Starmer’s strained insistence that he would, in the words of another outgoing prime minister, “fight on” and “fight to win” melted on contact with political reality. The power of Burnham’s victory sent an uncomplicated signal to the parliamentary Labour Party. The man previously confined to the Greater Manchester mayoralty would thwart Reform and save Labour seats. 

There was no misinterpreting the message made in Makerfield. It demanded a response.

Starmer’s statement today will spare Labour from the brutal spectacle of a parliamentary stampede. But in the words of a third outgoing prime minister, the herd had already moved.

After all, the protection Labour’s leadership strictures afforded Starmer was no match for the raw political meaning of the Makerfield result. 

To attribute Starmer’s fall solely to a single by-election would, of course, misunderstand the longer arc of his premiership. The winter fuel payment cut; the ructions caused by the government’s stance on the two-child benefit cap; the botched handling of the welfare bill rebellion; the inevitable but always belated U-turns; the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the United States; the unpopularity; the rise of populisms on the left and right – every development, every debacle diminished Starmer in the eyes of Labour MPs. 

In his statement this morning, Starmer exercised his right to rehearse a different story. He referred to the “morally” bankrupt state of the Labour Party in 2020 and the immense odds he faced as leader of the opposition in the wake of Corbynism.

In defiant tones, Starmer declared that he had proved “those people wrong. Because we changed our party, ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence and national security and becoming a party that once again stood proudly with, not against, our national flag.”

The 2024 general election did indeed deliver that rare thing: a Labour government. But the defining story of Starmer’s premiership was its inability to realise the potential that this historic political achievement promised.

Starmer’s resignation sets in train the process that will now deliver Britain’s seventh prime minister in 10 years. He told the nation that nominations would open for the election of his successor on 9 July. If a leadership election is triggered, Starmer’s successor will be in place by the time parliament returns from its summer recess in September. 

The parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) will now enstool, by contest or coronation, Andy Burnham as Starmer’s successor. The immediate intrigue lies in whether any credible challenger will emerge. Starmer’s remaining allies may yet attempt to rally around a candidate, but Wes Streeting’s decision to endorse Burnham all but clears his path to Downing Street.

There has been some meditation on the meaning of Makerfield in recent days. But the developments since Burnham’s victory was declared in the early hours of Friday morning surely confirm it as the most consequential by-election in British history. 

By-elections and poor electoral performance generally are part of the formula that leads to a prime ministerial resignation. The circumstances of Burnham’s accession, however, are entirely unprecedented. He stood for parliament with the aim of defenestrating the prime minister, and succeeded.  

For this reason, it is indefensibly banal to suggest that Starmer is leaving Downing Street “on his own terms”. The extent to which Starmer’s exit was coordinated with or communicated to camp Burnham will be revealed over the coming days and weeks. But Starmer has fallen victim to a political coup – engineered by Burnham and endorsed by the electorate of Makerfield. 

In the end, there was some grace but little dignity to be found in the circumstances surrounding Starmer’s departure.

Perhaps the real power of the Makerfield by-election is that it allowed Labour to oust Starmer on its own terms. The Makerfield outcome obscures Nigel Farage’s claim that Starmer is his third prime ministerial scalp (after David Cameron and Theresa May). Reform candidates stood at the local elections in May on a platform of “get Starmer out”. On the face of it, regicidal action by Labour MPs risked lending credence to Reform and Farage. But in Makerfield, Burnham stole Farage’s thunder to ensure a succession could be conducted almost entirely according to his design.

The reasons for Starmer’s resignation are manifold. They can be found in the missteps and muddied messaging that characterised his premiership. But the immediate cause of his resignation is simple: Andy Burnham and Makerfield. 

It was Burnham, then, who definitively disproved Michael Heseltine’s maxim that those who wield the knife cannot inherit the crown. 

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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Burnham’s ambition, of course, was never in doubt – nor was the national executive committee’s rapid capitulation. The Greater Manchester mayor was blocked ahead of the February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election on the grounds that his selection would unleash a new wave of Westminster psychodrama. At the second time of asking, Starmer’s resistance – and his political capital – was spent. 

But the circumstances that delivered Burnham’s Makerfield vacancy invited scrutiny. It was Josh Simons, the former director of Labour Together, who sailed to the rescue of Labour’s prince across the water. Simons’ abdication could well be rewarded with a central position in the Burnham court.

The second curiosity concerned the character of the Makerfield constituency. Simons’ 5,399-vote majority was the fifth lowest of the 27 Greater Manchester constituencies in 2024. The seat also carried a significant Reform presence. The party’s 2024 candidate, Robert Kenyon, polled 12,803 votes (31.8%), finishing second. Some two years later, in the weeks before Simons’ resignation, Reform secured 24 out of the 25 seats up for grabs on Wigan Borough Council.

In truth, it was necessity – as opposed to calculation and strategy – that carved Burnham’s path to power. He was left with limited options as Greater Manchester Labour MPs successively ruled out imposing a by-election on their constituents. Political circumstance conspired to produce a proof-of-concept contest for the man many cast as Labour’s antidote to Reform.

Burnham’s victory this week was remarkable on two counts therefore: for its margin – a majority of 9,231 with 54.8% of the vote – and for its narrative power.

Burnham’s campaign in Makerfield was constructed around a series of familiar rallying cries. But it was their convergence on a single candidate that defined the by-election’s novel nature. Burnham was simultaneously the “Change” candidate, the “Stop Reform” candidate and the “Get Starmer Out” candidate. This same succession of slogans powered the Green Party’s victory in Gorton and Denton. But in Makerfield, they formed the rhetorical reserve of the candidate with the red rosette – in a historically Labour-voting constituency. 

Not every slogan was featured on Burnham’s “For Us” literature. But there could be no mistaking the subtext of Burnham’s “bring change to Westminster” message. In Makerfield, the electorate endorsed Burnham and the central, irresistible implication of his candidacy: regicide. 

Against this backdrop, Burnham’s landslide conforms to recent electoral trends. Voters want change and do not expect Starmer to deliver it. Makerfield represented another opportunity for voters to send a version of the same message they have sent to Westminster for some years now. 

For weeks, Makerfield was styled as a stepping stone on Burnham’s path to power. But Burnham’s campaign would be mistaken to see itself as the driver of events. Voters used him to send a message to Westminster – not the other way round.

Burnham still has considerable cause for optimism this weekend. Reform’s limited pool of candidates is continuing to cause problems; Robert Kenyon marked the party’s second candidate blunder in as many by-elections. Nigel Farage appears increasingly uneasy in the role of permanent political actor; the prospect of becoming prime minister is weighing on British politics’ perennial outsider. And over the coming months, Farage’s fragmenting right flank will pose a series of tricky purity tests that risk pulling Reform’s centre of gravity further from the median voter.

Burnham will now reap the political spoils of his Makerfield conquest. His immediate achievement lies in injecting a popular element into what had hitherto been an elite-dominated power struggle. Burnham was endorsed as his party’s saviour in a Reform target seat by voters Labour must win to survive as a national force. A great deal was left unsaid during the campaign. But Burnham’s implicit message to Labour MPs was simple: if I can win Makerfield, I can win the country. 

Politicians, of whatever rank or party affiliation, trade in stories. The original sin of the Starmer premiership was its almost dogmatic aversion to narrative. Burnham’s victory simultaneously strikes the heart of the tale Starmer told Labour MPs in opposition: that ideological self-flagellation was a condition of victory. Burnham’s message is that Labour can be truer to its historic instincts (more left-wing) and still win the country. 

Today, in the wake of Makerfield, Burnham’s principal problem is that all which was left unsaid during the campaign must now be articulated. 

The mythical power of the prince across the water is derived from their perfect isolation. Burnham’s relative detachment in recent years has obscured his political outline. As such, leading figures from every Labour faction have projected their political aspirations onto the Greater Manchester mayor. Burnham’s power base is found among the soft left, and his emerging leadership operation is staffed by figures drawn from the upper reaches of the relaunched Tribune Group. But elements of the traditional Labour right, the Socialist Campaign Group, Blue Labour and the Red Wall Caucus have all found common cause with Burnham in recent months. 

The rival claims on Burnham were thrown into sharp relief in the early hours of Friday morning. Both Josh Simons and John McDonnell celebrated when the returning officer declared Burnham’s victory. The former was situated by Burnham’s side at the Makerfield count; the latter shed a tear live on LBC Radio. 

Labour MPs’ conceptions of what Andy Burnham means, politically, will now be pitted against each other. Every faction that rallied to Burnham’s ambiguous standard will want to see itself represented in the settlement that follows.

The extent to which Burnham’s factional coalition is a marriage of convenience – or of delusion – will soon be revealed.

The big strategic dilemma facing camp Burnham is whether they choose to define their man before or after challenging Starmer. The route of least resistance would be to land in Westminster on Monday with the roster of 81 regicides required under Labour’s leadership rules. A contest would begin in earnest, and Starmer and Wes Streeting could melt away. But this approach would store up problems for Burnham in Downing Street.

There is also the matter of unseating Starmer, whose public pronouncements indicate a stubborn resolution to remain in power. The prime minister is protected by Labour’s strict leadership election procedures, which do not provide for a simple “no-confidence” motion, and he senses that subjecting Labour’s saviour to finer scrutiny could see some of the sheen come off. 

In any case, it is time for Labour MPs to reconcile themselves to the consequences of their rebellion and Burnham’s Makerfield victory. The demand for an “orderly” succession will soon reveal its oxymoronic character. There is no such thing as a bloodless coup in British politics. Even if a contest is avoided, Burnham will need to succeed where previous prime ministers have failed in constructing a sense of political order from the rubble of regicide.

If the real meaning of Makerfield lay in the campaign subtext, its fallout will be defined by the clarity Burnham can no longer defer.

And if he does not deliver, if chaos reigns, Labour’s latest MP will learn that the public’s patience is perilously thin.

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The move marks Burnham’s second attempt at a parliamentary comeback, after Labour’s national executive committee (NEC), Starmer-in-council, thwarted his prospective candidacy for the February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election. That contest proceeded without Burnham and resulted in a symbolic victory for Zack Polanski’s Green Party. 

The Gorton and Denton contest followed the resignation of Mike Amesbury as the incumbent MP. Amesbury was handed a 10-week prison term after punching a constituent in Frodsham, Cheshire, which was reduced to a suspended sentence after an appeal. 

This time, Burnham’s route back to parliament has been carefully choreographed. 

On Thursday afternoon, Josh Simons, the former director of the Starmer-aligned Labour Together group, announced he would stand down as MP for Makerfield with the explicit intention of enabling Burnham to replace him. 

Simons’ move piled further pressure on Downing Street after Wes Streeting, the newly resigned health secretary, pointedly called for a future Labour contest to contain “the best possible field of candidates”.

Keir Starmer’s political authority has diminished markedly since he blocked Burnham in Gorton and Denton. And it has already been announced that Downing Street will no longer stand in the Greater Manchester mayor’s way.  

But the absence of a Downing Street edict does not guarantee Burnham’s smooth return. If Starmer will not block Burnham, the electorate of Makerfield – and the insurgent Reform UK – just might.

At the 2024 general election, Reform UK candidate Robert Kenyon polled 12,803 votes (31.8%) in Makerfield. Simons secured a majority of 5,399 over Kenyon in second place. Two years later, Reform won 24 out of the 25 seats up for grabs on Wigan Borough Council in the 2026 local elections. 

As such, the by-election amounts to a proof-of-concept contest for Burnham. If he can thwart Farage in Makerfield, the momentum could yet carry him all the way to 10 Downing Street. The so-called “king of the North” would be welcomed to Westminster with a coronation. 

The circumstances make for what must surely be the most consequential by-election in a generation.

But as Burnham prepares for his prime ministerial primary, the case of Patrick Gordon Walker will loom large in his mind and wider coverage. 

In 1965, the newly appointed foreign secretary lost the Leyton by-election that had likewise been arranged to secure his return to parliament. It remains a case study in how a constituency – notwithstanding the machinations at Westminster and the designs of a given candidate – can chart its own course.

The 1965 Leyton by-election: a cautionary tale for Andy Burnham

The 1964 general election returned Harold Wilson’s Labour Party to power after 13 years of Conservative government, winning 317 seats on 44.1% of the vote. But the victory was narrow; Wilson’s working parliamentary majority of just four seats was the smallest since 1847.

Walker, who had served as shadow foreign secretary since February 1963, was one of four incumbent Labour MPs to lose their seats. He was defeated in Smethwick by 1,774 votes.

The Conservative campaign in Smethwick was centred on extreme hostility to Commonwealth immigration. Supporters of the Tory candidate, Peter Griffiths, were reported to have used the slogan “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”

Griffiths refused to condemn the slogan and, in the wake of the campaign, Malcolm X visited Marshall Street in Smethwick. The trip came just days before he was assassinated in New York City.

Wilson, meanwhile, appointed Walker to the cabinet as foreign secretary. 

In a commons speech on 3 November 1964, Wilson’s admission that Walker could not take part in the queen’s speech debate provoked laughter from Conservative MPs.

The prime minister, who did not appreciate the Tory response, immediately condemned the “utterly squalid” Conservative campaign in Smethwick. The party’s tactics, he said, would “leave a lasting brand of shame on the Conservative Party”.

Wilson asked if Alec Douglas-Home, the former prime minister and Conservative leader of the opposition, was “proud” of the new Tory MP for Smethwick.

He declared: “Does he now intend to take [Griffiths] to his bosom? Will the Conservative whip be extended to him, because if he does accept him as a colleague he will make this clear: he will betray the principles which not only his party but the nation have hitherto had the right to proclaim.

