We may never know for sure whether Wes Streeting, as some of his clearly unimpressed colleagues claimed, had a role in persuading Scottish Labour leader Anas Sawar to call for Keir Starmer’s resignation – supposedly as a prelude to the Health Secretary launching a bid for the leadership.

If that was indeed the plan, then it seems to have backfired. Barely had Sawar finished speaking before the Cabinet (including Streeting himself) began circling the wagons around their beleaguered boss, and by the evening Starmer looked safe – at least for the moment.

The idea that Streeting, despite his denials, “came for the king and missed” is not entirely far-fetched. True, the assumption that replacing an unpopular leader will magically improve a government’s fortunes tends to represent the triumph of hope over experience. But the fact that it does occasionally do the trick means that politicians – especially ambitious politicians like Streeting – are often prepared to give it a go. And if that sees them accused of stabbing their leader in the back, or even the front, then so be it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that.

It should come as no surprise, then, that postwar political history is replete with instances of betrayal, some botched, others brutally successful, but all of them ultimately triggered by a sense that the occupant of Number Ten has either gone gaga or else passed their electoral sell-by date – or sometimes both.

Parliamentary parties, in this respect at least, are like the Normans, who, to quote William the Conqueror, were, unless “disciplined under a just and firm rule”, inherently inclined to “tear each other to pieces and destroy themselves, for they hanker after rebellion, cherish sedition and are ready for treachery.”

What, then, might an errant knight determined to grab the crown from his or her ailing monarch learn from those who’ve tried it before? The overriding lesson, surely, is to grab the opportunity when it arises since it may never come around again. In June 2009, Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell resigned from Gordon Brown’s government, supposedly paving the way for Foreign Secretary David Miliband to mount a challenge, only for the Blairite young pretender to pull out at the last minute and lose his chance forever.

Similarly, Michael Portillo was given just seconds to decide what to do when John Major asked whether he would back him to stay on when he put himself up for re-election in June 1995. Portillo said yes, helping Major to beat John Redwood only to take the Tories down to a defeat so bad that it would cost Portillo his safe seat in parliament. Sadly, by the time he’d bagged another one and put himself forward to fill the vacancy left by William Hague’s departure as Leader of the Opposition in 2001, his time to shine had passed – so much so that he lost out not just to the irredeemably Europhile Ken Clarke but to the woefully ill-equipped Iain Duncan Smith.

Hague, it is worth recalling, got the leadership gig in the first place because he had proved a good deal more ruthless. Just like Michael Gove in 2016, he surprised everybody in 2001 by reneging on an apparently firm commitment to support a colleague for the leadership, opting, after agreeing to serve as Michael Howard’s running-mate, to stand in his own right instead.

It is also worth recalling, of course, that the hard-hearted opportunism that paid off for Hague did not pay off for Gove. Moreover, it is easy to see why those who have hesitated and lost opted to hesitate when the crunch-point arrived. Michael Heseltine’s faux-Shakespearian warning that “He who wields the dagger never wears the crown” has long given potential assassins pause.

Actually, of course, the experience of the woman Heseltine sought unsuccessfully to replace proves otherwise: Thatcher, after all, directly challenged Heath in 1975 after serving him loyally (albeit through gritted teeth) in Cabinet for four years. Nevertheless, he had a point. Sometimes a slightly more indirect approach to betrayal beats open confrontation.

Thatcher’s own defenestration in November 1990 – later dubbed by her as “treachery with a smile on its face” – provides perhaps the paradigmatic example. The fact that she was badly wounded by her erstwhile deputy, Geoffrey Howe, before being brought down by her failure to squash Heseltine by a sufficient margin in the first round of voting, offered her eventual successor, John Major, plenty of plausible deniability.

He was also absent (owing to his convalescing at home after a painful dental procedure) from the face-to-face meetings with Cabinet colleagues which helped persuade her to call it a day. Further,Sir John agreed to sign his boss’s nomination papers for a second round (despite knowing she was unlikely to enter and whilst discreetly preparing to throw his own hat in the ring).

This oblique-yet-opportunist approach has worked for other politicians who have aspired to lead the party aptly characterised by the late historian John Ramsden as “an autocracy tempered by assassination”. Boris Johnson, for instance, took the chance to resign on a supposed point of principle after Theresa May’s Cabinet meeting at Chequers in July 2018, leaving him free to continually undermine her authority until she had little alternative but to throw in the towel a year later – at which point he was able to turn his tacit campaign for the top job into something more explicit.

Even more Machiavellian, though, was Harold Macmillan. In the summer of 1956, he had, if anything, been keener than Prime Minister Anthony Eden to teach Egypt’s President Nasser a lesson and snatch back the Suez Canal by military means. Yet once it became clear to him, as chancellor, that the Americans were prepared to do whatever it took on the financial front to halt the operation, he called for withdrawal. As Labour leader Harold Wilson waspishly put it, he was “first in and first out”.

Then, knowing full well that the escapade’s bathetic outcome was all but certain to end Eden’s tenure in Downing Street, Macmillan devoted himself to outmanoeuvring the PM’s preferred candidate, Rab Butler, so as to secure himself the succession a couple of months later. Not only that, but when the time came for Macmillan to pass on the premiership to someone else in October 1963, he engineered the ensuing contest to ensure he was replaced not by Butler (who was once again expected to take over) but by the far less gifted Alec Home.

Arguably, however, Butler only had himself to blame. Home – concerned he might not be able to form a government should Butler refuse to serve – asked the Queen to delay appointing him until he could be sure his rival would do the decent thing. Butler’s friends urged him, as one of them put it, to use the loaded revolver he’d effectively been handed. But Butler, ever the gentleman and always inclined to indecision, declined to do so. The government in which he agreed to serve was subsequently kicked out of office a year later, dashing forever his hopes of making it to Number Ten. Wes Streeting (and Angela Rayer) take note.

Originally published at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/16/political-treachery-art-streeting-crown/