British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has had another typical week of his term: success in foreign policy, electoral disaster, and rebellion within his own party.
Unfortunately for Starmer, the heads of state and government of the coalition supporting Ukraine do not vote in British elections or choose the number two of the Labour Party. This means that his international leadership serves him no purpose at home.
In practical terms, what has happened in the last three days seems to reaffirm the thesis that the leadership of the British government has an expiration date in May 2026, when the next local elections are held and, predictably, the Labour Party will be crushed by the ultranationalists and europhobes of Reform UK.
Starmer's latest defeat came this morning when the Labour Party officially announced that party members had chosen MP Lucy Powell as the number two of the party, a member of Starmer's critical faction, at the expense of the Prime Minister's candidate, Education Minister Bridget Phillipson.
It's not just that Powell is not on Starmer's "side." It's also that the Prime Minister dismissed her in September, during his government crisis, from her position as Commons leader, a role responsible for coordinating the Executive's actions with those of the parliamentary group. This means that Starmer, having removed Powell from the Government, will now have to deal with her within the party.
To make matters worse, the new Labour "deputy leader" wasted no time in implicitly criticizing Starmer's shift to the right. "We cannot be more reformist than Reform UK," Powell said after her victory. It was a critique of Starmer's policy of toughening the fight against illegal immigration, practically the only point Reform UK campaigns on.
Precisely, the Prime Minister's strategy seems to have been further thrown into crisis after the catastrophic results for his party in a by-election called following the death of the incumbent. In the Caerphilly constituency, located in Wales, where Labour had been winning for 107 years, the party plummeted to third place.
The seat went to the Welsh nationalists of Plaid Cymru, thanks to a massive mobilization of the center and the left, who used tactical voting to stop Reform UK, which seemed destined for a symbolic victory of historical proportions. Nevertheless, that party came in second place, just four percentage points behind the winners.