Sir Keir Starmer’s jet-lagged team were still basking in the success of the prime minister’s first trip to meet Donald Trump in the White House on Friday morning when a high-profile resignation brought them crashing back to earth.
Anneliese Dodds, the development minister in the Foreign Office, had resigned four days after learning she was to oversee a £6bn raid on the UK’s aid budget to pay for a historic defence spending increase.
“These cuts will remove food and healthcare from desperate people, deeply harming the UK’s reputation,” she said in her resignation letter.
Dodds is one of more than 400 Labour MPs who have found themselves sharing responsibility for a series of difficult decisions by Starmer since his party won a landslide victory in July’s election.
Party officials believe her resignation is an isolated incident, rather than the first crack in a dam of discontent. But it is a reminder that Starmer faces challenges in holding his government and party together as he pursues increasingly tough decisions in the coming months.
“There are (also) people in the cabinet who are also unhappy about” the aid cut, said one Labour MP. “That doesn’t mean we’ve reached a tipping point against Keir though, the mood is grim rather than mutinous.”
For the last 14 years the party, which lost four general elections in succession, had criticised the ruling Conservatives for their supposed incompetence or callousness.
Now they find themselves linked to multiple policy moves far outside the comfort zone of centre-left politics as ministers operate within strict fiscal rules and an erratic geopolitical backdrop.
Although the government is pursuing left-of-centre policies — including a huge rise in business taxes, overhauling workers’ rights and nationalising the railways — it has also embarked on other measures that have unnerved Labour MPs.
These include maintaining the two-child benefit cap, cutting the winter fuel allowance for millions of pensioners, embracing a tough approach on immigration, taking a relaxed approach to artificial intelligence and accepting Brexit.
Starmer’s effusive courtship of Trump, who many Labour MPs regard as dangerously rightwing, has only added to the roster.
More difficult decisions are coming down the tracks in the spending review in June.
One minister said that vast cuts to the welfare system scheduled for next month will prove to be the most “toxic and painful” moment for Labour MPs, posing potentially the biggest rebellion of Starmer’s leadership to date.
“When I look at some of my new colleagues you can see a rising sense of alarm; they are getting it in the neck over things like the winter fuel allowance,” said one MP.
Tom Harris, a former Labour MP and commentator, used a column in the Telegraph to describe the current Labour administration as “at least by traditional definitions, more right-wing than anything that has gone before”.
The whips office has imposed tight discipline, with seven MPs suspended last summer for voting against the two-child benefit cap: only four have been forgiven. As a result most MPs are loath to criticise the leadership on the record.
But one former frontbencher said colleagues were “shell-shocked” by the abruptness of the aid cuts even if they understood the need to step up defence spending.
“People are angry that the politics have been so woefully thought through especially for those facing challenges from Greens and independents,” they said. “But people want to be loyal and are very afraid to speak out.”
Another Labour MP said that even many “nailed-on loyalists” had previously worked as aid charities and were upset at the decision.
“We know that people will die as a result. However, we also agree with the defence spending because it’s a political reality,” he said. Many colleagues would dodge any parliamentary debate on the issue, he predicted.
Expressing quiet despair, one MP accepted the aid cut “may be popular politically”, citing a YouGov poll showing 64 per cent of the public support the move, but they added: “Morally and strategically it’s wrong”.
One new MP said they had not delivered leaflets on hundreds of doors just to take “rightwing” decisions on benefits and aid.
“I think it will backfire morally. We’re taking billions from some of the most deprived people on earth,” they said. “We are forgetting our liberal left-wing voters who we can easily lose to the Lib Dems and Greens.”
Yet for all the angst on the left and “soft left” of the Parliamentary Labour party, other MPs believe the aid decision by Starmer was correct given pressure from the new Washington administration on European governments to lift defence spending. One told the Financial Times he was “delighted”.
Starmer’s meeting with Trump on Thursday was seen as a glowing success, to the surprise and relief on many Labour MPs. The US president praised the UK’s decision to raise defence spending.
Some of those applauding the prime minister’s move — which he said was taken reluctantly — are in seats threatened by Nigel Farage’s rightwing Reform UK party.
“The prime minister’s recent steps have been very reassuring,” said Dan Carden, who leads the “Blue Labour” grouping of economically left-wing but socially conservative MPs. “There’s a clear attempt to anchor the government and be on the side of common sense, our national interest and working class values,” he told the FT.
Another MP said that most of his colleagues were “more concerned about the spectre of war” than the cuts to aid.
One of the new intake said the increase in defence spending was popular.
“For lots of MPs . . . this is the first time we have put something on our [social media] and not been screamed at,” she said.
“Everyone thinks the prime minister is rising to the occasion . . . all the Tories and Farage people locally are having to concede it’s a good thing.”
One cabinet minister told the FT that the policy had cross-party and public support. “Even Keir doesn’t think that it’s a good idea,” they said. “He knows that it’s the only idea.”
