She adds: “It’s so rare for there to be a Labour prime minister. We owe that person the opportunity because he’s the person that got us into power.”
3) Labour’s rulebook can be impenetrable — Gloria De Piero, served under Jeremy Corbyn
Gloria De Piero knows first-hand how intractable Labour’s rules be. She resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2016 as part of an orchestrated coup to displace the hard-left Labour leader.
A vast swathe of Labour’s Parliamentary Labour Party opposed Corbyn at the time. Mutinous MPs launched a vote of no-confidence in Corbyn, in which he was defeated overwhelmingly by 172 votes to 40.
But unlike the Tory system, votes of no-confidence are “non-binding” and so can be happily ignored by the leader. Following the failed coup, rebellious MPs were forced to resort to a leadership contest. This failed because “the members were full square behind Jeremy Corbyn.” She remembers darkly: “We were utterly miserable. People were drinking too much — well, I was. Nobody knew how to get out of it.”
While recent polling suggests Starmer is deeply unpopular with the party membership, De Piero points out that, unlike the Tory party, where rebels can secretly submit letters of no-confidence, Labour’s current rules require a candidate to find eighty colleagues and present their names to party officials in order to fire the starting gun on a leadership contest. Those names are then made public. “Somebody has to put their head up over a parapet, get the signatures of 80 people without anybody knowing and then go, there you go,” she adds.
Even moving against an embattled leader doesn’t take them out of the picture. Unlike a Conservative leader who can be ousted by losing the support of a majority of MPs in a vote of no-confidence, De Piero points out that “the existing leader of the Labour Party is automatically on a ballot for any future contest.”