Before the country went to the polls on May 7, one of Keir Starmer’s cabinet ministers offered a word of caution. Although the poor results for Labor were “baked”, it was impossible to know what might happen next. “There is a tremendous emotional response when you embrace your colleagues who have lost,” the minister told Starmer. And it can make Labor MPs behave unpredictably.
Wes Streeting was that cabinet minister. Forty-eight hours after the results came in, and with only a flurry of calls for Starmer to resign, Catherine West, the little-known MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet, decided she had had enough. She was reeling from watching friends lose their jobs at the council she once led. Frustrated by the lack of leadership from the cabinet, she went on Radio 4 to tell them to get together and agree a successor. If they didn’t, she would take on Starmer herself – not to become Prime Minister, but just so that the Labor Party would finally do something.
West spent the weekend fielding calls from reporters and her colleagues, who warned her that the most likely beneficiary of her intervention would be Streeting. It could end up triggering a race before Andy Burnham could return to parliament. The West did not want this. She sent typo-ridden messages to leading Labor women asking them if they would consider running, including Sarah Sackman, a close ally of the Prime Minister, who politely declined. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, did the same when West asked her live on TV. But by Monday, when West changed course to coordinate a letter begging Starmer to set a timetable for his departure, things had begun to move without him.
“Catherine West opened Pandora’s Box,” said a senior Labor figure. “She will never have to buy a drink at a Labor conference for the rest of her life,” claimed another. Soon, a steady stream of Labor MPs began calling for Starmer to quit, numbering 50, 60, then more than 70. By the time Joe Morris, Wes Streeting’s PPS, resigned on Monday night, swiftly followed by fellow Streeting allies Burnham and Shabana Mahmood, it was clear that Starmer was in deep trouble.
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Inside No. 10, things “took a turn,” an insider told me. Mahmood entered the building and told the Prime Minister that he should set a schedule for his departure. Yvette Cooper has followed suit, according to two sources, although her relatives deny this. Other cabinet ministers held talks with her about how to leave in a “dignified manner”. Pat McFadden, the wise Blairite seen as a steady pair of hands, calmed the nerves. He told Starmer not to do anything immediately, reminding him that no leadership challenge had been mounted. “You shouldn’t be tempted to resign because of Twitter,” he advised. “There are only four assistant ministers.” Richard Hermer and Steve Reed offered similar advice. Jill Cuthbertson, his longtime aide who recently replaced Morgan McSweeney as joint chief of staff, returned from maternity leave to help.
And yet, as the evening of May 11 approached, even supportive cabinet ministers felt the pressure might be too much for Starmer to handle. One said to me: “I don’t see how he survives this.” Another reluctantly concluded that it was over. As dawn broke the next day, former Number 10 aides, ministers and other insiders were in disbelief at what was happening. “I’m so desperate – how did we end up here, in a death spiral to nowhere?” a former top aide texted him. “Total shitshow coming up makes me cringe,” said another. The markets were shaken. Starmer’s departure seemed inevitable.
But at the morning cabinet meeting, the prime minister did what he had always said he would do and fought back. “The Labor Party has a process to challenge a leader and that hasn’t started. The country expects us to get on with governing,” he told colleagues. It was his put-up-or-shut-up moment, laying his hand on Streeting, Burnham and whoever else was hanging around. Before anyone had a chance to respond to his comments, he quickly moved on to the situation in Iran. Streeting and other colleagues then stopped to speak to Starmer. He didn’t leave them.
That afternoon, Starmer got down to business: he held the Middle East response committee, while outside Number 10 ministerial resignations piled up and rumors of imminent cabinet resignations and leadership challenges mounted. Streeting and other cabinet ministers asked to see him again, but were blocked. The unions tried to see it through; they discovered that their meeting had been cancelled. Burnham, meanwhile, arrived in London.
“Keir can stop this instability. He can make this orderly,” Miatta Fahnbulleh, the first minister to resign from his government, told me that afternoon. She asked the prime minister to stay on through the summer months to steer the country through economic strikes from Iran, but to set a timetable for his departure and make way for new leadership by the autumn. She concluded that Labor had a “moral responsibility to deliver the change that people voted for – and also to have a hearing – and that is not possible with him as leader”.
As Starmer’s leadership faltered, the list of Labor figures who considered running for leader – which they would all deny – grew longer and longer, including Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, John Healey, Darren Jones and Al Carns, who makes his case in this magazine on page 19.
Streeting and Burnham, however, remain the frontrunners. Streeting believes the task ahead is to show Labor it can win; he can deliver; and that he has the vision and ideas that the party can have. In his council area of Redbridge, he showed he has the ability to win: dismissing the argument often leveled against him that he is likely to lose his seat at the next election, and showing he can take the fight to reform, the Greens and independents. He believes he has delivered the NHS and that voters are starting to notice. It is the third area – proving to the Labor Party that he has the ideas they can get behind – that is his biggest challenge.
Streeting knows he is associated with a faction and style of politics that the Labor Party now resoundingly rejects – the McSweeneyism bloc, as many see it. He has insisted privately (and publicly, at every opportunity) that he would take a different approach, respect the different traditions of the Labor Party, break away from the culture of the past. Many are skeptical.
Meanwhile, Burnham is increasingly convinced that things are moving in his direction. At every level of the party, from the cabinet to the National Executive Committee – which will decide whether he can run in a by-election – he believes support is coming his way. He expects to call a by-election within the next six weeks, although at the time of writing no Labor MPs have announced they will stand down for it.
His campaign would be his time to make a case for change for the country, his allies believe. “He’s got the outsider’s platform. That’s worth more than anything else he’s got,” says one. So if Burnham “went out and faced the public and won, is there really much at stake in the leadership election?” they ask.
But as Burnham and Streeting conspire, Starmer insists the volatility of leadership elections is the wrong thing for the country. He and many worried allies believe Labor will be locked out of power for a generation if they change leaders two years into government. However, many other Labor MPs believe they are doomed if they don’t.
(Further reading: Tracked: Labor MPs calling for Keir Starmer to quit)
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