“And if he does not, if he takes what I think is the right course… the Smethwick Conservatives can have the satisfaction of having topped the poll, and of having sent here as their member one who, until a further general election restores him to oblivion, will serve his term here as a parliamentary leper.”

A series of Conservative MPs responded by objecting to the term “parliamentary leper”. A total of 25 opposition MPs reportedly walked out after Wilson’s diatribe, and at least 25 more then signed a motion of censure against the prime minister. Four Labour MPs responded by tabling a tongue-in-cheek motion that censured Wilson for “a cruel and unmerited slight on lepers.”

The 1965 Leyton by-election was engineered to provide Walker with a swift return to the House of Commons. 

Leyton, represented by Reginald Sorensen since 1935, was thought to be a Labour stronghold. Sorensen, the popular local MP, had secured a majority of 7,926 votes in the 1964 general election. He was raised to the peerage to prepare the way for a by-election. 

At one point on the campaign trail, Walker reportedly remarked to an American: “Secretary of state [Dean] Rusk doesn’t have to do this, does he?”

But he maintained that he did not object to having to campaign, adding: “Foreign policy should be related to the people.

“And one can be so much more effective politically if one is elected. I think that is one reason for the problems of your secretaries of state with the Senate.”

In the end, the Conservative candidate, Ronald Buxton, won the Leyton by-election with 16,544 votes – a majority of just 205 votes over Walker.

The result, dubbed “the most astonishing election result since the war”, dealt a significant political blow to Wilson.

The prime minister was asked if the contest represented a “condemnation” of the government’s first 100 days in office.

He responded: “No, it was a disappointment of course. I think there were obvious local factors in it, for example any constituency that has been represented faithfully and well by a good local resident may feel a certain objection to a by-election being caused and a stranger coming in.”

Wilson added: “But I think the main thing we faced in a national sense was this – that for our first three months we decided that whatever needed to be done was going to be done, popular or not. We had taken over a very grim economic situation.

“We thought it right to put the country on its feet again, even if that meant political unpopularity…

“For example, we had, as almost our first act, and I’m proud of it, decided to increase old age pensions, and we did it in the middle of an economic crisis. But of course, for reasons we all know, the pensions couldn’t be paid until March”.

Buxton’s victory forced Walker to resign as foreign secretary. His brief tenure marked one of the very few occasions in British political history when a cabinet minister sat neither in the commons or Lords.

The by-election also reduced Wilson’s already razor-thin parliamentary majority from four to two. (The election of a Conservative MP as speaker of the commons raised this back to three).

Wilson responded by appointing Michael Stewart as the new foreign secretary. Stewart had served as education secretary since the 1964 general election.

In the commons, Douglas-Home labelled the Leyton by-election as the “best epitaph on the 100 days of socialist government”.

He declared: “Now we have had the surprises – and more than enough of them, if I may say so. The dynamism about which the prime minister spoke has been the dynamism of the bull in the china shop.

“The pronouncements of the government and their methods of proceeding have made confusion worse confounded, though I must now announce that the honeymoon is over, and for the best of all possible reasons – that the promises have proved false and the solemn vows undertaken at the general election have been dishonoured.”

Labour MP William Hamilton told the House: “I believe that the first lesson which we on this side and the opposition have to learn from the Leyton result is that we must not take the electorate for granted.

“We should not insult them by using them for purely party political convenience.”

Hamilton said the by-election was “little more than a crude attempt at ballot rigging”.

On the same day as the Leyton contest, 21 January 1965, a by-election for the constituency of Nuneaton was held in similar circumstances. Frank Cousins, who had been appointed to lead the new Ministry of Technology following the 1964 by-election, was returned as a Labour MP.

Cousins, previously the secretary general of the Transport and General Workers Union, emerged with a majority of 5,241 votes (down from 11,702 at the 1964 election).

Two years later, Labour won a landslide 98-seat majority at the 1966 election.

Walker was returned as the MP for Leyton with a majority of 8,646 votes. He sat in the cabinet from 1967 to 1968, first as minister without portfolio, then as secretary of state for education and science.

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These words accurately describe the political landscape Keir Starmer, Britain’s incumbent embattled premier, faces after Catherine West announced her plan to launch a leadership bid. West’s plan, hastily organised in the wake of this week’s local elections, is designed to smoke out prospective challengers better placed to take on Starmer in a full contest. More specifically, West’s scheme is aimed at engineering a contest among those candidates who currently serve as members of parliament – thereby excluding Andy Burnham, the mayor of greater Manchester. 

In any case, Starmer is not the first prime minister to face such a manoeuvre from a self-styled “stalking horse” candidate. 

On 22 November 1989, Sir Anthony Meyer, a backbench critic of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, launched a bid to oust the prime minister. 

Meyer was also a reluctant candidate, standing in the place of far more senior Thatcher-critics such as Michael Heseltine. He acknowledged that he had no chance of winning, but believed a contest – initiated by a stalking horse candidate – was necessary to test the party’s confidence in its leader.

Conservative discontent with Thatcher’s leadership had been simmering since at least the Westland affair (1986), which featured the resignation of Heseltine as defence secretary. By late 1989, the government was suffering from the intense unpopularity of the community charge, known universally as the “poll tax”, and internal spits over its policy on European integration.

The Conservatives lost 13 seats in the July 1989 European Parliament election – the party’s first national election defeat since October 1974. The campaign was conducted in the shadow of Thatcher’s famous Bruges speech (September 1988) – a trenchant, and divisive, statement of her euroscepticism.

The European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), an economic stability measure, emerged as a flashpoint in 1989. 

Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson reportedly threatened to resign as foreign secretary and chancellor respectively if Thatcher failed to oversee Britain’s entry into the ERM. Thatcher responded with a reshuffle in July 1989, replacing Howe as foreign secretary with John Major. Howe was made leader of the commons, a post embellished with the title of deputy prime minister. Lawson then resigned in October 1989 following a dispute over the influence of Thatcher’s economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters. Walters opposed Britain’s entry into the ERM.

Under the Conservative Party’s leadership procedures at the time, Thatcher was subject to annual re-elections. But she had been returned to her post unopposed since 1975. 

1989 was different. 

Meyer, a 69-year-old europhile backbencher, put himself forward as a candidate, triggering the first Tory leadership election since Thatcher toppled Edward Heath in 1975.

Meyer was a long-standing critic of Thatcher’s leadership. 

In November 1981, Meyer was among the Conservative “gang of 25” who signed a letter threatening to vote against the government’s latest round of monetarist measures delivered at the autumn statement. In the wake of the Westland affair, he argued that the time had come “when we should be thinking in terms of choosing another leader”.

The short 1989 Conservative leadership election featured an intervention from Heath, Thatcher’s predecessor as Conservative leader. The europhile former prime minister described Thatcher as a “narrow little nationalist… unable to move with the movement of history in creating the greater Europe”.

Meyer, meanwhile, was derided by the tabloid press as “Sir Anthony Whats’isname” and a “stalking donkey”. In an open letter to Conservative MPs, he wrote: “On Europe above all, the prime minister stands apart not only from many of her own cabinet.”

One opinion poll, published shortly before voting began in the contest, found two-thirds of voters were unsatisfied with Thatcher’s leadership.

On the day of the election, 5 December, Thatcher attended the commons for prime minister’s questions.

Labour MP Alice Mahon asked: “Since this might be the last time that the prime minister answers questions at the dispatch box… will she tell us her proudest achievement?

“Is it the number of homeless? Is it the deeply unpopular poll tax or is it the image of a government who resort to seedy bribes to get their privatisation programme through?”

Thatcher responded: “My proudest achievements have been bringing Britain from the decline of socialism to the prosperity of Conservatism.”

The prime minister survived Meyer’s challenge, of course. She secured a seemingly decisive victory with 314 votes to Meyer’s 33. But the result exposed significant discontent within her party. A total of 60 MPs – one in six – failed to support her, either by voting for Meyer, spoiling their ballots (24), or abstaining (3).

Thatcher, however, hailed her victory as “splendid” in a statement outside No 10.

She said: “I would like to say how very pleased I am with this result and how very pleased I am to have had the overwhelming support of my colleagues in the House and the people from the party in the country.

Kenneth Baker, the Conservative chairman, said: “What the Conservative Party has decided today is that they want to be led into the 1990s and the next election by Margaret Thatcher.”

He added: “The leadership question is now settled.”

George Younger, Thatcher’s campaign manager, stated: “It is a marvellous result; 85% of MPs voted for her. It will strengthen her authority for some time to come.”

Norman Tebbitt, the former Conservative chairman, said the result was “very close to an absolute triumph”.

Privately, however, Thatcher’s team was alarmed. 

Younger warned that many MPs had voted for her with “varying degrees of reluctance”. He classified 50 MPs as “reluctant supporters”, who could in time make Thatcher’s position vulnerable.

In a memo, Younger said: “The result is not as good as the figures. Many voted with varying degrees of reluctance for the prime minister. They cannot all be relied upon another time.”

He predicted future danger, noting: “As there are likely to be economic and polls difficulties in a year’s time, another challenge is not improbable.”

He continued: “It is felt that there are personality tensions within cabinet and that these must be resolved if confidence is to be restored. In particular, Geoffrey Howe must be seen and treated as the PM’s right-hand man.”

One of Thatcher’s whips, Tristan Garel-Jones, put it more bluntly when he said: “We are talking about the beginning of the end of the Thatcher era.

He added: “We have to try and ensure that that is managed in a way that enables her to go to the end of her prime ministership with dignity and honour. The most we can achieve is that she wins the next election.

“I think that is possible, but not certain.”

The 1989 campaign therefore shattered any lingering sense of Thatcher’s political invulnerability. Heseltine was reported to be one of the three MPs who abstained. Heath hinted that he had voted for Meyer.

Meyer was pleased with his showing, saying he received “more votes than I expected to get.”

He added: “I think what I have done is think the unthinkable as it were, raise the very question of the leadership at a time when others weren’t willing to discuss it.

Meyer maintained that the contest was “worth it because it’s raised the whole question of whether Mrs Thatcher’s policies and Mrs Thatcher’s style of leadership are the ones which are most likely to win the next election for the Conservative Party and the ones most suited to British needs at this critical junction in the history of Europe.”

In January 1990, Meyer was deselected by his constituency party in Clwyd North West.

In the year that followed Meyer’s challenge, the issues that inspired his candidacy intensified.

On 1 November 1990, Geoffrey Howe – the last remaining member of Thatcher’s 1979 cabinet – stood down as deputy prime minister. He cited fundamental disagreements with Thatcher’s stance on European integration. It came after Thatcher issued her most strident denunciation of European integration to date with her famous “No. No. No.” declaration on 30 October 1990.

Howe’s famous resignation speech spurred Heseltine to launch a formal leadership challenge the following day, 14 November. He won just enough of the vote on the first ballot to force Thatcher’s resignation.

Meyer went on to join the Pro-Euro Conservative Party (1998-2001) and then the Liberal Democrats from 2001.

Meyer died on 24 December 2004, aged 84.

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The Labour MP issued a momentous intervention after her party’s drubbing in the elections this week. On Saturday afternoon, West called on the cabinet to “reorganise themselves” and put forward their “best communicator” to replace Starmer. Speaking to BBC News in the wake of this week’s elections, the Labour MP and former Foreign Office said she was putting senior ministers “on notice”. 

West said: “My preferred option is for the cabinet to do a reshuffle within itself, where there’s plenty of talent, and for Keir to be given a different role, which he might enjoy, perhaps an international role.”

If West succeeds in smoking out a more prominent leadership rival – be they Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting or another figure – it would not be the first time she has played a role in bringing down a prime minister.

An intervention from West during a December 2021 session of prime minister’s questions was later central to the House of Commons privileges committee inquiry into whether Boris Johnson misled parliament over “Partygate”.

On 8 December 2021, West asked the prime minister: “Will the prime minister tell the House whether there was a party in Downing Street on 13 November?”

Johnson responded: “No, but I am sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.”

In January 2022, following the publication of the Sue Gray report into Partygate, West asked whether Johnson had “inadvertently” misled this House in response to her previous question.

The scope of the privileges committee inquiry, which the commons agreed to in April 2022, explicitly referred to Johnson’s answer to West in December 2021. In giving evidence to the privileges committee, Johnson accepted that the House was misled but denied doing so deliberately.

As part of its conclusions, the privileges committee found: “Mr Johnson misled the House when he said on 1 December 2021 that all Guidance was followed completely in No. 10, when he said on 8 December 2021 that the Rules and Guidance were followed at all times”.

The committee ultimately recommended that Johnson be suspended from the House of Commons for 90 days. However, shortly before the publication of the report, Johnson announced his resignation as an MP.

West is the Labour MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet, having first been elected to parliament for the predecessor seat of Hornsey and Wood Green at the 2015 general election.

In the 2024 general election, West won 28,535 votes, representing 58.7% of the vote. The Green Party candidate, Fabio Vollono, received 7,060 votes (14.5%), while the Liberal Democrat candidate, Dawn Barnes, secured 6,099 votes (12.5%). West was duly elected with a majority of 21,475 votes.

West was appointed as a trade envoy to Pakistan in January 2026. Appointed by the trade secretary, envoys are tasked with boosting British exports and attracting foreign investment. An envoy’s duties typically involve leading trade delegations, lobbying host governments on market access issues, and building relationships with overseas businesses.

West is also a member of the House of Commons Treasury select committee (since October 2025) – the committee tasked with scrutinising His Majesty’s Treasury and government policy on taxation and public spending.

West served as parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Indo-Pacific from July 2024 to September 2025. She left this role as part of Starmer’s 2025 shadow ministerial reshuffle. 

