I am sorry about the title.
Not very sorry, obviously. But sorry enough to acknowledge that “one weird trick” belongs more naturally beside adverts for miraculous belly-fat solutions, obscure pension loopholes, and things dentists apparently hate. And that it is not usually the hook into a conversation about democratic renewal.
Still, I think there is this weird trick available to Keir Starmer.
It is this: govern.
Govern with the majority he has to begin fixing one of the things that is most obviously, repeatedly, structurally broken in British politics. Not by avoiding disagreement. Not by finding the correct grid of announceables. Not by setting up the right combination of technocratic delivery boards. Not by locating the mythical median voter hiding somewhere between a focus group in Nuneaton and a laminated pledge card.
Govern with the majority he has to fix British politics by making votes mean something closer to what voters intend them to mean.
In other words: electoral reform.
I know. I know. Nothing says “urgent political response to last week’s electoral earthquake and this week’s leadership crisis” like constitutional reform. I know you and everyone else is crying out: at last, regional deliberative democracy methodologies.
And yet. It kind of feels like precisely the moment when you swing for the fences and you say the bigger thing.
Because the noise now is all about Starmer. Whether he can survive. Whether he should survive. Whether the speech worked. Whether the cabinet is wobbling, marching, whispering, briefing, plotting, or merely standing near a door with an unusually thoughtful expression.
This is Westminster’s favourite kind of drama, because it can be reported almost entirely through human weather. Who is up. Who is down. Who is loyal. Who is “loyal”. Who is thinking of the party. Who is thinking of the country. Who is thinking of the country in a way that it just so happens involves them becoming prime minister instead.
And some of that matters. Of course it does. Leadership matters. Judgment matters. Political authority matters. If a prime minister cannot command confidence, that is not a trivial problem.
But the problem runs deeper.
The danger is that the Labour party convinces itself that this is fundamentally a personnel issue. Change the leader, change the mood, change the story. A new face, a new operation, a new grid, a new solemn promise that lessons have been learned and listening has occurred.
Perhaps that would help. Perhaps it would not. But I reckon the forces now swirling around Starmer would swirl around whoever succeeded him.
Because I don’t think last week’s elections were really simply a verdict on one man.
I think we’ve been getting closer to this sort of outcome for years.
The electoral map was wobbling. Now it has toppled.
Reform is no longer merely an irritation on the right of the Conservative Party. The Greens are no longer merely a place for protest votes in seats where everyone already owns a bicycle. The Liberal Democrats continue to possess their strange and enduring ability to appear locally inevitable while nationally implausible. Independents, local parties, national parties and post-party moods are all tugging at the fabric.
The country is not behaving like a two-party country.
It has not done for some time. But last week made the point harder to avoid. Voters are moving in different directions at once. They are not simply swinging neatly from red to blue or blue to red, like a polite constitutional pendulum maintained by a retired civil servant in a cardigan. They are fragmenting, protesting, experimenting, hedging, punishing, searching.
And Westminster is still trying to cram that into a machine built for a different political world.
This is the thing about First Past the Post. Its defenders always present it as the sensible shoes of electoral systems. Sturdy. Familiar. No nonsense.
But what if it is no longer producing stability? What if it is producing distortion and claiming it as stability?
The great promise of the system was that it delivered strong governments. But strong in what sense? Strong enough to govern, perhaps. Strong enough to command the Commons, also perhaps. But strong in legitimacy, consent, or public trust ? Um…not so much?
That is the bind Starmer is in.
He has, at least on paper, the kind of parliamentary majority that prime ministers dream of. The sort of majority that ought to make legislation possible, discipline manageable, and ambition something other than a word smuggled into speeches by a special adviser at 1.15am.
And yet the whole thing feels oddly brittle.
A huge majority, but a shallow mandate. A government with power, but not much consent. A prime minister with authority, but no great sense of permission.
