I have disliked almost every Starmer policy to date. Given that, you might expect me to be on my seat cheering at the spectacle of Keith on the ropes, visibly fighting for his premiership after the resignations of Morgan McSweeney, his all-important Chief of Staff, and Tim Allan. But I’m not cheering. And nor should you, for this reason: have you seen what the rest of his party is like?

The nominal ground for McSweeney’s resignation is the role he played in Mandelgate: the furor over Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador in the light of revelations about his friendship with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But really the knives have been out for McSweeney much longer, thanks to the role he played in purging the party’s madder Left factions ahead of Starmer’s electoral campaign.

McSweeney, we now know, masterminded this work by all manner of skulduggery, including funding campaign groups to taint the Corbynite faction with antisemitism, then expelling the ringleaders from the party and marginalizing their followers. But as the Americans discovered in Afghanistan, military occupation and peace aren’t quite the same thing. Only weeks into Starmer’s premiership, as street protests erupted nationwide in the wake of the Southport atrocity, muffled thumps and squeaks were emanating from Westminster as well.

These clarified into reports of intensifying rivalry between McSweeney and Sue Gray, Starmer’s then-chief of staff. The briefing wars had already begun, only to be won by McSweeney. After Gray resigned in October 2024, McSweeney took her place. But the noises off never really stopped. The Left first drew blood when they forced Starmer’s humiliating U-turn on ending pensioners’ winter fuel payment in May 2025, and then again on changing the criteria for PIP disability assessments the following month: signs of a party nowhere near as harmonized and sensible as the image presented by Starmer in his electoral pitch.

Having made enemies in Gray’s faction as well as the rump Corbynistas, McSweeney did well to survive more than a year. It’s clear now, though, that his many haters spotted their chance with Mandelgate and have duly pounced. Now, one haunting question remains: what will Starmer do, or indeed be, without him?

Even with McSweeney in post, it didn’t take long for the brittle authoritarianism of Starmer’s Southport response to slacken into something eerily passive, or perhaps more accurately “emergent”, rather than ordered by any very substantive vision. I recently called him Keith-GPT, and the Large Language Model (LLM) analogy is apt in the sense that Starmer’s program since Southport really does feel like the product of a pattern-recognition engine: one designed to calculate the average of views across all groups deemed politically important, but incapable at any point of applying human judgment. It’s the Keith-GPT Labour Leadership Model.

The great selling-point of Morgan McSweeney was that he was supposed to calibrate this emergent policy-formation engine ruthlessly to the median voter. Perhaps this explains the sense of constant, amorphous triangulation not just in relation to his own party factions, but also in relation to public reaction, in the form of yet more U-turns. Here, winter fuel and PIP were soon joined by further U-turns driven by public pressure, on holding a grooming gang inquiry, on making digital ID mandatory, yet another on farmers’ inheritance tax and also recently on business rates for pubs.

At the risk of over-stretching the robot analogy, then, we might describe Morgan McSweeney as the engineer that was supposed to ensure “alignment” with generally accepted public mores. And whatever else you want to say about him, he did at least seem to grasp that the general British public does not want a far-Left government, and successfully produced a convincing enough appearance of not being that to have enthused my family, among many others. All the bloodshed was aimed thus: at steering the PM and the Labour Party as a whole toward the “middle ground”.

Now, along with the interpersonal enmities and factional struggles, his departure reflects the fundamental, structural problem of all contemporary politics: that this isn’t actually possible, because the “middle ground” is no longer there — and anyone hewing to that supposed middle will find the country ungovernable on those terms. I was into my thirties before I’d lived through six prime ministers. My daughter is not into double digits yet, and she has lived through six already. Each of these has followed the same, now wearily familiar pattern. A leader is installed, tries (usually) to tack to this “middle ground”, and is promptly tripped up by a mix of incompetence, venality, infighting, fiscal constraint, insoluble policy paradoxes, media vultures, and an increasingly sullen and radicalized electorate.