Prior to the 2024 general election, which saw Labour returned to power after 14 years in opposition, West served as shadow minister for Asia and the Pacific (2021-2024), shadow minister for Europe and the Americas (2020-2021), shadow minister for sport (2020), and shadow minister for foreign and commonwealth affairs (2015-2017).

West was dismissed from the frontbench in June 2017 for voting against the Labour whip on an amendment supporting UK membership of the European Union single market.

West was a member of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee (2019-2019), the committees on arms export controls (2017-2019), and the international trade committee (2017-2019).

Before entering parliament, West served as a Labour councillor for Tollington ward on Islington London Borough Council from 2002 to 2014. She was leader of the council from 2010 to 2013.

West was one of 22 Labour MPs who nominated Emily Thornberry for the party’s leadership in early 2020. The election was triggered by the resignation of Jeremy Corbyn following the party’s defeat in the 2019 general election, which resulted in Labour’s fewest seats in the House of Commons since 1935.

Thornberry, then the shadow foreign secretary, was one of five candidates to reach the second stage of the contest. However, she was eliminated from the race on 15 February 2020 after failing to secure the required 33 nominations from Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) or three affiliated groups. This left Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey, and Lisa Nandy as the three candidates on the final membership ballot.

West was one of 36 Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the party’s leadership in June 2015. She may have been part of the group of MPs who lent their nominations to ensure Corbyn, a veteran backbencher, reached the threshold of 35 required to appear on the ballot, intending to “broaden the debate.” Following Corbyn’s landslide victory with 59.5% of the vote, several of these MPs expressed regret.

In March 2016, West was labelled as “core group plus” by the Corbyn leadership in a leaked list which categorised Labour MPs by their perceived loyalty. This label suggested the Corbyn leadership viewed West as a reliable supporter.

West supported Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and therefore agreed with the vast majority of her constituents, 75% of whom also voted to Remain. 

In February 2017, West voted against the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill. The legislation empowered the prime minister to notify the Council of the European Union of the UK’s intention to withdraw, formally triggering the process set out in Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. MPs supported the bill by 498 votes to 114 at second reading. In voting against the bill, West defied the party whip – one of 47 Labour MPs to do so. 

West was a signatory to a 2017 statement issued by the Labour Campaign for Free Movement – a group established by Labour members and activists to advocate for the retention and extension of free movement rights following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. At the time, Labour’s official position was that free movement would end at the point of Brexit in March 2019.

During the 2019 general election campaign, West was one of 193 Labour candidates to sign the anti-Brexit “Remain pledge”, drawn up by the campaign group Remain Labour.

The pledge stated: “Labour is committed to a confirmatory referendum, to give you the final say on Brexit. If elected as your Labour MP, I pledge to campaign to Remain in the EU.”

West voted in favour of the Starmer government’s flagship welfare bill at second reading. The vote came after ministers agreed to significant concessions to avoid defeat via a mass rebellion of Labour MPs on 1 July 2025. 

West voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, better known as the assisted dying bill, at second reading (November 2024) and third reading (June 2025). On the third reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in June 2025, West did not record a vote. 

West voted against a government motion calling for the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent system in July 2016. The motion, which was passed by 472 votes to 117, committed the UK to constructing a new fleet of submarines to carry the nation’s nuclear weapons. Labour was split over the issue with 140 of its 230 MPs going against leader Jeremy Corbyn and backing the motion. 

West voted against a government motion to extend UK airstrikes against Isis from Iraq into Syria in December 2015. The motion, which was passed by 397 votes to 223 after a ten-hour debate in the House of Commons, authorised the RAF to conduct strikes against Isis targets in Syria.

Born Catherine Elizabeth West in Mansfield, Victoria, Australia on 14 September 1966, she holds dual British and Australian citizenship.

West grew up in Sydney. She studied modern languages and social work at the University of Sydney.

She moved to the UK in 1998 and gained a master’s degree in Chinese studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

West later worked as a social worker in Australia. She also worked as a caseworker for Labour MP David Lammy.

West is married to Colin Sutherland, co-director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Malaria Centre. They have a daughter and a son.

She is a Quaker and speaks five languages including Mandarin. She developed her Mandarin whilst teaching English as a second language in Nanjing, China.

West is the great-great-niece of actor Italia Conti. 

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The result marks the first time that the Green Party of England and Wales, which has existed in one form or another since 1973, has won a parliamentary by-election.

In fact, the Green vote share (40.7%) was four times larger than their previous best by-election performance (Somerton and Frome in 2023). Less than one year ago in Runcorn and Helsby, the first by-election this parliament (and pre-Polanski), the party polled at 7.0%, placing fourth. 

Historically, parties returned with landslide majorities have proved resilient in the initial by-elections of a new parliament. Not so this government. And the nature of Labour’s recent routings has been remarkable. The result in Gorton and Denton means that the first two by-elections of the parliament have been won by Reform UK and the Greens – parties beyond the established mould of the British party system. There is no obvious precedent for such a pronounced anti-incumbent and anti-establishment turn in the electorate. The mould is breaking. 

In Gorton and Denton, the Greens (40.7%) and Reform candidate Matt Goodwin (28.7%) placed first and second – together accounting for 69.4% of the vote. The last time Labour finished third in a by-election it was defending was in Mitcham and Morden in 1982. 

It should also be noted that the Conservative candidate in Gorton and Denton won just 706 votes (1.9%); this, the party’s worst-ever performance at a parliamentary by-election, has cost Kemi Badenoch’s party its £500 deposit.  

The deeper one delves, the more history appears to have been made.

The contest represents the first by-election in Great Britain since the 1945 Combined Scottish Universities election in which neither of the two best-performing candidates came from the Conservative Party, Labour, or Liberal Democrats (excluding the Rochdale by-election in 2024, which was fought under highly unusual circumstances).

Hannah Spencer, new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, is the first of her party to win a seat in the North of England. Spencer’s election means that, after nearly 100 years of continuous representation, the Gorton area of Manchester will not have a Labour MP. The old constituency of Manchester Gorton was previously one of Labour’s safest seats in the country. 

Spencer overturned the sixth-largest Labour majority to fall at a by-election since the Second World War.

Gorton and Denton, the Green Party’s fifth-ever commons seat, was one of only 70 seats nationwide where Labour won more than 50% of the vote share in 2024. Its 13,413-vote majority made it Labour’s 38th safest seat. The turnout on Thursday stood at 47.5% – just 0.3% below the 47.8% recorded at the general election.

The result is the first time since Rochester and Strood in 2014 (when Ukip and Mark Reckless displaced the Conservatives) that an ideological rival has taken a seat from the governing party in a by-election. That contest followed the more symbolic Clacton by-election in which Douglas Carswell triumphed at his former party’s expense. 

Ukip’s de facto successors, Reform UK and the Brexit Party, posed a considerable if uneven threat to the Conservatives from 2019 to 2024. But it failed to steal any seats from the Tory government during its tenure. After coming close as the Brexit Party in the 2019 Peterborough by-election, Reform did not secure over 10% of the vote again until February 2024 (Wellingborough). 

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Hopefully that is suitable historical context to establish the significance of the Green victory in Gorton and Denton.

The result underlines that the Green threat to Labour and Keir Starmer, the subject of some speculation in recent months, has materialised. The Green Party has announced itself as a clear, present and probably existential threat to its rival on the left.

Sometimes by-elections really matter. Orpington. Hamilton. Eastbourne. Glasgow East. Clacton. North Shropshire. Add Gorton and Denton to that list.

For Labour, the contest is unquestionably a calamity – the worst by-election result in the party’s recent history. Labour finished third with a quarter of the vote in what it insisted was a two-horse race between itself and Reform. In Gorton, the party demonstrated that it could not defeat Reform in a seat it has held for decades with overwhelming majorities. On current trends, the 57% of current Green supporters who say they would hold their nose and vote tactically for Keir Starmer’s party in a fight between Labour and Reform UK will be staying put. 

There is a clear echo of the Caerphilly contest, a Senedd Cymru by-election, which took place in October 2025. In both cases, Labour landed in third place behind Reform and an ascendant progressive party. 

The signal these elections send is that Labour is a poor option for progressives concerned about the forward march of Faragism. This psychological watershed, of course, has similarly significant implications for idealistic progressives who have hitherto feared “wasting” their vote with the Greens. 

The simplest summary of the by-election from Starmer’s perspective is that things are bad and getting worse. The result will compound the turmoil that follows May’s elections, surely shortening the prime minister’s stay of execution. 

It is pertinent that Starmer placed himself at the centre of the by-election campaign with his decision to block Andy Burnham, Labour’s best bet, from standing. The prime minister’s blocking manoeuvre reflected a lack of guile and foresight – a level of political myopia that only the narrowest evaluation of one’s self-interest can produce. Even Spencer, the Green candidate, conceded that Burnham is “very popular here” and that “people really respect him”.

Starmer is discovering, as Rishi Sunak once did, that the arrival of rock bottom merely masks further plumbable depths. Labour’s decline, like the Green Party’s rise, is unreasonably well-advanced.

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If the Gorton and Denton by-election reflects the state of Labour under Starmer, it is equally a testament to the transformation of the Green Party under Zack Polanski’s leadership.

I recognised that the 2025 Green leadership election was a “turning point” for the party. The Greens appeared on the cusp of unlocking their potential as a populist insurgent on Labour’s left flank. That potential is now being fully explored. 

Polanski has learnt from the Faragist right about how to cut through, organise a political narrative and tell stories to a disillusioned public. “Eco-populism”, simply put, has brought a strategic certainty and self-confidence to the Greens. It has also expanded the party’s appeal beyond a handful of target seats. Gorton and Denton is, in many respects, a different kind of seat from the Green Party’s current collection. 

Adam Ramsay (Waveney Valley) and Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire), who stood against Polanski in 2025 on a minimalist ticket, routed longstanding Conservative strongholds at the 2024 general election. Ramsay and Chowns owe their place in parliament to the party’s inroads in rural, Tory-facing seats. Meanwhile, Brighton Pavilion, a historic Green stronghold now held by Siân Berry, and Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) are younger, generally irreligious urban seats – natural hotbeds for progressive politics. In these constituencies, over 80% of voters supported remaining in the European Union (EU) at the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

The Green Party’s electoral strategy pre-2024 also spanned years of grassroots activism and progression at the local government level. Before Ramsay prevailed in Waveney Valley, the Greens secured Mid Suffolk council at the 2023 local elections. The party narrowly missed out on an overall majority on Bristol City Council in the 2024 local elections. The Ramsay-Denyer strategy bore fruit, to the surprise of some commentators, at the 2024 general election. For the Green Party, winning four seats under first past the post represented a serious breakthrough and the possibility of sustained political relevance. 

But this victory in Gorton and Denton would have been unthinkable under the Denyer-Ramsay co-leadership or a hypothetical Ramsay-Chowns ticket.

Gorton and Denton is a mostly urban, ethnically diverse constituency with high levels of economic deprivation. An estimated 50% of voters in Gorton Denton supported leaving the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum. The Greens and Spencer surged from third to first place over a relatively short campaign. In particular, the success of the Green Party in mobilising the constituency’s Muslim population should alarm Labour MPs.

The Greens have broken new ground with the scale, nature and symbolic meaning of their victory in Gorton and Denton. 

Polanski has succeeded, in part, by responding to his party’s obvious political incentives. The GPEW and its sister parties finished second place in 40 constituencies at the 2024 general election; in all but one of these 40 seats, the Greens finished second to Labour. The party effectively exhausted the electoral potential of its “Countryfile conservative” strategy after securing breakthroughs in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire.

Spencer, a former plumber who joined the Greens in 2022 because she was “so angry at the gap between the super-rich and all the rest of us getting bigger”, could prove a real asset to the party and Polanski in parliament. In her victory speech, she celebrated the defeat of “the parties of billionaire donors”. This allusion to the “pure people”-“corrupt elite” binary suggests Polanski has secured a parliamentary bridgehead for his eco-populism. 

Green surges have been snuffed out before, of course: following the 1989 European Parliament elections (when the party won 14% of the vote) and ahead of the 2015 general election. But Polanski’s success in carving out a foothold for the Greens in an increasingly crowded political landscape suggests the party is not going anywhere anytime soon. Polanski will weaponise the Green victory in Gorton and Denton as proof that his party is the progressive force best equipped to thwart Farage.

The Green leader’s strategy has attracted sizeable media interest because it aligns with the moment: he has cast himself as an insurgent challenging establishment arguments. But social media clicks can only get a party leader so far. For insurgent parties, electoral success is the currency of credibility.

Gorton and Denton proves that the Green Party’s recent success is no mere mirage – the surge is real, and it is coming for Keir Starmer.  

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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Declaring that he had to do “what is right for my country”, Sarwar called on the prime minister to resign in a scathing statement.

In a press conference this afternoon, Sarwar proclaimed: “It is not easy and not without pain, but my first priority and first loyalty is to my country… The distraction has to end, and the leadership in Downing Street has to change.”

Sarwar’s sensational intervention marked a massive moment for the politics of the Labour Party and the nation. 

Sarwar has felt the blunt force of the Labour brand’s toxicity in his campaign for the upcoming Scottish Parliament elections. That he has chosen to strike now would suggest that the Scottish Labour leader’s estimation of his party’s chances in May is dismal. The intervention is an effective admission that the Scottish Labour Party cannot win an election with Starmer as prime minister. 

In July 2022, Sajid Javid, the health secretary, was the first senior party figure to call for Boris Johnson to stand down as prime minister. His resignation was followed mere moments later by that of Rishi Sunak, the chancellor. Javid and Sunak sparked an all-consuming torrent of departures, accompanied by letters lambasting Johnson’s character, judgement and conduct. 