This is what happens when the system can turn a fragmented public mood into an apparently emphatic parliamentary outcome. It creates governments that are legally secure but politically thin. It gives someone the keys to the machine while leaving them unsure whether anyone particularly wanted them to drive it.
And there is something faintly comic about the whole thing. Labour won a large majority and has behaved as though it had been asked to carry a loaded tray of drinks down a moving train. Careful now. Don’t spill the mandate. Don’t alarm the commentariat. Don’t let anyone think you intend to use the thing.
But what is the point of a majority this size if it cannot be used to touch the machinery of politics itself?
What is the point of winning power if power is then treated as an administrative inconvenience?
The usual response to an election shock is already under way. There are calls for a reset. There are always calls for a reset. British politics now resets so often that “have you tried turning it off and on again?” must be the unspoken first principle of our unwritten constitution.
Starmer has given the expected leadership-crisis speech: the stay-the-course, I-have-heard-you, Britain-needs-change, I-will-not-walk-away speech. It may well have contained good things. But the question is not only whether a speech contains good things. It is whether it rises to the size of the moment. Whether it is shift-the-needle, save-the-job, heal-the-land good.
There will be further speeches along similar lines. There will definitely be stern-faced briefings about delivery. There will be attempts to rediscover “working people”, as if they have been left behind a sofa in Labour HQ. There may be reshuffles, relaunches, triangulations and phrases so drained of life that even the autocue will look embarrassed.
Message matters. Delivery matters. Labour has often failed to explain itself, and Starmer’s personal unpopularity is real enough.
But beneath all that, our political system is trying to force a plural country through a binary funnel.
The status quo teaches people to vote against what they fear rather than for what they believe. It rewards tactical calculation and punishes sincerity. It tells voters in safe seats that the national drama is happening somewhere else. It tells voters in marginals that their power lies mostly in being targeted, courted and frightened every few years.
It turns democracy into a form of emotional arbitrage.
And then, every few years, we look around and wonder why public trust is low.
Now, the obvious objection is that Labour cannot simply use its majority to impose proportional representation. That would be both constitutionally reckless and politically self-defeating. It would be dismissed instantly as a stitch-up, and not only by bad-faith actors.
A governing party changing the voting system that gave it power needs to be more careful than that.
The trick, then, is not “Labour should pass PR next Thursday and hope nobody notices”.
The trick is to start a process that is serious enough to be trusted.
Not a commission of the great and the good, though some of the great and the good may be allowed sandwiches at the back. Not a consultation in which the answer has already been drafted by clever people in a windowless room. Not a national conversation in the usual sense, which generally means a hashtag, some stakeholder roundtables and a PDF at the end of it.
Something more demanding than that.
A network of citizens’ assemblies, rooted regionally, with proper time, evidence, facilitation and power. Assemblies in different parts of the country, reflecting different political cultures and electoral experiences.
Let people in safe Labour seats, former Labour seats, Reform-surging towns, Green-leaning cities, Lib Dem strongholds, Conservative remnants, rural areas, post-industrial places, commuter belts, coastal communities and ignored edges of the map look honestly at what the current system does to them.
Let them hear from experts. Let them hear from parties. Let them hear from people whose votes have counted too much, and from people whose votes have counted too little. Let them examine the options properly: STV, AMS, open lists, AV-plus, the whole alphabet soup. Let them understand the trade-offs rather than being patronised with slogans.
And then let their recommendations matter.
That is the important bit.
Britain has a genius for inviting citizens into the room after all the doors have been welded shut. We ask people what they think, thank them for their contribution, publish a summary of findings, and proceed with whatever was going to happen anyway. This is called engagement, and like many British constitutional conventions, it relies on everyone agreeing not to laugh.
A democratic reform process cannot work like that. If this is to mean anything, the assemblies need teeth. Their recommendations should shape the legislation, the referendum question if there is one, the timetable, and the public education needed to make the choice meaningful.
Because the process is the point.
