Labour’s Starmer problem isn’t over – Clive Lewis just proved it

Clive Lewis has never been shy about what he thinks of Keir Starmer. But his latest broadside, posted on Facebook this week, is less about settling scores than issuing a warning – reckon with the Starmer years properly, or watch Labour repeat them.

The Norwich South MP took particular aim at how Starmer’s departure from Holborn and St Pancras has been described. “Vacated his seat,” Lewis wrote, is a euphemism verging on absurd – “almost as if he accidentally wafted away on a gust of wind”. The reality, as Lewis tells it, is much blunter – Starmer promised to serve out his term as a constituency MP, then broke that promise to chase paid work on what Lewis calls “the international circuit”.

It’s a theme that resonates currently. Starmer quit as prime minister in the summer after losing the confidence of his own backbenches, replaced by Andy Burnham. He then announced on 1 September that he was standing down as an MP too, triggering a byelection in Holborn and St Pancras on 8 October – a seat Labour has held since it was created, but one the party is now fighting hard to keep against a resurgent Green campaign. For Lewis, that timing is precisely the point. Starmer’s own party is being made to defend his old seat while still avoiding a proper account of his time in office.

Lewis doesn’t hold back on what he thinks that account should include. He describes Starmer’s tenure as leaving behind “the chalk outline” of a legacy rather than anything substantive and calls him “the worst PM in our movement's history” – while insisting the criticism “isn't personal in any way”.

The substance of his complaint runs deeper than a jibe about a resignation. Lewis lists what he wants Labour to confront – a “toxic culture” inside the leadership, the readmission of Peter Mandelson to the heart of government by what he calls “a small clique”, the expulsion of thousands of party members, a crackdown on the right to protest and Labour’s refusal to act as, in Lewis's words, “a genocide” unfolded in Gaza.

None of that will be news to Labour’s left, which has made most of these arguments before, individually, over the past two years. What’s sharper here is the framing. Lewis isn’t just relitigating old grievances, he’s arguing that failing to examine them now, at this exact moment, is itself a political risk. “If we don't ask ourselves how this happened and why, if we don’t interrogate this sorry chapter,” he writes, “then we are doomed to repeat it.”

That argument lands at a key moment for the party. Labour heads to Liverpool for its conference at the end of this month – the first since Burnham took over – with the Holborn and St Pancras contest reaching its climax barely a week after delegates go home. Burnham’s team will want the conference to be about the future – the cost of living, his early departures from Starmer-era policy, a reset of tone. Lewis’s post is a stark reminder that a significant part of the party doesn’t think Labour can move on without first admitting what went wrong.

Whether that reckoning happens is, of course, a separate question from whether Lewis is right to demand it. But the byelection gives his argument an unusually literal test case. Voters in Starmer’s own former seat will get to decide, within weeks, what they make of the record he left behind. If Labour loses a seat it has never lost before, the question of how honestly the party examined the Starmer years won’t stay a backbench talking point for long.