In the 24 hours that followed Sunak and Javid’s resignations, 36 MPs stepped down from their roles in government. At the time, Starmer referred to Johnson as a “pathetic spectacle” and mocked those who remained on the frontbench as the “charge of the lightweight brigade”. 

Sunak’s resignation was integral in triggering the ministerial stampede that ultimately trampled Johnson. When the herd moves, the outgoing prime minister observed, it moves.

In this regard, the news that Eluned Morgan, the first minister of Wales, would follow Sarwar in calling for Starmer’s resignation initially seemed significant. Like Sarwar north of the border, Welsh Labour is facing a possible routing on 7 May – courtesy of an insurgent Reform UK. But reports have since clarified that Morgan will not be commenting on Starmer’s future today. 

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And so the spotlight now swings back to Westminster. 

Sarwar’s statement, together with Tim Allan’s resignation this morning and Morgan McSweeney’s resignation on Sunday, strengthens the prevailing impression of a government in freefall.

But in a strictly processual sense, the Scottish Labour leader has no say in Starmer’s future – that is up to the prime minister himself and the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). A leadership contender needs 81 MPs to trigger a contest; meanwhile, Starmer continues to insist that he will not resign. 

Responding to Sarwar’s intervention, a Downing Street spokesperson said: “Keir Starmer is one of only four Labour leaders ever to have won a general election.

“He has a clear five-year mandate from the British people to deliver change, and that is what he will do.”

Even more significantly, Sarwar’s declaration has awoken the cabinet from its collective slumber. Downing Street, notwithstanding recent resignations, has been successful in securing public statements of support from secretaries of state. 

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has insisted that with “Keir as our prime minister, we are turning the country around.”

Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, has called on his colleagues to “get behind the prime minister”. 

Steve Reed, the housing secretary, has said that Labour needs to “stay the course”.

Douglas Alexander, the secretary of state for Scotland, has said he “respects” Sarwar but that Starmer has his support.  

Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, has called for “calm heads and seriousness of purpose”. 

Peter Kyle, the business and trade secretary, has said he backs Starmer as prime minister, adding: “The economy is growing, let’s focus on delivering for the British people.”

In his first tweet in almost a year, Alan Campbell, the leader of the House of Commons, stated: “The only change we need to be talking about is the change we were elected to deliver for the British people.”

And what of possible leadership contenders?

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate secretary, declared that Starmer has “earned the right to deliver the change he has promised and do what he cares about.”

Wes Streeting, the ambitious health secretary, has conceded that it has “not been the best week for the government.” But speaking to Sky News, he added: “Give Keir a chance.”

On top of this, Angela Rayner has issued a statement saying Starmer has her “full support.” The former deputy prime minister said that the worst possible response to the Peter Mandelson affair would be “to play party politics or factional games.”

These expressions of support, from the enthusiastic to the somewhat strained, matter. So far, Sarwar’s intervention has not provided a springboard to collective action at Westminster; no one has been willing to give a lead at Westminster to an anti-Starmer campaign.

The clean sweep of cabinet support is reminiscent of the reaction to previous Labour coup attempts. In June 2009, after James Purnell resigned as work and pensions secretary and called on Gordon Brown to step down, the rest of the cabinet swung to the prime minister’s defence. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and Alan Johnson, the health secretary – Brown’s most likely heirs – rowed in behind the Downing Street incumbent. 

Purnell’s putsch failed.

In January 2010, two former cabinet ministers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, called for a leadership contest to resolve Brown’s future. The Hewitt-Hoon coup was summarily dismissed by a chorus of cabinet ministers. 

There is another possible parallel in recent political history. In January 2022 – some months before Javid and Sunak moved at Westminster – the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Douglas Ross, called for Boris Johnson to resign as prime minister. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the then leader of the House of Commons, responded that he did not think Ross was a “big figure”. 

Less than two months later, Ross was forced to walk back his call for Johnson to resign. 

Then as now, it would seem that the parliamentary party is not ready to depose the sitting prime minister – at least not like this. 

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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On Wednesday, the prime minister instructed Labour MPs to support a government amendment to a humble address tabled by Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party. The official opposition called for the release of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as Britain’s ambassador to the US; Starmer sought to include exemptions for those papers that might prejudice national security and international relations. 

The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) mutinied. 

Having been marched up and down hills for months by a meandering Downing Street operation, Labour MPs looked elsewhere for guidance. It was left to Angela Rayner to locate a politically sustainable solution and dictate terms to the government Whips’ Office. Ministers agreed, under the threat of greater humiliation, to refer the documents to the cross-party intelligence and security committee.

The former deputy prime minister filled the PLP power vacuum on Wednesday. 

The episode exposes just how thin Starmer’s grip on his parliamentary party has become. 

Any prime minister’s fate rests with their parliamentary party. A finer appreciation of this fact might have spared Starmer some of his more spectacular misjudgments – the “noises off” on the backbenches matter. But a prime minister’s dependence on their party is never more apparent than at the end of the road. 

On the steps of Downing Street in July 2022, Boris Johnson memorably described the irresistible synchronisation of regicidal MPs. When the herd moves, the outgoing prime minister observed, it moves. Johnson’s obstinate determination to cling to power was no match for the collective might of Conservative MPs. 

Johnson attributed the “powerful” herd instinct to Westminster as a whole. But there is an argument to say that, when it comes to ejecting and electing leaders, this instinct is a uniquely Conservative asset.

Over 14 years of government, spanning five prime ministers, the Conservative Party’s leadership election rules were treated as an extension of the British constitution. The key distinction between the Tory rules, established in 1998, and those governing any challenge to Starmer lies in the former’s no-confidence procedure.

The Conservative no-confidence ballot is a ruthless, and highly sophisticated, mechanism.

In total, the 1922 committee of Conservative backbenchers has overseen three ‘votes of confidence’: Iain Duncan Smith in 2003, Theresa May in 2018 and Boris Johnson in 2022. Of these votes, only the first has been successful. A total of 90 Conservative MPs voted against Duncan Smith in the standard secret ballot; the outgoing Tory leader could only muster 75 to his defence. 

The 2018 and 2022 ballots technically secured the position of May and Johnson respectively. When a leader survives a confidence vote, they are rewarded with a 12-month clemency period. In practice, both May and Johnson were defenestrated mere months later. (Johnson, at least, was warned that the 1922 executive committee would pass a rule change to force a second confidence vote.)

The power of the no-confidence mechanism is that it creates a leadership vacancy. This means that Conservative MPs, who see the incumbent leader as a liability, do not need to resolve on a common path forward – only that the incumbent should go. The defenestrated leader, to round off the ruthless process, is then barred from standing in the subsequent leadership election. 

The mechanism has its drawbacks, of course. Creating a vacancy without charting a clear course can produce some unforeseen and unfortunate outcomes – including but not limited to sending Liz Truss to Downing Street. But the Conservative no-confidence ballot remains a precise, and mostly orderly, way of translating mass disaffection into a leadership challenge. 

Labour’s system is significantly less precise. 

In the event of a vacancy, as we saw with the mostly smooth competition to replace Angela Rayner as deputy leader, the rules are simple enough. But Labour lacks its own in-house assassination bureau; there is no reliable production line of “men in grey suits” who can coordinate a lethal visitation while an incumbent remains in place.

Critically, there is no procedural means of creating a Labour leadership vacancy. In 2016, a PLP motion expressing no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, tabled by Margaret Hodge, was passed by 171 votes to 40. But there was no obligation for Corbyn to stand down. Instead, both Owen Smith and Angela Eagle declared their leadership candidacies and easily surpassed the 20% threshold (then 50 MPs) to trigger a contest. Corbyn was given a place on the ballot following an 18-14 National Executive Committee (NEC) ruling. And the membership vote restored Corbyn as leader with a refreshed mandate. 

According to the Labour rule book, it remains the case that a vacancy can only be created by a resignation. Pretenders cannot exploit a vacuum; they must wrestle the crown from the king’s head while he remains on the throne. 

Conservative leaders are felled by a politically amorphous, technically anonymous herd of critics. Keir Starmer’s usurper will have a name, a faction and a wider group of allies – all of whom must make themselves known under party rules. Labour MPs cannot cower in smoke-filled rooms or behind secret letters to a senior backbencher. In this regard, the Labour rule book is plain: “Valid nominations shall be published by the party”.

The rule book, however, is sufficiently ambiguous to allow a challenger to choose the sequencing of their insurrection. The rules suggest that a challenger should surreptitiously sign up a fifth of the PLP (81 MPs) to a coup, before providing the proof of their nominations to the general secretary of the Labour Party, Hollie Ridley. But on a reasonable reading of the rules, an MP could declare their intention to run, and then begin canvassing the parliamentary party.

And yet, whatever approach a would-be challenger takes, they will be forced to place their head above the parapet. 

A potential parallel is found in the Conservative Party rules as they existed from 1975 to 1998. Then, as now in the Labour Party, the removal of an incumbent leader required a full frontal assault from a prospective challenger. Margaret Thatcher avoided a challenge under these rules for much of her tenure as Tory leader and prime minister. But she faced two contests successively in 1989 and 1990. 

In 1989, Sir Anthony Meyer stepped forward as a “stalking horse” candidate. Thatcher secured a mostly decisive victory over “Sir Anthony Whats’isname” or the “stalking donkey”, as Meyer was dubbed by some in the press, by 314 votes to 33. On that occasion, a serious challenger to Thatcher, such as the former defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, chose not to stand. Meyer stood to test the party’s confidence in the prime minister. 

One year later in 1990, in the wake of Geoffrey Howe’s searing resignation statement, Heseltine announced his candidacy for the leadership. Under the party’s then leadership rules, a candidate required a majority of 15% of the total Tory selectorate to win outright on the first ballot. Thatcher’s majority was four short of this threshold; she responded by announcing her resignation as prime minister. 

But Heseltine’s candidacy famously established the dictum that knife-wielders do not go on to collect the crown. Both John Major and Douglas Hurd put themselves forward for the second ballot, and the former prevailed. 

Those considering a challenge to Starmer’s leadership will be acutely aware of this precedent. There are countervailing case studies, of course – examples of would-be candidates missing their moment of maximum opportunity to wait for a cleaner opening that never arrived. Michael Portillo installed telephone lines in 1995, but did not challenge Major; David Miliband chose not to lead an insurrection against Gordon Brown. Both pretenders lost subsequent leadership elections. 

Another option for those dissatisfied with Starmer’s leadership would be a symbolic stand, signalling to the prime minister that his time is up. Historically, this is the route the Labour Party has taken when a leader is perceived to be a liability.

An ideal model is supplied by the Blair-Brown leadership transition. On 5 September 2006, 17 Labour MPs issued a letter asking Blair to resign – reports indicated that dozens more were willing to support the call. A coordinated move by Brown’s allies followed, including the resignation of several junior government ministers. Tom Watson, the future Labour deputy leader, was among those to step down. Blair was forced to announce that the party’s upcoming conference would be his last. On 25 September, at the scene of Blair’s final conference, Brown declared his candidacy for the leadership.

Crucially, the relative precision of Blair’s defenestration owed to Brown’s status as his obvious successor (notwithstanding an ill-fated challenge by John McDonnell). 

Recent coups have not been so successful. In June 2009, just minutes after the polls had closed in the European and local elections, James Purnell resigned as work and pensions secretary and called on Gordon Brown to step down as prime minister. Purnell, who insisted that he would not seek Brown’s post were it to become vacant, was joined by backbench MPs Barry ­Sheerman and Graham Allen in calling on Brown to resign. But Miliband, the foreign secretary, and Alan Johnson, the health secretary – Brown’s most likely heirs – rowed in behind the Downing Street incumbent. Purnell’s putsch failed. 

In January 2010, two former cabinet ministers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, called for a leadership contest to resolve Brown’s future. The prime minister dismissed the challenge as a “form of silliness” – and the Parliamentary Labour Party agreed. Interestingly, the Hewitt-Hoon coup called for a secret ballot vote in Brown’s leadership, replicating the Conservative no-confidence procedure. Both Johnson and Miliband (eventually) signalled their support for the prime minister. 

The 2016 Labour leadership election was the ill-fated consequence of a failed coup, triggered by the dismissal of Hilary Benn as shadow foreign secretary for plotting. Benn’s sacking in the early hours of the morning opened the floodgates to a wave of resignations from the shadow frontbench, precipitating the symbolic no-confidence vote in Corbyn’s leadership. The incumbent stayed put. 

At this moment, Starmer is likely more vulnerable than either Brown or Corbyn. In the former case, discontent was more diffuse with a general election nearing; in the latter instance, Starmer does not command the confidence of the grassroots in the way Corbyn did. A symbolic intervention could well be enough to depose Starmer. 

But such a stand would have to be fronted by a politician with sufficient political clout – a party grandee or shadow cabinet minister – to signal decisively that Starmer’s time is up. Moreover, if the prime minister refuses to resign, this strategy would still depend on his prospective successors stepping forward to announce their candidacies. They would need to have full faith that their parliamentary colleagues would go over the top with them.

It is likely, therefore, that in the absence of a resignation, the Labour herd will be forced to get creative in order to drive Starmer from office.

The prime minister is also protected, for the time being, by the absence of an agreed successor. Andy Burnham was only recently barred from marching on Westminster by the Labour National Executive Committee (NEC). In September 2025, Angela Rayner resigned from the government over her tax affairs. Wes Streeting is seen as a plotter by Starmer’s allies and with scepticism from the Labour “soft left”. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader from 2010 to 2015, has previously been rejected by the electorate. Shabana Mahmood, the most Blue Labour-coded of the likely contenders, would surely struggle among the party membership. 

The Conservative herd moved against Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, in part, because the parliamentary party could conceive of a line of succession. (The choice of Conservative MPs to succeed Johnson was, of course, Rishi Sunak, not Truss.)

