By David Littlefair

Copyright newstatesman

There really is no saving Labour from itself. The party National Executive Committee gave MPs just a handful of days to collect dozens of nominations from the most factionally-selected Labour parliament of all time. There will be almost no opportunity for a real debate about the government’s plunging popularity and why polls suggest it is headed toward electoral annihilation.

Constituency Labour Parties will have a fortnight to call a nomination meeting. The usual dominant factionalists in each local party will hammer their way to the endorsement they were always planning to make. There will be no real hustings. The message is clear: this is an inconvenience that the party can’t afford to let get in the way of its ‘missions’.

Contrary to talk of a ‘reset’, this is another vintage Starmer moment. Another episode emblematic of his choice to run a century old political party as though it were a large branch of Sainsbury’s. There’s little regard for democracy and man management, little room anywhere for fancy talk about values or ideals. Instead, there’s a focus on hiring better executive managers. In a Labour Party without any real ideology, better managers are all the country really needs.

Could a new Deputy Leader offer the chance for some fundamental change? The list of candidates announced or in discussion show just how much Labour is lost without Rayner. It will be almost impossible to replace her, as so few politicians like her exist.Her route into politics is practically extinct in 2025. Rayner has a charisma that is rarer still: able to cover Labour’s otherwise dour and grey frontbench with a dose of glamour, a camouflage dryrobe thrown around a sickly seaside bather.

Joie de vivre is thin on the ground in Labour. It seems unlikely that any new choice will match Rayner for likeability. What other red lines could be drawn to try and find a candidate even remotely similar? How about these, most of which would strike the public as incredibly normal but are embarrassingly hard for Labour MPs to leapfrog over:

Is not a landlord

Has had a job outside of politics and lobbying

Is not an Oxbridge graduate

Did not go to private school

Is not the third generation of a political family dynasty

And, for good measure, given Labour’s strategic struggles:

Did not vote to defecate on disabled people from a height

Stella Creasy is a proposed candidate who has canvassed MPs but is leaving the announcement late. She is one of the few MPs to show concern about the government’s farcical decision to arrest frail pensioners for terrorism whilst holding a placard in support of Palestine Action.Creasy would surely still have the numbers in the parliamentary party to make the ballot. But her class-agnostic ‘Mother Red’ initiative, crowdfunding from Labour members and unions to help mothers run for Labour selection, somehow ended up handing some of its war chest to the kind of wealthy barristers and think tank executives that became Labour MPs in 2024.Mother Red deftly demonstrates why it is close to impossible for a Rayner-like figure to be elected in the modern Labour party, but will have surely earned Creasy some reciprocity.The ardent Europhile – whose ‘Labour Movement For Europe’ patronage campaign also helped parachute professional Remainers into some of the most deeply leave-voting seats in Britain – might do well with Labour’s middle class and London-weighted selectorate. However, it seems unlikely that she will be able to have an honest conversation with those members about how to win an election when 71 per cent of the electorate consider immigration to have been too high for years.

Similar could be said for Emily Thornberry, who Reform would love to remind voters was once fired from cabinet for tweeting a photograph (said to be) mocking an England flag hanging outside a Rotherham white van man’s home. Thornberry, Labour’s loveable kooky auntie, has the somewhat unfair advantage of a real human personality.

Both politicians have their merits, but throwing out a prominent Northern working class voice in favour of an elite London professional epitomises Labour in 2025 in a way that’s a little too close to the bone to be funny. Both are Oxbridge graduates, as are 20 per cent of the House Of Commons, though recent political and democratic results certainly question the wisdom of this ongoing institutional foothold. After Starmer’s London-centric reshuffle, one of these candidates coming first would compound Labour’s longstanding disconnect with the North.

Speaking of the North, The Guardian has called Bridget Phillipson a ‘like-for-like’ replacement for Rayner. For most it would be hard to see why, but then for the Guardian all the land North of Birmingham is a sort of Outer Siberia-like wasteland, and just to have been born in this backwater is enough.

In reality Phillipson, another Oxbridge PPE graduate and lifelong career politician, is more of a like-for-like replacement for Starmer. It isn’t clear how the party would benefit from a lockstep march between Leader and Deputy when the former is already struggling to inspire. Though Phillipson’s pitched battle with private education could have gone much further, it shows a real ability to fight that has otherwise been sorely lacking since the 2024 landslide. Does the government know what fights remain for it between now and the end of parliament? Does Bridget? Perhaps, if little changes, the government will somehow emerge into a better place by default. That is likely to be Phillipson pitch.

