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. Judgement 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.
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