The bottom line is that Starmer’s position is terminally vulnerable, but protected by a combination of process and political circumstance. 

In July 2022, Johnson referred to his party’s “brilliant Darwinian system”. Labour simply lacks a reliable apparatus for regicide. And so the relative ease with which the Conservatives ditched leaders will not be repeated under Labour. The process will not be precise, and it will almost certainly not be orderly. When Starmer is finally felled, the fallout will be fraught. 

The length of Starmer’s stay of execution lies with the Labour herd. The prime minister is only in a position to endure. In the meantime, the destabilising phoney war and the leadership brinkmanship will continue until a future flashpoint. This could be provided by the Gorton and Denton by-election and/or the elections in May.

If Starmer is to go, then at some point, in some way, someone – be they a leadership contender or disgruntled grandee – will have to step forward.

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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The official narrative was delivered in the form of a lengthy press notice this afternoon. The “statement from the Labour Party” explained that Burnham’s candidacy would have precipitated an “unnecessary” Greater Manchester mayoral election, imposing a “substantial and disproportionate” impact on party campaign resources ahead of the local elections and elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd in May.

The NEC, Starmer-in-council, could not in good conscience have “put Labour’s control of Greater Manchester at any risk.” The statement also cited the need to avoid an unnecessary splurge of “taxpayers’ money and resources” and looked ahead to the Gorton and Denton by-election; the pronouncement promised a “positive campaign”.

There is also the unofficial narrative, which departs markedly from the neutral-sounding language of this statement. 

Loyal Starmerite MPs welcomed Burnham’s exclusion in curiously congruous tones. John Slinger, a staunch and sometimes lonely defender of the prime minister, argued that the decision to bar Burnham would allow Labour to move swiftly on from the “introspection and psychodrama of the last week.” Steve Race, the Labour MP for Exeter, welcomed the decision on the grounds that it would “put the psychodrama to bed.” Both Labour MPs respectively looked forward to the “vital” and “important” elections in May – and the prospect of defeating Reform. 

From the Labour leadership’s perspective, the administrative and political explanations are difficult to reconcile; taken together, they suggest that Starmer wanted a way to block a psychodramatic rival and found a procedural solution.

It is at the intersection of these two narratives, then, that the truth appears. And it is a revealing truth. Under significant political strain, Starmer found solace in the dual comforts of process and the NEC rulebook. 

The landslide 8-1 NEC vote belies a series of cruel realities.

The first problem is the weakness the decision signals. In September 2025, Starmer defused Burnham’s Labour conference challenge with a disciplined, politically thoughtful set-piece speech. The prime minister emerged stronger from his conference battle. But he does not back himself to win a war at Westminster. William Hague, during his ill-fated tenure as Conservative leader, faced a potentially threatening parliamentary comeback of his own. His solution was to appoint Michael Portillo as shadow chancellor. 

The Labour leadership simply does not think the party whip, or possibly collective responsibility, would be enough to suppress Burnham. Instead, Starmer – in a crowning moment of centralised control-freakery – has chosen to keep Labour’s prince across the water in the relative wilderness. Critics will argue that this culture of control is now crowding out assets in the battle against Nigel Farage.

Certainly, Starmer’s allies will struggle to waft away the stench of a selection stitch-up; Lucy Powell – the sole non-Starmer ally on the NEC – provided the lone dissenting vote. 

The most striking aspect of Burnham’s exclusion is its potential to exacerbate existing divisions within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and the cabinet. In recent days, a series of senior Labour politicians have rallied around Burnham; Powell, Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner – the current deputy leader, the former deputy leader, and a former party leader – all signalled their sympathy with the Greater Manchester mayor’s cause.

In a speech to the Labour north west regional conference, Rayner declared: “I know my friend, the mayor, has put his name forward, and I believe the local members should get the choice, no stitch-ups.”

Crucially, the criticism of Starmer’s conduct is not confined to the soft left. Jo White, the convenor of the Red Wall caucus of Labour MPs, had urged the party leadership to let “the North decide who their Labour candidate should be for the Gorton and Denton by-election.”

White added: “A London stitch-up will be a disaster for Labour.”

On top of this, the Blue Labour group has condemned the party’s central bureaucracy for its lack of “clarity and direction”. The faction poured scorn on the use of “administrative and procedural methods” to block Burnham, which they castigated as “a profound mistake”. 

The Labour Party’s factions are mostly speaking with one voice – that should scare Starmer far more than the prospect of a Burnham comeback. And the NEC decree will only reinforce and crystallise this unlikely unity – both now and in the coming months as Labour faces Reform in Gorton and Denton. 

In repulsing his party’s prince across the water, therefore, Starmer could well have opened the factional floodgates.

Equally telling is the quiet of potential future leadership candidates. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, conspicuously refused to come out swinging against Burnham on the Sunday morning media circuit. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, spoke positively about the Greater Manchester mayor in his appearance at the Fabians new year conference yesterday. He condemned the anti-Burnham briefings as “disgraceful” and described the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election as “very critical”.

He added: “We want the best possible candidate for that by-election.”

Compare this line to that taken by Steve Reed, housing secretary and Starmer ally, in the wake of the NEC decision. Reed spoke of the “huge inconvenience to two million voters across Greater Manchester of having a by-election for a new mayor if [Burnham] were to move forward.”

He added: “People voted in Greater Manchester overwhelmingly for Andy Burnham to be their mayor two years ago for a four-year term.”

If Labour loses the Gorton and Denton by-election, the recriminations will be brutal.

Starmer will be squarely in the firing line – the NEC ruling confirms that. Not only would he be blamed for failing to win the seat, but sceptics would argue that he actively undermined Labour’s chances in pursuit of his own survival. That is the political reality that the NEC decision effectively invites.

The timing is fascinating. Starmer has placed a target on his leadership mere weeks before his latest moment of maximum danger, the May elections. 

That is the distinct irony of the NEC decision. Blocking Burnham makes a leadership challenger more, not less, likely. And so Starmer’s professed reasoning, to lance the boil of Labour psychodrama, fails on its own terms. 

Starmer succeeded at Labour conference because he styled Burnham, credibly, as the source of the psychodrama. The NEC decision reverses this dynamic. The Labour leader’s intervention means he owns the political fallout of Burnham’s exclusion and any by-election setback. He is the most prominent author of any chaos that now follows.

There will come a time when Starmer runs out of procedural solutions to his political problems. 

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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Zahawi, whose prominence in the Conservative psychodrama elevated him to ‘big beast’ status, did not stand in the 2024 election. His farewell statement was even tinged with a hint of penance. “My mistakes have been mine”, he declared, “and my successes have come from working with, and leading, amazing people.”

Zahawi’s “mistakes” matter because they are many. He first achieved cabinet-rank status in September 2021. Rewarded for his efforts as vaccines minister, he was appointed to the post of education secretary by Boris Johnson. Zahawi served in this position loyally until his next promotion – which came during the ministerial exodus of July 2022. He filled the hole left in the Treasury by Rishi Sunak’s resignation as chancellor. 

Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition, mocked the protestations of those who accepted high office during the dying days of Johnson’s administration as the “charge of the lightweight brigade”. 

Zahawi soon turned his fire on the prime minister. Within days of his appointment as chancellor, Zahawi helped force Johnson from office. He was among the senior ministerial delegation who welcomed the prime minister back to Downing Street after his swansong liaison committee appearance. In a public statement, Zahawi said the situation was “not sustainable and will only get worse”.

Johnson’s belated acceptance of political reality precipitated the July-September 2022 Conservative leadership contest. Zahawi announced his own candidacy, securing just 25 supporters on the first MP ballot. Subsequently, alongside the bulk of the Johnson-allied elements of the Conservative Party seeking to extend their ministerial careers, Zahawi endorsed Liz Truss. In an article for the Telegraph, Zahawi lavished praise on the foreign secretary “for her leadership, her economic plans, and her ability to deliver”.

Zahawi entered the Cabinet Office as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in September 2022 – before swiftly exiting as the financial fallout from the mini-budget levelled the short-lived Truss ministry. 

Zahawi was deemed to have sufficient political clout to be rewarded with an office in Sunak’s administration. It would be a decision that the new prime minister, Zahawi’s predecessor as chancellor, would immediately come to regret. In fact, the Conservative chairman emerged as the most serious self-imposed challenge to Sunak’s “integrity, professionalism and accountability” maxim. Zahawi had failed to disclose a HMRC probe into his affairs when appointed education secretary in September 2021, and again when appointed chancellor in July 2022. Upon his promotion as chancellor, Zahawi appeared to refer to reports of an HMRC investigation as “smears”.

His dismissal on 29 January 2023 followed an investigation by Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests. Magnus concluded that Zahawi had committed a “serious breach” of the ministerial code regarding his tax affairs.

In the seven months that separated his appointment as chancellor in July 2022 from his sacking as Tory chairman in January 2023, Zahawi showed seriously questionable political judgment. It was a story of crippling climbdowns, evasive-sounding explanations and misplaced loyalties. 

This tale, of course, begs serious questions of the political judgment shown by those strategists who welcomed Zahawi into the Reform tent today. 

The defection, put simply, strengthens the argument that Reform is increasingly functioning as a refuge for Conservative flotsam and jetsam. After the defections of David Jones, Ross Thomson, Marco Longhi, Andrea Jenkyns, Jake Berry, Adam Holloway, Maria Caulfield, Danny Kruger, Lee Anderson, Chris Green, Lia Nici, Jonathan Gullis and Nadine Dorries, Labour is unlikely to abandon this line of attack. Zahawi’s defection also points to a pattern evident across recent defections. The former chancellor is the latest long-standing Johnson ally with an axe to grind to find refuge in Faragism. 

What is most revealing about today’s theatre, however, is how the defection reflects back on Farage. 

The Reform UK leader has settled on a political strategy that involves attracting ex-Tories; to this end, the party has even set up a dedicated turncoat department. There are a few explanations for this approach; firstly, by attracting those with parliamentary and administrative experience, Reform wants to reinforce its claim as a prospective party of government. There is also a storytelling element; by literally draining the Conservative Party’s talent base, Farage can paint his opponents on the right as politically moribund. 

This is how Farage conceives of the political landscape and news agenda. There are those with momentum, and those without it. 

His weekly press conferences are planned to create the impression of a Reform insurgency. They are a staple of the Faragist playbook – simple theatre to steer the eyes of Westminster onto his political operation. The fight on the right has tightened in recent months; Reform’s populist recipe of weekly press conferences, bolstered by a steady drumbeat of defections, is designed to inspire the impression of Faragist strength. 

But there is an inherent peril in Farage’s trusted political model.

After all, Reform’s defected elements may not always be the best advertisement for administrative competence. It is a testament to the Reform leader’s powers of presentation that figures who might otherwise be dismissed as political has-beens are now styled as harbingers of the future. 

One wonders too whether the preponderance of ex-Tories in Reform’s ranks will become a source of internal tension. From a Reform perspective, Farage’s strategy is not beyond reproach; there will no doubt be different levels of enthusiasm about embracing former Conservatives across the party. Indeed, what does Farage’s reliance on defections say about his ability to cultivate political talent? 

What does it say about the Reform leader’s estimation of his current bench of talent?

The key question regarding Farage’s defection strategy is whether it obscures more than it reveals about the position of Reform in the political landscape. Farage loves the theatre associated with the literal unveiling of a Tory ‘big beast’ such as Zahawi. Theatre is a necessary part of politics – especially of the populist variety. But it is no substitute for true professionalisation – the construction of an institutional apparatus and political operation that can compete with Labour and the Conservatives long into the future. 

It is undoubtedly a curiosity that Farage’s strategy for destroying the Tories involves accepting their stragglers. Whatever the case, Farage’s current band of defectors suggests he has not been overly selective in discriminating between possible political assets and potential liabilities. 

Storytelling has long been Farage’s preferred medium of political communication. He has proved uniquely effective in this regard. But the challenge for Reform in 2026 will be to step beyond the burden imposed by its brand of populist politics, which demands sometimes vacuous contributions to the national conversation or its own political development. 

Defections are not a strategy for inspiring a sense of political seriousness. Farage will not be able to defect the Tories into submission. At this juncture, the risk for Farage is that his gets expose a lack of substance – rather than demonstrate strength.  

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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For this, Kemi Badenoch likely has the Greater Manchester mayor to thank. Burnham landed in Liverpool last week with a transparent agenda to destabilise the Labour leadership; every fringe event marked another symbolic incursion on the Starmer premiership. The prime minister broke the siege with a well-received keynote speech that targeted Reform UK and featured some precise swipes at Burnham’s pretensions.

Jenrick, a strategic mind, chose not to risk comparisons with the Greater Manchester mayor’s botched putsch.

Burnham and Jenrick perform corresponding roles in the internal dramas of their parties. Both are possessed by a palpable ambition, and aren’t afraid to flaunt it; wear the scars of a leadership campaign (two in Burnham’s case); have been on ideological journeys, cementing their popularity among party activists (several in Burnham’s case); once sat around the cabinet table; and articulate analyses of their party’s position that resonate with the activist soul. 

Jenrick and Burnham represent parallel phenomena: independent but dynamically aligned. The Conservative pretender showed uncharacteristic restraint this conference season – having witnessed his Labour counterpart flaunt his way into obscurity. The result is the same: Starmer and Badenoch both saw their authority enhanced at the expense of their rival claimants. 

It’s been a poor conference season, then, for those who would be king. 

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The art of pretending is in its timing. Leadership aspirants face a lethal paradox. Hesitate, and you risk missing an opportunity to sack the throne. But forcing the question can prove politically fatal. You risk exposing your designs. 

