Labour has been engulfed in a bitter briefing war as Wes Streeting was forced to deny plotting a leadership challenge against Prime Minister Keir Starmer
What on earth is going on?
That was the mood last night as my phone glowed red hot with messages about the bitter briefing war at the very top of Government.
It all began when allies of Keir Starmer launched an extraordinary bid to protect the PM by suggesting it would be reckless to topple him – and insisted he would fight any leadership challenge.
Some pointed the finger at Wes Streeting, the ambitious Health Secretary, who was then forced to deny he was plotting a coup.
Underneath the spin, what appears to be happening is an increasingly paranoid No10 has manufactured a story about a leadership crisis in a bid to stop a leadership crisis from happening.
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It’s an old political play – smoke out your rival, then force them into a public show of loyalty to put the dampeners on their ambitions.
But one MP told the Mirror last night: “They’ve fired their own starting pistol and shot themselves in the face.”
This briefing has only served to put rocket boosters under Westminster gossip about Mr Starmer’s future and to advertise potential weakness. It has also put Labour’s woes at the top of the news bulletins.
Mr Streeting, who just so happened to be on the morning broadcast round to talk about the NHS, insisted it was completely untrue – and joked that “someone in Downing Street has been watching too much Celebrity Traitors”.
In reality, there are mutterings in Labour about Mr Starmer’s leadership as he struggles to turn around the party’s flagging poll ratings. Mr Streeting is among several ministers regarded as a potential threat.
MPs, and even Cabinet ministers, accept that the Government has made some serious mistakes and can’t seem to sell the good things it is doing to the public.
The failure to take the fight to Reform has also left many deeply frustrated.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that a coup is imminent. And it’s worth remembering that no Labour PM has ever been forced out of No10.
Creating this narrative ahead of the Budget on November 26 is a nuclear move.
It seems some allies of the PM were spooked by the idea of a possible coup if the make-or-break bid to fix the public finances with manifesto-busting tax hikes lands badly.
A Government source told me late last night: “Bringing down a government over a Budget would be a catastrophic thing to do.
“If you thought Liz Truss was bad, imagine the damage that would do.”
This all might seem smart to the authors of the strategy. But did anyone think about what the public would make of it?
Voters were pretty clear last year that they’d had enough of the political psychodrama under the Tories but Labour is falling into the same trap.
The risk now is people will look at the headlines over their cornflakes and think ‘what’s changed?’