Labour’s leadership choices

With Burnham not in the Commons, James Crouch suggests Labour could do far worse than elect Wes Streeting

Last week Opinium tested a range of potential candidates for Labour leader. While we looked at the public in general, getting into the weeds of the data does tell us something interesting about the potential candidates and the path Labour could choose.

It is clear that the Prime Minister has a serious popularity problem, and he really has been very vulnerable to a potential leadership challenge for a very long time. Since the beginning of August, Keir Starmer has permanently been on net -40 or under, except for a brief couple of weeks during his early response to the crisis in Iran. For the best part of 300 days, Keir Starmer has been at a popularity level equivalent to Theresa May, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson all at the points at which they left office. So it really should be no surprise that we are here. Usually, prime ministers just do not survive very long when things are like this.

The question is: what is to be done? And while members’ polling is incredibly important for informing who is most likely to win a leadership race, it is often just as important to inform MPs, members and others in the party about what voters outside the Labour movement think. This week, the decision has clearly become: wait for Andy Burnham, or go with Wes Streeting?

Now, there are a couple of ways of doing this.

The most straightforward one is simply asking the question: if Starmer resigns, who do you think should replace him? We offered a range of potential candidates, and when we did this the answer was pretty clear, although the numbers are naturally low until a race actually gets going. Almost one in five (18%) UK adults believe that Andy Burnham should replace Starmer as leader, followed by Angela Rayner (5%), Ed Miliband (4%), and then finally Wes Streeting (3%), tied with Rachel Reeves (3%). But this is often driven by the salience of whoever is in the news that week.

Realistically, people’s views are complex, they change, and at this stage what we really want to do is get underneath the surface of what the underlying perceptions of the different potential contenders are. Then we know what the starting point is: who is handicapped from the beginning, who has plenty of space to grow into the race, and who is already starting well ahead.

This is where we prefer to ask about acceptability as a potential leader. Is any given contender acceptable or unacceptable as a future Labour leader?

The starting point is actually quite obvious. If Andy Burnham can get back into Parliament, he is quite clearly the potential contender with the initial advantage: 43% of all UK adults think he would be acceptable as the next Labour leader, while only 23% say they would find him unacceptable.

By comparison, Wes Streeting is starting further behind, but voters are open to him. Just over a quarter (27%) of UK adults think that Streeting would be an acceptable future Labour leader, while 35% currently say they would find him unacceptable.

Now, that might not sound especially strong, but when you look at the wider mix of potential contenders you can see that having only 35% of voters ruling out a potential future Labour leader is pretty good going, considering the current unpopularity of the government (which Burnham benefits from not being part of). Consider the 53% who would count Rachel Reeves as unacceptable as a future Labour leader, and the 45% who say the same about Angela Rayner. It shows that the public and voters are still more than open to Wes Streeting as a potential future prime minister, even if he does not quite have the headline lead at this early stage.

And when you dig down into different voter groups, you can start to see where Streeting’s relative strengths and weaknesses lie.

The clearest example is among current Reform voters. Now, many of these will be ex-Conservatives rather than ex-Labour voters, but there are still many there to be won back for Labour. Among current Reform voters, Streeting records a net acceptability score of -22 (24% acceptable, 46% unacceptable). While still negative overall, that is notably softer resistance than many other senior Labour figures face with the same group of voters.

But the leadership race will have to answer the question Labour has not really had the chance to ask itself since last week’s local elections: does it want to chase Green votes in inner cities, or fight to win back Middle England? While Andy Burnham remains the favourite because he’s not in the Commons, at this stage Wes Streeting may have more room to do the latter than many of his rivals currently in a position to run.

See the full data on Opinium’s website here.