Will Starmer Hold On?
It depends. A brave start, but indulge me.
It's largely to do with the makeup of the party. Starmer's faction - Labour Together - massively reduced party membership numbers and reshaped the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party) in their (right-wing and factional) image. This makes sense if you appreciate the fact that within the broader party, the Labour Right are a fringe of a fringe - e.g. in 2015 when they fought fair and they ran Liz Kendall for Labour leader against Corbyn, Burnham and Cooper, she got 4.5% the vote (supported by Maurice Glasman, who is now enamoured with Trump, the Sun newspaper and with Morgan McSweeney as her campaign director). They learned their lesson.
Labour party membership figures are reportedly under 250,000. For context, Labour's modern peak was around 530,000 members just before the 2019 general election. Once Starmer won the leadership election, a large swath of members were kicked out of the party (mainly for expressing dismay at the fact he immediately rolled back on all of the pledges that won him the leadership in the first place). MPs supporting strike action also had the whip removed and a lot of activists abandoned the party for its non-response to the Gaza genocide.
Labour also adjusted its finances so the party was less financially reliant on members and trade unions, and through Labour Together, courted private finance, raising around £7million for the 2024 general election that could be strategically funnelled into supporting key factional allies - Mahmoud, Lammy, etc. It meant they had the resources to win, but then had lots of favours they had to give out, hence inexplicable non-action in key economic areas despite promising otherwise (i.e. you can't nationalise the water companies if you are beholden to private water companies, etc., etc.).
When it came time for the general election, local democracy was completely overhauled, with Labour candidates selected from the top down and dropped into seats from on high rather than being elected by the local membership. We now know that the The Labour Party Parliamentary Candidates Programme was designed to select the most pliable and ideologically aligned candidates (and that Mandelson was actively involved in this process!)
This led to some significant controversies amongst Labour supporters, especially in races where existing popular left-leaning candidates like Faiza Shaheen were considered persona non grata and some (very right-wing fringe) candidates like Luke Akehurst were dropped into seats predicted for comfortable majorities. You may have noticed that a lot of the confused, dead-eyed younger faces sent on breakfast television to be eaten alive by routine questioning are new players in the cast.
Ignore where you stand on the details of the politics for a moment - what it means practically is that the parliamentary party - the collection of MPs that would have to challenge Starmer - is largely staffed by incredibly fresh, politically inexperienced people who owe Labour Together (which is de facto Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney) for their positions, because without them, very few of them would've been selected.
In order to oust Starmer, you need a group of senior politicians separate from his faction to organise a coup (hence Starmer openly blocking Burnham from running in the by-election) but you also need the membership numbers to support such a move. There's no point doing a performative resignation if the numbers won't follow you out the door. For example, Ed Miliband needs Angela Rayner, Emily Thornberry, etc., but he also needs John Nobodys and Claire Somethings to feign disapproval en masse at the very mechanisms that brought them to office.
The other meta-narrative here is that Starmer can't distance himself from Mandelson because he is Morgan McSweeney's man and Morgan McSweeney is Mandelson's man. Starmer positioned himself in the internal leadership campaign as Corbynism in a tie and nice trousers, got rid of those supporters, ran on "change" against Sunak when speaking to the country, and is now pursuing Sunak-esque policies because of the private interests to which he is beholden.
Given the right-leaning nature of the British press and how many concessions he has given them, I can understand why the casual punter might perceive Starmer as a well-meaning technocrat and a welcome antidote to the age of populism, but the truth is that his intuitions are reactionary and his troubles are self-inflicted. He has the numbers for a truly transformative political programme - and I'm not talking Corbyn's manifesto, I'm talking a moderate social democrat programme like Pedro Sanchez is implementing in Spain right now - and they have to tie themselves in knots to explain to the public why that is impossible.
These moves by the Labour Right made strategic sense in the mid-90s when the left was significantly divided, and Tony Blair was a popular and charismatic leader overseeing a growing economy, but these moves look particularly cynical and "emperor has no clothes" when you quickly become one of the most unpopular PMs of all time (polling at -57 approval rating at the time of writing). Furthermore, Blair had the "Brownites" (I'm left-wing so for me, this is splitting hairs, but historically and self-evidently these differences matter to the people involved) in his cabinet and these groups were working together (if occasionally and opportunistically undermining each other in the press). I'd venture that Starmer closed his circle of allies too early, meaning that someone like Burnham is a perceived threat rather than someone who can "come off the bench" and give the party some new energy to use an obnoxious football analogy.
I'm no fan of Starmer, but given the make-up of the party, and the fact that he has the most limp formal opposition in the Tories, and the most divisive opposition by polling to his right in Reform, he could well hold on. The thing we don't know is what a Starmer government looks like if he is able to shake off Mandelson and McSweeney's influence - if you thought he was an ideological void before, watch out!