The conspirator must maintain a fine balance. Constructive ambiguity sustains the mythology of a saviour-in-waiting. Theirs is a state of permanent preparation. 

Burnham and Jenrick’s challenge extends beyond convincing activists they’d be an improvement on the incumbent leader. (Polling suggests they have already succeeded in that regard.) They must persuade the party’s kingmakers that the realisation of their tantalising potential is worth the trauma of regicide. 

The shrewdest pretenders manoeuvre and cajole their party into taking a path it would refuse were the destination – regicide – ever spelt out explicitly. They engineer the circumstances whereby their elevation is not condemned as a treacherous plot, but received as a welcome inevitability. That is how a pretender defies the famous maxim, bloodying the knife and claiming the crown. 

Andy Burnham, suffice it to say, did not display the requisite subtlety in his conference contributions. Whatever his intent, his public posturing belied his strained protestations of innocence. Ambition was read into his every action, but still, he persisted in delivering his damning appraisal. 

The ‘King of the North’ arrived at the scene of his first conference intervention shadowed by a royal court comprising photographers, a security detail and his political counsel. In an address ostensibly about electoral reform, Burnham took aim at what he termed a “climate of fear” within the party. He never directly walked back his comments, but the days that followed were marked by a broader strategic retreat.

Having recommitted himself to the Greater Manchester mayoralty and backed Starmer to remain prime minister, Burnham cut an isolated figure in his conference exit. The King of the North departed just minutes before the PM’s keynote speech, flanked by two anonymous aides. 

The narrative arc of his conference was encapsulated by these contrasting images: his regal entrance, with the eyes of conference upon him, and his humble, defeated departure. 

In politics, it is so easy to learn the wrong lessons from teachable moments. Jenrick would have taken note of Burnham’s spectacular overreach, and it surely informed his obsequious manner at Conservative conference. 

Jenrick either overplayed his hand in the preceding months, or underplayed it in Manchester. Whatever the case, the lack of continuity was immediately conspicuous. “There was a leadership election and the party made its choice”, Jenrick told one fringe event. “Kemi is our leader. I am in her shadow cabinet. I would not have chosen to serve in the shadow cabinet if I didn’t believe in Kemi, if I didn’t want her to succeed, if I were not rooting for her and trying to support her in every way that I can.”

The stance presented a clear path for Badenoch to outperform expectations with her conference address. Indeed, Jenrick’s own podium contribution was seriously underpowered – echoing his sermon at the Conservative Party’s 2024 fête. (The shadow justice secretary’s rise has been powered by a canny social media strategy; it’s noteworthy that he has not risen to the set-piece opportunities afforded to him).

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Conference season provided a genuine pivot in the political narrative: Burnham and Jenrick’s leadership tilts are – temporarily at least – on hold. Starmer and Badenoch have secured a welcome period of silence, albeit only partially of their own accord. 

Both return to Westminster next week sporting something of a post-conference glow. Starmer hinted suggestively at a symbolic purpose for his government. Badenoch proved her party still has a pulse. These are considered wins for parties polling a collective 37%.

The PM and LOTO have been afforded space to define their own agendas, free from damaging questions about their fragile authority. The same could not be said heading into conference season. Starmer can continue to tell his story. Badenoch will begin to draw the dividing lines implied by her policy blitz. 

Yet the political solace is in its own way deceptive. Burnham’s insurgency was a convenient smokescreen; it allowed the Labour leadership to style its critics as irredeemably disloyal. It distracted from the more subtle but no less instructive manoeuvring of Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting. And Burnham’s challenge obscured the party contest that is actually playing out within Labour.

Lucy Powell’s likely election as deputy Labour leader will not, as her rival apparently expects, plunge the party into a fresh civil war. (Bridget Phillipson’s contention that Powell has no “clout” and would single-handedly foster division is contradictory, of course.) But the deputy leadership result, Powell’s all-but-inevitable elevation, will be interpreted as a rebuke. And Starmer’s prospective deputy has said she would use her perch to act as “bridge” between the Labour leadership and party activists – thinly veiled code for championing a leftward tilt.

The stage is set for future flashpoints. Starmer’s focus will now turn to internal discontent ahead of the autumn budget and the fraught path to digital ID – before pivoting to the local elections in May. 

The local elections will beg ever more existential questions of the Conservative Party’s standing in this radically reformed political landscape. Badenoch succeeded in securing a temporary reprieve at conference, no more: a stay of execution snatched from the jaws of regicide. Any ephemeral narrative of resurgence will not survive contact with the local elections in May.

The post-conference glow is something of a smokescreen, therefore. For both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, the uncomfortable truth is that their moments of maximum danger are still to come.

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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Even then, Kemi Badenoch’s party was reduced to a rhetorical device, rather than treated as a meaningful political threat. The Conservatives did not stand up to “grievance politics” in their 14 years in government, Starmer observed. He would. With that, the prime minister delivered his peroration and returned to more pressing matters: the rise of Reform UK. 

Yet the speech’s cursory consideration of the Conservative Party was, in effect, its logical foundation. The rump Tory party, exhausted and misled, was dismissed as obsolete. Labour would focus its energy on the forces that devoured it.

Starmer’s conference address was an analysis of the political landscape, its recent redevelopment, its faultlines – and a statement of where Labour under his leadership would stand within it.

Nigel Farage was the speech’s antagonist. And Starmer portrayed his role in Britain’s political drama with unprecedented clarity. The Reform UK leader was characterised as a harbinger of division and decline; derided as a politician who neither understands his country, nor much likes it; and cast as an arch-opportunist, who cynically exploits grievance for his own career ends. 

The prime minister called out the “self-appointed champions of working people” and spoke of “a fight for the soul of our country”.

He declared: “If you say or imply that people who have lived here for generations can’t be English because of the colour of their skin, people who made their lives here… we will fight you with everything we have because you are an enemy of national renewal.”

Starmer positioned Labour as both Reform’s antithesis and antidote. He defined the nature of the populist threat, and presented a theory to explain its moral failings. 

In other words: Starmer told a story.

“That was me”, the prime minister is said to have confided to friends moments after delivering his speech. Therein lay the political power of the address: its simplicity, its unapologetic authenticity. 

With his speech, Starmer intervened in the long-running debate over what he actually stands for. The prime minister had once been reticent to rectify this ambiguity. Perhaps his strategists reasoned that storytelling was not his strong suit, or that politics had somehow evolved beyond the need for narrative. Whatever the calculation, events have shown it to be wrongheaded. 

The prime minister’s previous attempts to address his lack of political substance only muddied matters. Starmer took to the conference stage on Monday with his programme still couched in managerial nomenclature: his collection of “pledges”, “missions”, “first steps”, “milestones”, “foundations” and “phases”. 

Some of these formulations had already been reneged upon. But others were left languishing in a liminal state of simultaneous existence and non-existence: neither explicitly committed to, nor formally forsaken. From 2023 to 2025, the more the prime minister tried to distill his political offer, the less accessible it became. Somewhere in this managerial milieu, of course, resided the government’s “plan for change”.

Starmer’s conference speech entirely avoided such constructions.

From the outset, Starmer levelled with the electorate by foregrounding a clear narrative. Speaking plainly matters in politics. 10 pledges, six milestones, six first steps, five missions, three foundations and two phases are no substitute for singular purpose. There was a finality to the conference address, therefore. The chronic carving up of Starmer’s politics into categories was never exactly compelling; it lacked genuine commitment. There was no indication of political definition, direction or denouement. Starmer’s address was different.

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The final phase

The prime minister’s lack of political definition infused his government. Policy announcements seemed random, bereft of any overarching programme.

More pertinently, political stories matter – especially in a fractured and highly competitive political landscape – because they dictate the battles a party picks. Managed conflicts are a means by which parties project their values to voters. Without a narrative, parties are drawn onto the territory of their opponents and forced, in effect, to triangulate to survive. Instinctively sympathetic voters are left isolated. 

Political stories are also significant in setting the boundaries of a leader’s authority. A narrative provides the connective tissue that holds a government’s priorities, policies and personnel together. It invites frontbenchers and backbenchers alike to identify with a common mission. Without one, orders emerging from the centre appear disjointed and incoherent. MPs who want to be heard are left to freelance. With a story, loyal MPs are incentivised to work towards their party’s leadership on its terms.

Approved narratives, equally, serve as an instruction to the leader’s inner circle. Consider Starmer’s “islands of strangers” debacle: the prime minister’s decision to row on the speech suggests his own speechwriters – apparatchiks employed as experts in their subject’s mind and voice – did not understand his politics. The conference speech, which narrated the nature of Starmer’s challenge to Reform, will stand as a guide for his No 10 coterie. 

And without a narrative, otherwise manageable crises – like the loss of Downing Street personnel – appear somehow existential. A government that exists, ostensibly, to ensure the favourability of the daily news cycle will find itself disproportionately distressed by relative dips. The lack of a narrative has informed the brittle quality of Starmer’s premiership. 

Indeed, when the going gets tough, a political North Star can serve as a guide – setting the terms of strategic retreats and/or pointing a government to safer territory. 

For the first time in months then, Starmer’s speech has given his premiership a sense of forward momentum. The address has created a permission structure for his cabinet outriders to take on their opponents with evermore uncompromising rhetoric. Consider Ed Miliband’s comprehensive castigation of Elon Musk in these terms. One already senses the shift from cautious managerialism. A much-needed edge has been added to the government’s communication. 

The response of Reform, reactive and not a little tetchy, should harden Starmer’s strategic resolve. Farage’s hastily arranged presser suggested he had been thrown off balance by the conference address – as did the substance of his response. His fightback incorporated strained suggestions that the Labour leader had set out to incite violence against Reform. As Zia Yusuf, the former Reform chair, put it on Tuesday: “The prime minister knows precisely what he’s doing. 

“He knows he cannot beat Nigel at the ballot box, we’ve seen the most extraordinary campaign over 48 hours to demonise Nigel, and he is absolutely inciting violence against him.”

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The anti-Farage front

There are unavoidable risks with Starmer’s strategy, that said. The approach speaks simultaneously to progressives, to traditional conservatives and to the Reform-curious so-called “hero” voters Labour secured in 2024 – all with a view to constructing an anti-Farage popular front. It seeks to persuade those who are implacably opposed to Reform’s politics that Labour is the only vehicle that can thwart Farage. At the same time, it engages in an argument among the Reform-curious about the moral damage the party would wreak were it given the chance – an attempt to effectively delegitimise and re-stigmatise the party. 

The “moral line” strategy is a deliberately unsubtle solution, therefore, to a rapidly fragmenting electoral landscape. The apparent aim is to appeal to enough of its target audience (the anti-Reformers and the Reform-curious) to build the kind of broad-but-shallow electoral coalition Starmer constructed in 2024.

The questions as to whether this strategy can work are manifold, and multiplying. How will voters respond to the prime minister’s transition from details-focused arch-pragmatist to a lectern-thumping preacher-politician? Can Starmer authentically style himself as the leader of a British popular front – à la Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 2022? Will progressives really rally to Labour’s cause when arguably better ideological fits, in the form of Zack Polanski’s Greens or the Corbyn-Sultana project, exist? 

In any case, is this the best Labour can do in government: emerge as a repository for reluctant anti-Reform votes? And what if Starmer succeeds in talking up the threat of Reform, inspiring further coverage and diminishing any Conservative comeback, but fails to take them down?

Will stigmatising Farage catch his voters in the crossfire? Can Starmer differentiate his target audience, the Reform-curious electorate, from the Reform leadership? Farage will try his utmost to sow confusion; he excels in twisting the meaning of such stances to suit his standing. 

The fight Farage strategy, as we have addressed, leaves room for impassioned improvisation. That is the instruction Starmer handed down in Liverpool. And yet, David Lammy’s intervention just hours after the PM delivered his speech was a conspicuous blip in an otherwise roundly successful afternoon. The deputy prime minister was forced into a hasty about-face after he claimed Farage had “flirted with Hitler Youth”. Labour must remain relentlessly aware of the traps and unforced errors that Farage so excels at exploiting.

But the riskiest element of Starmer’s pitch is his message to those who declaim Britain as “broken”. The PM, despite his previous declarations to the contrary, says he does not “accept” this characterisation. This position risks coming across as insecure, insincere, and – Reform will posit – out of touch.

Farage’s success in recent months has been to associate Starmer and the Labour government with a status quo that voters roundly regard as having failed. The prime minister now risks playing into this conception by defending what he used to demean as “broken”. Starmer’s story about Britain’s moral character, and threats to it, should not relegate concerns about its material condition. 

Such is the narrative conflict that will define our politics, quite possibly, until the next general election. Starmer’s frame, that of division vs renewal, is now in direct competition with that advanced by Farage: that of insurgent outsider vs the broken status quo. 

The prime minister has begun the process of piecing together his premiership, fractured as it has been by infighting, incoherence and policy reversals. And yet danger still awaits: a pivotal budget and perilous May elections could rupture this nascent sense of momentum. Farage will not let up.

In his conference speech, Starmer appeared to find his calling. His ability to answer it now looks set to determine his political fate. 

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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The Lord Mandelson scandal represents the latest eruption of ill-feeling within Labour. The political repercussions are profound, and multiplying.

Starmer signalled his staunch support for Mandelson at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, only to summarily sack him less than 24 hours later. The PM’s position, articulated in response to Kemi Badenoch, was uncompromising and uncomplicated: he retained confidence in the US ambassador, insisted due process was followed in his appointment, and maintained Mandelson was playing an “important” role in the US-UK relationship. 

Starmer repeated the phrase “full due process” a full three times across the session. Badenoch had the PM on the run. “I see that she is finally catching up with the questions that she should have asked last week about the deputy prime minister”, Starmer quipped at one point, trying to shift the spotlight from this week’s fiasco to last week’s. The comeback was met with well-deserved derision.

