LONDON — Keir Starmer is fighting for his political life. But Britain’s Labour Party has a long history of ducking the chance to oust its struggling leaders.

The U.K. prime minister, whose party is languishing in the polls, is facing a fresh firestorm over Labour grandee Peter Mandelson’s post-conviction friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It’s the most serious crisis yet of Starmer’s eventful premiership.

Starmer is just the latest Labour leader to feel the heat from his own backbenches — but the party’s record when it comes to staging successful coups lags far behind the positively regicidal Tory party. POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast spoke to battle-scarred Labour veterans and party experts about why it’s just so tricky to dislodge a Labour leader.

1) Labour loves navel-gazing — Alan Johnson, former home secretary

Alan Johnson served in the Cabinet under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and witnessed first-hand a number of botched coups against the two New Labour giants.

He was talked up as a great leadership hope for the party in the floundering Brown era — but believes Labour is simply less ruthless than the Conservatives in wielding the knife because of its penchant for looking inward.

Labour’s various factions, he says, often appear more focused on winning internal ideological battles than governing the country. “There’s a little section that thinks it’s a debating society, there’s another section that believes that it’s all about preparing for the next revolution,” he adds of the center-left party.

Reflecting on the Tories, who rattled through five prime ministers in eight years as they tried to cling to power, Johnson says: “If they’re not winning elections, it’s very simple, out you go.”

2) Labour’s rarely in power and that makes MPs queasy — Ayesha Hazarika, former Labour adviser

Labour peer Ayesha Hazarika, who once served as an adviser to Ed Miliband, believes that the fact Keir Starmer is one of only seven Labour prime ministers in British history works to his advantage.

“I just feel like it’s not culturally or psychologically in our DNA as a political movement,” she argues. “That’s not to say it might not happen. We don’t feel good about doing this, and we’re also notoriously bad at organizing coups.”

She adds: “It’s so rare for there to be a Labour prime minister. We owe that person the opportunity because he’s the person that got us into power.”

3) Labour’s rulebook can be impenetrable — Gloria De Piero, served under Jeremy Corbyn

Gloria De Piero knows first-hand how intractable Labour’s rules be. She resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2016 as part of an orchestrated coup to displace the hard-left Labour leader.

A vast swathe of Labour’s Parliamentary Labour Party opposed Corbyn at the time. Mutinous MPs launched a vote of no-confidence in Corbyn, in which he was defeated overwhelmingly by 172 votes to 40.

But unlike the Tory system, votes of no-confidence are “non-binding” and so can be happily ignored by the leader. Following the failed coup, rebellious MPs were forced to resort to a leadership contest. This failed because “the members were full square behind Jeremy Corbyn.” She remembers darkly: “We were utterly miserable. People were drinking too much — well, I was. Nobody knew how to get out of it.”

While recent polling suggests Starmer is deeply unpopular with the party membership, De Piero points out that, unlike the Tory party, where rebels can secretly submit letters of no-confidence, Labour’s current rules require a candidate to find eighty colleagues and present their names to party officials in order to fire the starting gun on a leadership contest. Those names are then made public. “Somebody has to put their head up over a parapet, get the signatures of 80 people without anybody knowing and then go, there you go,” she adds.

Even moving against an embattled leader doesn’t take them out of the picture. Unlike a Conservative leader who can be ousted by losing the support of a majority of MPs in a vote of no-confidence, De Piero points out that “the existing leader of the Labour Party is automatically on a ballot for any future contest.”

4) Succession planning is a nightmare — Sion Simon, former Labour MP

Arguably the closest Labour came to a successful coup was in September 2006. Sion Simon, then a Labour MP from the West Midlands, was one of a small band of rebels who signed a letter calling for Prime Minister Tony Blair to step down.

Simon, along with the then-Junior Minister Tom Watson and other low-ranking MPs, discussed the plans at a curry house in Wolverhampton, before presenting Blair with their demands for his exit.

While Blair — more than nine years into office — eventually agreed to step down, Simon acknowledged that it would not have been possible without an obvious successor, in the form of Gordon Brown, waiting in the wings.

“The question is who and if you look at … any of the people who are talked about as being likely replacements, none of them, very clearly, is going to want to be involved or be seen to be part of a process that brings down the sitting Labour prime minister.”

He predicted: “They’re all going to want clean hands.”