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This has already done for the Conservatives. All the evidence so far is that it’s doing for Labour too. In this vein, the question of how long Starmer would last has been in the air since the Southport riots. I can’t remember the last time I read an article about the man that did not, at some point, mention the fact that he is the most unpopular prime minster since polling began. But again: the central structural issue is that neither of the traditional electoral coalitions makes sense any more, nor even agrees internally on anything much.

As things stand, the Parliamentary Labour Party is a monstrous hybrid, in which Blairites struggle to coexist with race-baiters, those advocating for the interests of their specific ethnic bloc, and (somehow, still) a tattered rump of the historic white working-class Labour movement. Then there’s the trade unions, now reinvented in the post-industrial age as public-sector tin-rattlers and trans activists. There’s the impossible dilemma of how Labour should respond to public disquiet about mass immigration, and, in its wake, the problem of inter-ethnic gang violence in majority-minority areas such as Leicester, without falling foul of the ethnic blocs now advancing their political interests either with or adjacent to the party.

What, ultimately, is Starmer to do? He can’t cut taxes without angering those of his MPs who represent the (now majority) of voters who are net welfare recipients. He can’t raise them without enraging those who want growth, and further immiserating the rump of net contributors. He can’t tax high earners any more without them leaving for Dubai. He can’t let more migrants in without angering part of his caucus, but also can’t keep them out or deport them without triggering another. The less said about Net Zero, the better.

The party has so many internal disagreements on so many of these issues that the only way they could be held even superficially in balance was via the kind of ferocious political maneuvering at which Morgan McSweeney clearly excelled. His dark arts managed to sustain an illusion of internal coherence within this incoherent and fissiparous party, at the expense of every faction and its pet projects. No wonder they all wanted him gone. But also no wonder that Starmer’s efforts to find the mathematical midpoint of so many mutually exclusive ideologies have grown increasingly strained and implausible. Even his face has taken on an uncanny quality, as though he could glitch and freeze at any moment.

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But uncanny though it has been to watch Starmer try and bridge these unbridgeable differences, with McSweeney’s aid, the prospect of the Prime Minister’s seemingly judgment-free consensus engine attempting to take the average of his party’s policies unaided was far worse. To borrow the AI analogy again, recall the brief episode during which Elon Musk opted to discard all constraints of civility and political correctness on his Grok AI, with the result that the pattern-recognition machine immediately began posting grossly offensive antisemitic content, at one point even calling itself “MechaHitler”.

We have to hope that Starmer has fractionally more human judgment than Grok, and that removing McSweeney’s guardrails would thus not necessarily result in Labour resiling like Grok did into instant antisemitism (though it’s not totally impossible). But inasmuch as his politics are emergent and driven only by consensus, removing the one individual capable of subduing the mad factions and pursuing the normie voter can only mean emboldening the nutjobs.

There was, alas, a conservative case for keeping Morgan McSweeney in situ. Thanks to Westminster’s bloodthirsty court press, and the vengeful hunger of Labour’s backbenchers, that case is trampled in the mud. Now, having lost his alignment engineer, what will Starmer settle on as the most plausible cocktail of policy options to inflict on the British public? It is, frankly, anybody’s guess. But we can assume nothing is now off the table, however deranged or factional, provided someone can convince him that this is the burning issue closest to the heart of the party or the electorate. We can also assume that every faction is already making as much noise as possible, to fool the Labour Leadership Model into identifying their pet issue as the one thing that will “reset” this ailing regime.

At the time of writing, Starmer hangs in the balance. The order has reportedly gone out to tweet messages of support, an event that usually signals it’s actually already over. But should he fall on his sword, no one who hated his policies should rejoice. Robotic and lacking in vision as he is, with McSweeney’s aid Starmer did at least manage to hold the madder daydreams of his party in check. Without even this fig-leaf of unity, we face the prospect of three years of Left-wing factions brawling for control of a parliamentary majority they only won by pretending to have foresworn factionalism. God help us all.

Armed volunteers mount barricades at the entrances to my village while youngsters on trail bikes scout through the perimeter cane fields. There is no available food or fuel and the chat groups buzz with an incessant flood of posts about destroyed buildings, burnt cars and roaming mobs. The State is entirely absent.