At this stage of course, Mandelson had already made his final public appearance as US ambassador.

In a pre-planned interview with The Sun, broadcast 8:10 am UK time on Wednesday, Mandelson described Jeffrey Epstein as an “albatross around his neck”. The confessional came shortly after a US congressional committee released Epstein’s “birthday book”. It featured Mandelson sitting with the financier wearing a bathrobe, a note describing him as his “best pal”, and a reference to meeting Epstein’s “‘interesting’ friends”.

Forebodingly, Mandelson volunteered a pre-emptive mea culpa. The ambassador warned that further “traffic, correspondence, exchanges” between himself and Epstein would be released. Mandelson had already seen the “very embarrassing” communications that would cost him his job. 

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The Mandelson debacle and other unforced errors

At 3:36 pm on Monday, Bloomberg News sent a 2,000-word email to Mandelson detailing further disclosures, appearing to reveal he maintained a close and supportive friendship with Epstein after the paedophile’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a child for prostitution. In these missives, Mandelson variously reassured Epstein that “your friends love you”, suggested his first conviction was wrongful, and urged him to seek early release from prison.

As for what comes next, a great deal hinges on what Starmer and Downing Street knew, if anything, about this correspondence before it was made public on Wednesday evening — and before he delivered an unequivocal defence of Mandelson at PMQs. The No 10 line is that Starmer’s confidence in Mandelson — expressed so absolutely at the despatch box on Wednesday afternoon — evaporated upon contact with Bloomberg’s tranche of emails.

This saga is bigger, of course, than the events of recent days. It was more than two years ago that the Financial Times first reported that Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse while the latter was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Asked about the report in February of this year, Mandelson told the FT: “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession, and frankly you can all f*** off. OK?”

Starmer, speaking in January 2024, was hardly more forthcoming. Questioned on the report, he responded: “I don’t know any more than you, and there’s not really much I can add to what is already out there, I’m afraid”.

The prime minister then went on to appoint Mandelson as US ambassador, despite the manifest reputational risks — despite the political baggage of two ignominious exits from government during Tony Blair’s tenure in Downing Street. The fact is that Mandelson’s appointment was an immense gamble; the decision has backfired, with spectacular and damaging consequences. Whatever gains the ex-ambassador exacted in charming the Oval Office incumbent and his MAGA coterie are dwarfed by the political tumult his deposition has wreaked. 

But place the details of “what Starmer knew and when”, which opposition parties are clamouring to get to the bottom of, to one side. The PM’s deference to “due process” and reliance on dry procedural answers at PMQs were untenable from the outset. Starmer, once again, did not spot the obvious danger. Not for the first time, the politics of the moment looked to have passed him by. 

That is what is so profoundly destructive about the management of the Mandelson debacle: for Labour MPs, it is all too familiar. 

The Mandelson scandal (the first saga since July 2024 truly worthy of that term), the winter fuel fiasco, the hashed welfare reforms, and the unseemly U-turn on a national grooming gangs inquiry have little in common substantively. But a pattern emerges from No 10’s management: the adoption of an unsustainable position, the strained defence of it, the unequivocal denunciations of alternative approaches, the stubbornness — then the slow acquiescence to political pressure in the moments leading up to a brittle about-face.

The PLP’s reaction to the Mandelson scandal is therefore entirely predictable.

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Labour fractures deepen, and widen

The names of Starmer’s most strident critics will not shock No 10, but it is worth ruminating on the tenor of their criticism. John McDonnell, the independent MP and former shadow chancellor, had this to say of Morgan McSweeney’s widely reported role in appointing Mandelson: “A choice is emerging for Keir. Either McSweeney goes or he does.”

Clive Lewis, the onetime leadership contender who remains a Labour MP, was less equivocal. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster programme, he said of Starmer: “You see a Labour prime minister who feels that he’s lost control within the first year…

“It terrifies my constituents, and it terrifies a lot of people in this country. We don’t have the luxury of carrying on this way with someone who I think, increasingly, I’m sorry to say, just doesn’t seem up to the job.”

Paula Barker, who was until Thursday a candidate for Labour’s deputy leadership, described Mandelson’s appointment as an “absolute betrayal”. 

She told BBC Radio 5 Live: “It smacks of putting party before the country, which is something that we said we wouldn’t do… My colleagues, who represent their constituents every single day, diligently, and stood up against welfare cuts, some of those were suspended for doing the right thing, for standing up for their constituents, and yet we have a man like Mandelson who is just basically allowed to get away with this. 

“I just think it’s absolutely disgusting, quite frankly.”

Barry Gardiner, another erstwhile frontbench colleague of Starmer’s — but by no means an ally — told BBC Newsnight that Labour MPs are “frustrated” and “angry”.

“I think it’s the culmination of a number of factors. It’s not just this but there’s been a series of what people regard as political slip-ups”, he said. “I found it very difficult to have a meeting with the prime minister when I asked for one a few months ago. It took six weeks to do that. 

“Now, I remember the days when I asked to see Tony [Blair] and it was, oh, fine, yeah, sure, Barry, why don’t you come in after PMQs on Wednesday? And if it wasn’t that, it would be, oh, it’s busy at the moment, can it hold off a week, you know.”

But one cannot characterise recent criticism as confined to No 10’s “the usual suspects”. Protests are beginning to permeate hitherto unexplored corners of the PLP. 

Justin Madders, who served as employment rights minister until last week, referred to Mandelson’s removal as the “Best sacking of the week by some distance”.

Charlotte Nichols, Labour MP for Warrington, maintained Mandelson “should never have been appointed in the first place”.

Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull East, told Sky News: “I am worried that we are in danger of losing the entire Labour movement unless we change stance, fast.”

Sadik Al-Hassan, first elected in 2024, stated: “There are some serious questions about the vetting process of the ambassador and whoever conducted those should be sacked immediately.”

Chris Curtis, generally regarded as a Starmer loyalist, noted that there are “definitely frustrations” among backbench MPs — “and that includes myself”. 

He told Newsnight: “We also know that the threat if we don’t get this right is massive, because unless we can turn these things around, what we’re looking at is a Nigel Farage-run government… It’s a duty on this government to ensure we stop that from happening.”

Curtis is a member of the Labour Growth Group (LGG) and the Living Standards Coalition of Labour MPs — prominent, nominally pro-government caucuses. Curtis represents a genre of Labour MP that No 10 cannot afford to lose.

Meanwhile, Labour grandees Lord Glasman, Blue Labour doyen, and Baroness Harman, the former deputy leader, have both been outspoken this week in criticising Mandelson’s initial appointment.

Frustration is being forced into the open by a collective recognition of two interconnected observations: the series of avoidable crises overseen by No 10, and the electoral threat posed by the rise of Reform UK. 

The result is this: the fractures opened by past policy debacles have both deepened, with regular critics radicalising in their opposition, and widened, as loyal figures now openly acknowledge their frustration.

The launch of a new internal campaign group, Mainstream, now threatens to become a lasting thorn in Starmer’s side. Backed by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and a cohort of Labour MPs, the group wasted no time this week in issuing a blistering response to Mandelson’s dismissal.

“Peter Mandelson’s inevitable sacking is what happens when you put your party faction’s interest before your party and before the country”, Luke Hurst, Mainstream’s national coordinator, stated. 

“If Starmer keeps running a narrow and brittle political project, it will break him and could break the Labour Party. We need a government and party of all the talents and all the views.”

In a social media post, the organisation added: “Keir Starmer has constantly put factionalism ahead of the Labour Party and ahead of the country.”

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A contest becomes a reckoning

These internal ructions played out in a week that saw the Labour deputy leadership contest enter its next stage. Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and Lucy Powell, the recently removed leader of the commons, both vaulted the race’s first and highest hurdle: 80 MP nominations. 

Having topped the ballot, Phillipson enters the next round advantaged by her strong standing among parliamentarians, but politically encumbered by her role as a serving minister. In any case, Phillipson’s 175-MP total — a figure just north of the frontbench “payroll vote” of around 170 MPs — hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement of either her or the government she represents.

The peril the deputy leadership contest poses to Downing Street remains: the campaign threatens to turn into a running verdict on the government’s performance, culminating in a de facto approve-disapprove referendum on Keir Starmer. But Mandelson’s sacking has intensified this danger. This latest avoidable crisis has made a seismic rebuke evermore likely. 

The tenor of the coming contest will be shaped, principally, by how Powell chooses to conduct her campaign. Already she has called for a “change of culture” inside No 10 — echoing a common criticism levelled at Starmer’s political operation. Powell contends that No 10’s self-imposed isolation, its disconnection, only reinforces its dysfunction. After the welfare and winter fuel fiascos triggered a torrent of briefings to this effect, No 10’s conduct in recent weeks will not have convinced Labour MPs that the necessary lessons have been learnt. 

Powell’s sacking and the wider reshuffle lend credence to her platform. She reportedly asked Starmer to explain his decision three times — without reply. Meanwhile, junior ministers were not informed of their fates by the prime minister; that task fell instead to Darren Jones and Jonathan Reynolds, the new chief secretary to the PM and chief whip respectively.

At this point, Downing Street knew a deputy leadership contest was imminent. This treatment of colleagues, therefore, looks like yet another serious misstep; a conspicuous overlap has since emerged between those who were sacked in the reshuffle and supporters of Powell’s candidacy.

Speaking to the Guardian in the wake of Mandelson’s departure, Powell described a sequence of “unforced errors” by the government and pitched herself as part of the solution: as deputy leader, she would serve as a “shop steward”, making the government appear less factional and closed-off.

She declared: “We’ve got a bit of a groupthink happening at the top, that culture of not being receptive to interrogation, not being receptive to differing views. But it’s a show of strength, a show of being effective, when you are receptive to interrogation and accountability and differing views, and then you come to better decisions.”

That is Powell’s opening pitch to Labour activists; she has embraced her role as the “send a message to Starmer” candidate. Unburdened by collective responsibility, Powell now has carte blanche to contort her campaign into a ready-made receptacle for activist dissatisfaction. 

An intriguing known unknown concerns the prominence of Burnham, Starmer-critical mayor and close friend to Powell. There is also an outstanding question as to Mainstream’s role during the campaign. Tellingly, none of its MP supporters have declared their support for Phillipson — do not expect that to change as the campaign unfolds.

At this juncture, the deputy leadership election could still resolve into a contest between Burnham-backed candidate (Powell) and government spokesperson candidate (Phillipson). In fact, one immediate effect of the Mandelson scandal is that the prospect of such a battle is higher. Prepare then for the possibility of a feverish proxy war, not just for the future of the party, but specifically between supporters of Burnham and Starmer: a kind of advisory, non-binding confidence vote.

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‘Change’

The central weakness of the Starmer project has always been its narrowness politically. Its grounding in the Labour Party is shallow. The brittleness of the government is explicable in these terms; the PM’s assured-sounding proclamations are belied by a lack of outspoken pro-Starmer outriders. 

The reshuffle marked a variation on a fundamentally familiar theme: a strident, single-minded set of moves designed to elevate McSweeney-ally Shabana Mahmood into the Home Office. But its ruthlessness has corroded relations down the Labour Party food chain. It is little wonder, given the account of the reshuffle relayed above, that its victims and collateral damage feel aggrieved.

The result is a familiar, even tragic irony. The very strengths of Starmer’s operation in opposition — its unyielding control, suppression of dissent, and strategic single-mindedness — have emerged as glaring weaknesses in government. There is precedent for prime ministers being undone by the traits that propelled them into power. Margaret Thatcher’s all-consuming conviction became her fatal inflexibility; Tony Blair’s flair for performance curdled into accusations of untrustworthy spin; David Cameron’s self-assured risk-taking culminated in a calamitous gamble; and Boris Johnson’s populist boosterism proved incompatible with the basic rules of office.

A new playbook is required. Starmer is not a career politician — a fact he is apparently proud of. But that does not absolve him of the responsibilities and intricacies of politics. A finer engagement is needed with the problems that beset his premiership. Political antennae are not about to sprout from the prime minister’s temples. But the time for deeper strategic thinking is overdue; reasonable-sounding tactics, like appointing a talented but flawed spinner to charm the US commander-in-chief, will not sustain this government. 

Starmer, who condensed his 2024 general election campaign into the single, compelling promise of “change”, must prove he can too.

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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A new “chief secretary to the prime minister” post was created; Darren Jones, rated in Downing Street, was poached from the Treasury to fill it. The changes were said to symbolise a new dawn for the government: Starmer heralded the arrival of “phase two”, which his team would embrace “in good spirits… and with conviction”. 

Starmer’s “summer is definitely over” line sounded like a plea as much as a promise — recent weeks had been dominated politically by Reform UK and Nigel Farage. Reform’s relentless summer activism, of course, followed the travails of spring. The No 10 shake-up was designed to remedy the organisational failings that delivered the winter fuel and welfare debacles. A line was being drawn. Delivery, and a “just f*cking do it” attitude, would now infuse the government. 

The reshuffle was about re-establishing control, therefore: of policy (particularly that handed down from the Treasury) and of the political narrative.

The loss of Angela Rayner is deeply damaging for manifold reasons. But its immediate political potency derives from how the episode jars, and will continue to jar, with the message Starmer sought to send this week. 

On Wednesday, Rayner referred herself to the prime minister’s ethics adviser after she admitted underpaying stamp duty on her £800,000 flat. On Friday, Rayner’s fate was sealed with Sir Laurie’s letter. She behaved with “integrity” and a “commitment to public service”. But the ministerial code had been breached.