Then there are the two Burnhamite picks. The recently demoted Lucy Powell, whose dismissive comments about grooming gangs on radio in May were reminiscent of Labour at their most aloof, has (like Burnham) worked in politics her entire professional life. Her role heading up Labour’s 2015 campaign doesn’t suggest an innate gift for helping the party develop a narrative about what it actually values – still Labour’s biggest problem with the public, but perhaps the lesson learned in that defeat would be useful to the party’s top brass. It’s not clear how much of a Starmer ally Powell is, or whether she will be an asset or an Ed Stone around the leader’s neck.

Powell is an Oxbridge graduate, and although not a landlord, was a strident defender of fellow MP Jaz Athwal against criticism of his mould-infested rental empire. Could such an MP replace Rayner, who had led the Renters Rights Bill?

Bell Ribeiro-Addy is the choice of the admirable stragglers in Momentum and the Socialist Campaign Group: the most pragmatic members of the hard left. The noble few in that tendency who understand there can be no Green / Your Party success without giving birth to a Reform UK government.Ribeiro-Addy wrote in Labourlist about wealth taxes in August. She now has the ammunition of TUC conference voting in support of these, too. There is a case for wealth taxes, of course. In Ribeiro-Addy’s constituency of Clapham and Brixton Hill the average detached home is worth more than £2m according to estate agents Kinleigh Folk And Hayward. Don’t expect this to be discussed when an easier (read: impossible) target like Elon Musk could be. Ribeiro-Addy fiercely opposed the welfare bill, is a career political advisor and attended private school.Luckily for Starmer, the chances she will make the ballot in a Parliamentary Labour Party handpicked for unquestioning loyalty before anything else are vanishingly low. As are the chances of making the ballot for marginal hopefuls: Blairite Alison McGovern and Socialist Campaign Group graduate Paula Barker.

Barker vaults all of the red lines. The MP for Liverpool Wavertree is a staunch critic of the government on welfare and Gaza. Like Rayner, she could never be accused of coming from a privileged background. Before parliament Barker worked in customer services and local government for three decades. Stridently left wing, she is unlikely to make a ballot that former Socialist Campaign Group colleague Ribeiro-Addy will also struggle to make. Another blow for those of us who would like to see Labour spread its talent net beyond the professional political elite.

What if the party were to look for a John Major-like outsider candidate? What if they skipped the predictable names and looked for an MP that could authentically replace Rayner. One didn’t come with a lot of factional baggage? There are some MPs recently added to the backbenches that could be elevated into the position – MPs that could dodge the battles of the previous decade. To find them would take a good root around the back of the party sofa.

Jim Macmahon is one of only 10 per cent of parliamentarians without a degree, a trait he shares with the 70 per cent of people in battleground areas like the North East of England. His rise through a career as a technician’s apprentice, to council leader, to Labour leader of the Local Government Association is strikingly ‘Old Labour’. His experience in local government would help fill the vacant role as liaison between Labour councils and the party leadership that will be so crucial to understanding how and where to win in 2029.

The best outsider pick, though, would be Natalie Fleet. Fleet is the closest Labour MP in life experience to Rayner. The MP for Bolsover, newly a bellwether seat once held by Labour titan Dennis Skinner, has a front row seat to Labour’s collapsing trust with working class voters. A video of her filmed at the Ashfield election count in 2019, tearful and exhausted, shows that she understands far more than most the long malaise of Labour’s gentrification. Like Rayner, she has personal experience of using services like Sure Start – someone who could not have reached her position in life without the labour movement.To select Fleet, knowing her views on grooming, would show the party is absolutely serious about destroying grooming gangs. It will show that Labour won’t whitewash what has already become the racist’s weapon of choice against the left and against Britain’s hard-won status as a tolerant country. It will show that Labour takes violence against women and girls with the utter seriousness that it should, in an era when so many politicians have failed to. It will showcase the utter failure of Kemi Badenoch in holding the Women And Equalities brief, having never spoken to a grooming gang victim. It will be the strongest antidote Labour can offer to the cynicism and toxicity that will flow from the issue for the remainder of the parliament.

The speed with which the NEC has set up the deputy contest makes it unlikely that Labour will make an inspired choice – but there’s still time.