For the first time, ordinary South Africans, bomb-proofed through decades of tumult, appear afraid for the future.

The democracy bought into existence 27 years ago after a negotiated truce between armed contestants, only some of whom were white, is facing its biggest challenge. Now it is not only the disgraced Zuma that is in the dock. It is also the current President, Cyril Ramaphosa.

The immediate spark for the conflagration was when, on 29 June this year, former President Jacob Zuma was ordered to serve 15 months in prison for refusing to appear before the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture — ironically a commission appointed by Zuma himself to investigate allegations of widespread corruption.

The response from political and even criminal forces, some of their leaders once office-bearers in the ruling African National Congress, was swift. They have mustered under the banner of something called Radical Economic Transformation which translates in method to the violent appropriation of wealth and in consequence to utter desolation. It is a more ambitious form of looting than the one currently on our television screens.

The incumbent, President Cyril Ramaphosa, was widely hailed on his election as leader of the African National Congress in 2017 as the saviour of the nation, a Mr Fix It Extraordinary with a luminary history in the trade unions, business and the negotiations that led to political emancipation. His promises of a New Dawn struck a resonance with a public desperately tired of the collapse in public morality and the accelerating race towards a failed state. Tragically, it has thus far proven a false dawn. The public anger is now palpable and dangerous.

I knew Cyril Ramaphosa when he was Chairman of the publishing company in which I was Editor and later Publisher of the South African Sunday Times, then the largest circulation newspaper in the country. I believe him to be an honourable and decent man, but not an effective one. He showed an almost obsessive desire to avoid confrontation, a preference for working through third parties and, later, a fierce aversion to taking tough decisions if it would affect party unity. More than once he privately confessed that he was a master at dancing on eggshells.

The hard decisions, like weeding out the criminals in his party, were outsourced to the Courts, the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, the media or political hitmen in his own party. Thus, he retained a serene, surreal aloofness amid the growing signs of chaos, division and policy-failure around him, restricting himself largely to sepulchral public utterances on safe-zone topics like gender-based violence, Smart Cities, Covid-19 and platitudinous statements of good intent. This rule-by-remote has born a bitter fruit.

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Shortly after my appointment as Editor of the Sunday Times in 1996, I made a point of engaging the newly-elected ministers in the ANC Government. Invariably I was asked what I perceived to be the greatest challenges facing the infant government. Always I replied: the loss of the nation’s precious skills and investment resources. The caution was obviously lost in the translation.

Under the guise of redistributive economic programmes, the ANC ushered in the policy of Black Economic Empowerment. Whatever its good intentions, it turned into a one-way flow of money extorted with state sanction from private or public purses into the hands of a monstrously avaricious new elite. The proceeds were instantly monetised and consumed in a style that would put a Byzantine court to shame. This has not gone unnoticed by the people burning the malls today.

To gain control of the state, the ANC followed a policy of “cadre deployment” of party faithful to occupy every level of government. Unable to even manage its own party affairs, they had no hope of managing a modern state. Everywhere there was dysfunction, collapse and corruption, the burden again borne most heavily by the poor. Across the spectrum, the internal party factionalism was replicated by the “deployees” in the State Departments.

The amounts stolen in the so-called State Capture project is dwarfed by the loss of wealth, tax, opportunity and confidence caused by the twin policies of black empowerment and cadre deployment, the core enablers of State Capture. Yet a generation after political emancipation, President Ramaphosa still refuses to renounce or even modify either policy. That has been his first great lost opportunity.

The second was not to appeal over the heads of his own party to the country for support for a genuinely reformist programme when elected in 2017. Granted, his election as leader of the ANC was a near-run thing and to this day there persists the claims by his opponents that he bribed his way to victory in the party’s elective conference.

Others suggested that he needed time to win over his suspicious caucus, many members with bank accounts that could hardly bear forensic scrutiny; more time to dance on eggshells. Perhaps, but the delay has proved mortally damaging to the nation

The Commission of Inquiry into State Capture under Deputy Judge President Raymond Zondo has ploughed its way through thousands of hours of testimony in its 38-month existence, minutely confirming the media’s decade-long reporting about how bad things really were during the Zuma years. If this was intended to placate the public, it did not.