A country with a trust problem cannot be bounced into democratic renewal by people it does not trust. It cannot be told, from the centre, that the centre has discovered a lovely new way for everyone else to be represented. The way we transform democracy has to model the democracy we say we want: patient, local, plural, honest about trade-offs, and willing to let people be more than electoral demographics with weather.
This is where the proposal becomes politically interesting for Starmer.
Or, frankly, for whoever ends up leading the government.
A leadership contest might change the face at the podium. It would not change the underlying facts. It would not unfragment the electorate. It would not make protest voting disappear. It would not restore trust by rearranging the order of names around the cabinet table. It would not make a country that has spent years learning to distrust political promises suddenly decide that this time, this time, the relaunch has really got it.
That is the thinness Starmer is trapped inside. Voters did not so much embrace him as choose the least chaotic available exit from the previous era.
Victory by way of eviction notice. Useful, necessary, but not exactly a love story.
Last week made that thinness visible in lost seats. Labour is being hit from more than one direction at once. The old comfort would be to choose a side of the electorate to chase and hope the others come home in fright. Move right to squeeze Reform. Move left to squeeze the Greens. Become more local to blunt the Lib Dems. Become more managerial to reassure people who mainly want politics to stop happening quite so loudly.
But this is still the old game.
And the old game is part of the problem.
Electoral reform would not magically make people love Starmer. We should be suspicious of anyone promising to make Britain fall in love with a constitutional process. That way lies a very disappointing podcast.
But it could change the nature of his premiership.
It would say: I know the system gave me power, but I do not think the system is therefore good. I know this majority is legal, but I do not think legality is the same thing as legitimacy. I know I could cling to the machine because, for once, it has produced a result I like. Instead, I am going to ask the country how we build something better.
That would wrong-foot almost everyone.
Those instinctively opposed to reform would call it a fix, but would have to explain why randomly selected citizens deliberating in public are less legitimate than a system that can convert minority support into overwhelming power.
Those already convinced of electoral reform would have to accept that democracy cannot be widened only for the people who agree with them. It would mean making room for voters, parties and arguments they might find uncomfortable, irritating or wrong.
Smaller parties would have to move from grievance to responsibility. Some would gain influence they could never dream of under First Past the Post. That is not a regrettable side effect. It is part of the point. If people can stop voting tactically and start voting for the politics they actually believe in, then more of those politics will have to be heard.
The commentariat would have to cope with a political act that is neither a reshuffle nor a vibes reset, so we can only send them our thoughts and prayers.
And voters might, just might, recognise something unusual: a prime minister using power to reduce the distortions that gave him that power.
There is a version of this that sounds like self-sacrifice. But there is also a version where it is the most hard-headed thing he could do.
If Starmer staggers towards the next election offering managerial competence plus slightly shorter waiting lists, he may find that “things are getting marginally less bad” is not quite the battle cry the moment requires. If he becomes the prime minister who gave people a route to voting honestly, with confidence that their choices could be fairly reflected, then this government has an answer to the question that haunts it.
What was the majority for?
It was for this.
For restoring the idea that politics belongs to the public before it belongs to the parties. For admitting that protest voting is not a personality defect. For making it less irrational to vote for the people you actually want. For taking a system that turns national life into a casino of marginals and saying, politely but firmly, that the house has had a good run.
Of course it would be difficult. Of course it would be messy. Democracy is often messy, which is one of the reasons powerful people prefer engagement exercises.
But the alternative is not stability. The alternative is the continuation of a system that is already producing instability, only with the added British comfort of pretending the instability is traditional.
So yes, here is the one weird trick that could save Keir Starmer.
Stop trying quite so hard to save Keir Starmer.
Use the majority. Open the process. Trust the citizens. Transform the machine.
And if, at the end of it, people can vote for who they want and see that choice fairly returned, he might discover that the strangest route to political survival is doing something worthy of being remembered.