One of the advantages of spending years around politics is that you end up with spies everywhere. Some are inside Westminster. Some drift through think tanks. Some are advisers, donors, researchers, trade union operators, journalists, political spouses and of course the WAG network that somehow hears leadership gossip before half the Cabinet does.
And since January, one name has started appearing with increasing frequency in conversations about Labour’s future. Al Carns.
Not publicly, at least not yet. You will not hear activists chanting his name in conference halls. There are no breathless magazine profiles positioning him as the “future of the Left”. Most voters would struggle to pick him out of a line-up.
But inside Labour circles, particularly among people already gaming out what happens after Keir Starmer, Carns is suddenly being discussed with genuine seriousness.
That, in itself, is remarkable.
Because Westminster had assumed the next Labour leadership battle would revolve around the same exhausted carousel of ambitious egos forever circling around power, each convinced destiny still has unfinished business with them. Andy Burnham continues to hover over Manchester like a man waiting for the kingdom to beg for his return, half provincial Caesar, half permanently disappointed regional manager. Angela Rayner remains trapped beneath the shadow of tax rows and lingering questions that stubbornly refuse to die, however aggressively she protests innocence and however enthusiastically the establishment scrambles to insist the public should stop asking awkward questions. Ed Miliband meanwhile carries on evangelising net zero with the missionary zeal of a man who would happily confiscate the nation’s boilers, air fryers and family hatchbacks if only somebody would let him draft the paperwork.
Yet quietly, beneath the noise, Carns’ stock appears to be rising.
The reason is not ideological fervour. In fact, what makes him interesting is almost the opposite. Labour members seem to like him. Labour’s big funders, the union leaders appear comfortable with him. MPs speak about him with a degree of respect that is unusually bipartisan by Labour standards. More importantly, almost nobody inside the party appears to viscerally dislike him, which in modern Labour politics is close to a medical miracle.
Part of this comes down to biography.
Carns is currently the UK Minister for the Armed Forces and Labour MP for Birmingham Selly Oak. However, he is not another creature grown entirely in the Westminster petri dish. He served five tours in Afghanistan, operating in Helmand while much of Britain’s political class was busy networking at think tank receptions and learning how to say “stakeholder engagement” with a straight face.
That military background matters politically. Britain has become deeply suspicious of politicians who appear to have spent their entire lives talking about the country without ever really living in it (basically the whole of the Labour front bench). Carns arrives with a degree of credibility that cannot be manufactured by media training or focus groups.
Then there is the intelligence factor.
More than one Labour source has said roughly the same thing to me over recent months, that Carns is bright, perhaps brighter than the Labour bench around him, but crucially lacks the exhausting need to advertise it every thirty seconds. In modern politics, where intellectual vanity often pours out of politicians like steam from a broken radiator, that restraint stands out.
And then came today’s line, the one that really made Westminster take notice.
According to a parliamentary source quoted by The Times: “Al Carns has said he is getting on with doing his job, but if someone fires the starting gun, he isn’t afraid of gunfire.”
Now that is not the language of a man completely uninterested in higher office.
Politicians do not accidentally workshop leadership metaphors involving starting guns unless the possibility has crossed their minds. And in Carns’ case the wording carries extra force because, unlike many around him, he has actually heard gunfire.
The important thing here is not whether Carns actively wants the leadership today. The important thing is that people around Labour increasingly believe he could plausibly end up with it.
Because despite the triumphalism still bizarrely projected by Downing Street, there is an increasingly widespread belief that Starmer’s political shelf life will be considerably shorter than his allies pretend. It’s no longer really about whether he eventually goes, but when the removal vans begin pulling into Downing Street.
Even MPs still loyally trotted out onto television studios to defend him are quietly gaming out succession scenarios behind closed doors. Names are being discussed. Alliances are being tested. Futures are being weighed.
And increasingly, Carns is one of the names surfacing because he ticks boxes the others simply do not.
He looks serious without appearing robotic. Competent without sounding managerial. Patriotic in Labour circles without sounding theatrical. He can speak to Labour’s traditional base without terrifying the far left on one hand or centrists on the other. He has a life story voters instinctively understand. Perhaps most importantly, he does not currently look like a politician who has spent fifteen years rehearsing acceptance speeches in the mirror.
Of course, there remains one gigantic obstacle. Almost nobody outside Westminster has heard of him.
But politics changes very quickly once parties decide somebody looks plausible. Before Tony Blair became inevitable, he was largely unknown outside political circles. Before David Cameron emerged, most voters would not have recognised him in the street.
Reputations in British politics can be built in a matter of weeks. Which is why people should probably pay more attention to Carns than they currently are.
Not because he is certain to become Prime Minister. Far from it. Politics destroys promising figures every week. Westminster is littered with the remains of “future leaders” who ended up hosting podcasts and giving speeches about resilience.
But to Starmer, Carns has quietly become something potentially far more dangerous than a frontrunner. A plausible alternative.
And when parties lose confidence in a leader, plausible alternatives suddenly become very important indeed.
Main Image: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence
