What should Keir Starmer do about Wes Streeting? A leadership expert on how to handle rivals in your team
Having survived what looked a lot like a coup attempt, Prime Minister Keir Starmer now needs to decide how to move forward. One of the biggest problems in the immediate term is what to do with his health secretary, Wes Streeting.
Streeting has long been named as a contender to replace Starmer – and has made no secret of his personal ambitions. Like every other cabinet minister, he made a statement in support of Starmer after the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar publicly called for his resignation. However, Streeting’s has been singled out for its tepid tone.
Now Starmer has a man who openly wants his job in his top team at a moment when he is trying to steady the ship. Might the PM find some inspiration about what to do from the private sector?
There is an old joke in the corporate world which states that when you take over as a new chief executive, your first task is to search the business high and low to find your natural successor – and then destroy them.
That is one (bleak) view of the rat race, or what is sometimes called “tournament theory”, the acknowledgement that within organisations there will always be a battle to get to the top. A more far-sighted approach to succession planning would look different. It would involve making sure that a range of senior people are developing their skills and experience, ready to take on the top job when it becomes vacant, as it inevitably will do some day. Ideally a company’s succession plan should contain a list with more than just one name on it.
In Westminster, however, discussions over the future leadership of the country are rather less dignified and rather more frenzied. Politics and business are different. This is a tournament all right, but the rules are less than clear. And they are subject to sudden change. Leadership in the political world is a far cry from what we call leadership in businesses and organisations.
Starmer, it seems, has survived a perilous moment. Still, as they say in Scotland, his coat is hanging on a shoogly nail.
Starmer looks around his top team, the cabinet, and sees several potential rivals staring back at him. Streeting denies that he is plotting to challenge Starmer, but few in Westminster believe him. A bad result in the byelection in Gorton and Denton this month or a collapse in support for Labour in the May local elections and Scottish parliamentary and Welsh Senedd elections, could prove the trigger for Streeting to act.
How should a leader look on the threat of a close colleague who is also a rival? Few are as generous or imaginative as Abraham Lincoln, who famously brought defeated candidates for the US presidency into his cabinet, as described by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book “Team of Rivals”.
Tony Blair survived as prime minister for ten years with his closest rival, Gordon Brown, at his side the whole time. Blair used to say, with apparent nonchalance, that it was not an “ignoble ambition” for Brown to want to succeed him. Blair seemed to hope, however, that another candidate might emerge to prevent Brown from getting the top job.
A confident and effective leader need not worry about having capable potential successors in their top team. On the contrary. Leadership is not a solo endeavour. A good leader will want to delegate tasks to talented people and draw on their advice. This is what is sometimes called “distributed leadership”.
Read more: How much longer can Keir Starmer survive?
Starmer has already revealed his insecurity by making sure that Andy Burnham, the mayor of greater Manchester, could not stand in the Gorton and Denton byelection. And hardened Westminster watchers will tell you that the prime minister could not have afforded to have Burnham back in parliament, preparing his own leadership challenge.
But Starmer could instead have been inspired by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Why not welcome Burnham back to Westminster, after winning a byelection that would have slowed his opponents’ momentum (in this case the Greens and Reform)?
And why not salute Streeting for his energy and dash? And Angela Rayner for her talents too while he is about it? Confident leaders want to have the best people around them. For a government that is seen to be struggling it would arguably make sense to put the best players on the pitch, and encourage them to perform. Leadership should not be a selfish ego trip. It is about them, not you.
Starmer has had a “clear the air” chat with Streeting and has, at least, not sacked him, yet. Starmer’s allies concede that the prime minister is not currently in a strong enough position to move against him in any case. Perhaps the cabinet will now pull together and prove they can get along.
Such thoughts will be dismissed as naïve and unrealistic by the inhabitants of London SW1. And, in that context, perhaps they are. But if so it tells you a lot about how far the practice of modern politics has departed from what many would regard as healthy and benign leadership.
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Stefan Stern does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.