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The endless delays in commencing criminal procedures because of the devastation of the criminal justice system by a toxic combination of “cadre deployment” and criminal intent, further eroded confidence. Thirty or so good investigators, auditors and prosecutors with support staff, immediately hired from the private sector or from abroad, would have done what the Zondo Commission could not do: put the culprits in prison quickly and at a fraction of the cost… but that would have required a hard decision from President Ramaphosa.

Enthralled by the Soprano-style tale of warring ANC factions daily playing out in the Zondo Commission, the public easily forgot to ask the big question: how well was President Ramaphosa governing?

The answer: badly, very badly.

He has failed to repudiate any of his predecessors disastrous policies: seizure of land without compensation; the Government’s land redistribution policy which has seen productivity of transferred land fall by 87%; the free tertiary education policy which has turned once great universities into day-care centres for uneducated young people; the highly restrictive labour policies or the huge state social welfare and public service bills. All of this compounded by a mismanaged and inappropriate State response to the various recent coronavirus outbreaks. Serial lockdowns have massively affected employment and driven urban and rural poverty, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal.

The consequence has been stuttering economic growth and the highest youth unemployment rate in the country’s history, many of the unemployed now playing cameo roles on our television screens as the malls burn. No society can or will endure such casually-inflicted pain.

But perhaps the worst consequence of Ramaphosa’s rule-by-remote, and expulsion-by-commission, has been the creation of space for his opponents to mobilise, mainly in their heartland, the province of KwaZulu Natal, from whence Jacob Zuma and many supporters hail, where his main ethnic power base lies (although by no means do all Zulus support Zuma) and where my family has lived for five generations. Throw in legions of unemployed and one has a volatile mix.

The violence has completely overwhelmed an already incompetent police force: there have even been instances of local communities supporting recently arrived reinforcements with food and munitions because they arrived so unprepared.

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By Gavin Haynes

For years the ANC-controlled province, often cruelly dubbed the Sicily of South Africa, has been the site of growing insurrectionary activity: hijacking of transport on main routes, seizure of schools and universities, xenophobic outbreaks, sabotage of municipal infrastructure, mafia-style blackmailing of construction companies, violent factional wars by ANC claimants to office, and wholesale corruption in public affairs (even as Zuma was entering incarceration, the pro-Zuma mayor of the province’s largest city was facing charges of corruption, along with 16 councillors). The perpetrators have acted with impunity and a growing boldness presaging today’s crisis.

All of this has been compounded by a hiatus of authority in the Zulu Royal Family, traditionally a source of stability in the province’s rural areas, albeit a prickly one. The recent death of King Goodwill Zwelithini has brought a disputed succession and a fracturing of loyalties.

In short, the province is destabilised and trapped in a classic first phase of revolution, driven by what appears to be a determined yet still shadowy alliance of usurped politicians and opportunistic criminals. In the frame right now for being the instigators are renegade former — and possibly current — elements of the State Security Agency, which during Zuma’s years became a virtual in-house close protection unit to serve his personal and nefarious interests. Army and police loyalties are still unclear.

President Ramaphosa’s response to all this growing chaos through the months has been a Herculean detachment, punctuated by a few anodyne homilies, not unlike his unctuous and comfortless national television address on Monday night.

The insurrection will no doubt be suppressed, my province will return to its fraught peace but the damage to South Africa and the country will be lasting. This province, certainly, will never forgive President Ramaphosa for sacrificing it on the altar of his own weakness and unpreparedness.

And the bigger question will remain: will the Dancer on Eggshells see the latest outbreak of insurrectionary and criminal violence as a reason for another instinctive compromise? Or will he see it as an invocation to move forward with a bold programme of renewal which must inevitably include splitting his party, dumping many of its discredited and failed policies, and taking all necessary measures to return the country to stability. Those are essential precondition for progress. It is not looking hopeful.