Rayner left three jobs in her wake: deputy prime minister, deputy Labour leader and housing, communities and local government secretary. Starmer, not wanting to let this worthy crisis go to waste, whipped out the Downing Street whiteboard and set about filling them. The finality of a reshuffle, the purest manifestation of a PM’s patronage powers, means a ministerial resignation can be seized upon as an opportunity. Changes planned for the autumn were expedited by events. 

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The appointment of Shabana Mahmood as home secretary was a statement of intent. In fact, the reshuffle seemed almost entirely geared to enable Mahmood’s elevation. Making way was Yvette Cooper, who found herself shunted into the Foreign Office. David Lammy was duly appeased with the deputy prime ministership.

The similarities to previous reshuffles are instructive. Lammy follows in the footsteps of one Dominic Raab, the first senior minister to have his fall from the Foreign Office cushioned with the deputy PM post. Cooper’s switch to the Foreign Office mirrors James Cleverly’s move in the opposite direction in November 2023 under Rishi Sunak as PM. Cooper and Cleverly, it is implied, would not have accepted anything less. Nor were Sunak and Starmer strong enough politically to offer it. 

Elsewhere, Douglas Alexander’s was an appointment waiting to happen. Pat McFadden’s move to the Department for Work and Pensions mirrored Mahmood’s: well-regarded ministers taking on problematic briefs deemed crucial to the government’s success. 

Meanwhile, the ministerial moves massaged Nigel Farage and Reform party conference out of the news cycle (for now). Given the circumstances, it was a well-managed, balanced reshuffle. There was little bloodshed in the end, but the changes represented a coherent restatement of the government’s priorities. There was meaning behind the musical chairs: a tune the government can dance to.

That, ultimately, is why the coming Labour deputy leadership contest looks set to be so punishing. Rayner was replaced in her erstwhile ministerial capacities with relative ease. The same cannot be said of her elected role as deputy leader. Starmer’s sorrow over the departure of his deputy, expressed in a handwritten letter, was surely compounded by his recognition of the tumult to come.

Labour’s rules require an election — that points to an unavoidable, protracted and potentially bitter internal debate. Labour Party conference, ever seized upon by embattled leaders as a political chrysalis chamber, will be reimagined as a beauty contest for deputy leadership contenders: a festival of in-fighting and recrimination. The prime minister is powerless to prevent it. 

With the stakes high and the audience narrow, the internal debate will not guide the candidates towards Starmer — but away from him. Expect the grievances and frustrations of the Labour activist soul to be eagerly echoed by the cast of deputy leadership candidates.

One reason why Starmer is prime minister is because his team, led by Morgan McSweeney, understood the first rule of leadership elections: the membership is a more ideologically maximalist collective than the party establishment. In the 2020 Labour leadership contest, Starmer pitched to the progressive soul. Now, combine this dynamic with an emergent “mid-term” effect — which could invite restless activists to inflict a critic on the incumbent prime minister. 

A civil war is about to begin, while the king remains on the throne. 

As such, we are entering a period of radical uncertainty. The last seven deputy leadership contests (2020, 2015, 2007, 1994, 1992, 1988 and 1983) have been run alongside a leadership contest. But what we do know points to a difficult time indeed for the prime minister. The brutal 1981 deputy leadership contest is a portentous precedent.

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Labour deputy leadership election: the campaign

For Keir Starmer, the political damage will unfold in three acts: the public deputy leadership campaign, the result, and the potential reality of a new deputy with a mandate to challenge him. 

Under the current rules, rewritten in 2021, deputy leadership candidates must receive a nomination to stand from 20% of their fellow Labour MPs. That means they must first amass the support of 80 colleagues. Then, they must secure a nomination from 5% of local Labour party branches, as well as three affiliates of the party — at least two of which must be trade unions. The final decision is made by the members.

The initial bar is the tallest. But a critic of Starmer could still vault it. The reasoned amendment to the government’s flagship welfare bill was signed by over 120 Labour MPs. A full 49 Labour MPs voted against the proposed legislation (though there have been some suspensions since).

In this regard, it is the Labour “soft left” that has most to gain from a deputy leadership contest. And there is no shortage of potential standard-bearers. The race’s dividing lines and dynamics will benefit a candidate who can stress their independence from the leadership: individuals such as Anneliese Dodds, Louise Haigh, Rosena Allin-Khan, Emily Thornberry or Sarah Owen, who have had run-ins with Starmer since 2020, appear well-positioned. Indeed, a candidate’s performance could well relate inversely to their proximity to project Starmer.

The race also has interesting implications for collective responsibility. We are in uncharted territory, and a key outstanding question relates to how the frontbench will engage in the contest. It would be politically impossible for Starmer to endorse a candidate. But the wider ministerial ranks will presumably participate, either as candidates or as supporters. Will there be a de facto representative of the government in the contest? Who would take on this mantle in a contest where perceived loyalty is likely to be a liability? What, then, if the contest ventures into open criticism of the government and ministers are implicated, if only by association?

Labour deputy leadership election: the result

At this stage, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the membership is about to stick a thorn directly into Starmer’s side.

Once in post, the prime minister would face a dilemma about what, if any government role, to offer his deputy. To be sure: Starmer will not be obliged to find a post for the winner of the coming contest. But having a senior critic with a mandate of their own positioned outside the government tent could prove immensely problematic.

Despite its lack of official power, the deputy leadership is more than merely “ceremonial”. The role combines relative seniority and freedom: an attractive formula for any politician. The tenures of recent deputy leaders — Rayner, Tom Watson, Harriet Harman and John Prescott — reflect how the incumbent can shape the bounds of their office and their place in the party. It is little surprise the role is highly coveted. In 2020, six candidates ran for the position; in 2015 it was seven; in 2007 it was six again.

Rayner’s parallel mandate made her, on various occasions, a powerful ally and critic of the prime minister. Generally, she operated as a bridge between the leadership and the wider party — a powerful spokesperson for both camps. Starmer will recognise that he has lost a proven and skilled communicator, who possessed a unique ability to promote his policies among the party. 

Rayner helped shield Starmer. Her successor, we can reasonably assume, will be closer to the activist conscience than the leadership. 

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Labour deputy leadership election: what next?

A potentially useful starting point in understanding how Rayner’s successor could operate is provided by — and bear with me here — Tim Farron in the 2010-2015 parliament. 

Farron was elected as the Liberal Democrat president (effectively its party chair) in September 2010 by the membership, mere months after Nick Clegg and David Cameron addressed the Downing Street Rose Garden as coalition partners. Farron, a stalwart of the party’s left, made no secret of the fact that he never much liked being hitched to the Conservatives.

The nature of Farron’s elected office, combined with his palpable ambition, created a deeply uneasy dynamic. A backbencher throughout the coalition years, he used his role to position himself as the voice of activists — and Clegg’s likely successor. For Farron, it was a fruitful approach. 

Labour’s next deputy leader, endorsed by at least 80 of their colleagues and the party membership, could perform a similar role. After all, Starmer’s new partner could make his sometimes tense relationship with Rayner look politically blissful. 

This would all be punishing for the prime minister. That is plain. But it’s worth spelling out exactly why. 

First of all, an activist-aligned deputy leader could serve to undermine Starmerism’s foundational narrative: specifically, that the prime minister sits atop a changed Labour Party. The deputy leader’s very presence, in these terms, would represent a challenge to Starmer’s political grounding and authority.

Secondly, in both the short and long terms, the drama generated by the deputy leadership vacancy will inevitably distract from Starmer’s focus on “delivery”. Labour is about to spend the autumn holding a mirror up to its own divisions — just as the government had hoped to pivot definitely to the country.

Starmer began the week projecting control. His recent reshuffling suggests he understands the perilous position Labour is in. But now he must spectate as deputy leadership candidates put his premiership on trial. Expect a pretty comprehensive cross-examination of the government’s perceived failings.

The prime minister’s definitive declaration on Monday that “Summer is… over” contained within it a nascent sense of hope, of purpose even. Today, that same phrase can only be read with a grim foreboding. 

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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Ahead of visits from democratically-elected foreign leaders to Westminster, usually the red carpets are hoovered and the finest silverware is polished. But when Ersin Tatar, the leader of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), visited London last week, it was a much more muted affair. His administration is recognised only by Ankara, following a 1974 Greek-backed coup d’état aimed at uniting Cyprus with Greece. In response, the Turkish military launched an intervention. A short but intense period of fighting ensued, displacing thousands and dividing the island. Critics view the Turkish presence as an illegal occupation. Türkiye maintains it was a justified intervention under international treaty obligations. The island remains divided to this day.

The UK, like the rest of the international community bar Türkiye, does not recognise the TRNC and continues to support reunification under a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation, a position backed by successive UN Security Council resolutions.

This delicate diplomatic environment creates a difficult dynamic for British policymakers.

Regardless, Tatar was determined to make his case for a ‘two state solution’ in Cyprus and did so in the various committee rooms of Westminster, meeting MPs and stakeholders with a particular interest in solving what has long been referred to as the ‘Cyprus problem’.

Politics.co.uk sat down for an exclusive interview with Tatar in Westminster.

“You have to have your voice heard in London,” Tatar said, noting that a quarter of a million Turkish Cypriots live in Britain and that the UK remains a guarantor power under the 1960 settlement that created the Republic of Cyprus.

During two days of back-to-back meetings, he pressed ministers and MPs to treat the island as home to “two peoples”, each entitled to self-government. Tatar told Europe Minister Stephen Doughty that London’s current stance, in his words, “does not restrain fresh Greek Cypriot pressure on the north.” He argues that Nicosia has widened legal actions abroad, from property disputes to Interpol alerts, in order to choke investment and travel. “Arresting investors over land that was expropriated half a century ago is absolutely unacceptable,” he said, pointing out that both communities appropriated abandoned property in 1974, yet only one side faces criminal claims overseas.

Tatar, who enjoys a close relationship with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye, also met with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose great-grandfather was Ali Kemal, a Turkish journalist, politician and writer.

Intercommunal violence on Cyprus is now a thing of the past, but travel and tourism have become the new battleground. Direct flights to Ercan airport in the north remain barred, forcing every traveller from the UK to change planes in Türkiye or cross the Green Line from Larnaca in the south. Tatar wants a compromise that maintains a brief security stop in Türkiye but allows passengers to remain on board the plane. “In this day and age it is discomforting,” he said, insisting the newly built terminal in Northern Cyprus meets international standards and poses no security risk. This position is supported in Westminster by Sammy Wilson MP, the DUP member for East Antrim.

The wider pitch rests on what Tatar calls a “more realistic” approach to talks about the future of the island. He rejects any imposed blueprint, arguing that regional wars have eroded faith in quick diplomatic fixes. Instead, he proposes a bridge period of practical co-operation — trade corridors, tourism links, environmental projects, while the constitutional question remains frozen. “Until we get to a final settlement we must keep the channels open or the two sides will stop talking,” he warned.

Those words resonated with diaspora groups gathered in a north London community centre that Tatar visited during his time in the capital, many of whom still own property across the divide. They want direct air links and an end to claims against land that make mortgage finance impossible. Tatar left them with a simple instruction: write to your MP, insist that Britain apply the even-handedness it promised in 1960.

No red carpet, no state banquet. Yet for the leader of a territory that lives under embargo and a degree of isolation, meetings with MPs and ministers interested in finding a resolution in Cyprus mattered much more than a silver plate in Buckingham Palace or a photo opp outside No 10.

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Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, an upstart offshoot of the Brexit Party, has risen to occupy a consistent first place in the polls. The former UKIP leader has cannibalised the Conservative Party’s support base with an uncompromising ideological offer that embraces an anti-establishment posture. 

In doing so, Reform has smashed political rules that once seemed self-evident: above all, that the UK’s electoral system, First Past the Post (FPTP), erects effectively impenetrable barriers to entry. Under the system, support for a party must be at once localised and widespread. Historically, insurgent outfits have failed to gain a foothold in parliament, let alone rival the seat count of the established, mainstream parties. Farage’s career trajectory prior to Reform represents exhibits A through Z.

But Farage’s recent success — at the 2024 general election, at milestones since and in the opinion polls — has precipitated a radical reappraisal of what is possible under the current rules of the game. Disruption is suddenly imaginable; Reform UK’s parliamentary “bridgehead”, and its arriving battalions, are a proof of concept.

It is little surprise, therefore, that other prospective and/or wannabe insurgents have taken note.

The initial commentary on Zarah Sultana’s announcement of a new insurgent left political party treated its unquestionably chaotic nature. In a summary statement posted to social media on Thursday evening (a time better suited to burying news than founding parties), Sultana announced her resignation from Labour — a year after she had the party whip suspended in parliament. That came after she backed an amendment to the king’s speech calling on the government to scrap the two-child benefit cap.

The independent MP said she and Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, would “co-lead the founding of a new party” — a curious and oddly specific choice of words.

“Westminster is broken but the real crisis is deeper”, Sultana said, promising an alternative to “managed decline… broken promises” and “barbarism”.

It soon became apparent that Sultana’s premature announcement had caught Corbyn off guard. Sunday Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund, who literally wrote the book on Corbynite disarray, reported that the former Labour leader was “furious and bewildered” at Sultana’s actions, adding: “I understand [he] has not agreed to join the new left party.”

Corbyn’s silence corroborated the story — and so did his belated statement. On Friday, he congratulated Sultana on her “principled decision to leave the Labour Party”.

The independent MP, by nature a non-confrontational and unhurried politician, added: “I am delighted that she will help us build a real alternative.

“The democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape. Discussions are ongoing — and I am excited to work alongside all communities to fight for the future people deserve.

“Together, we can create something that is desperately missing from our broken political system: hope.”

Pogrund’s reporting has since suggested that Sultana deliberately bounced Corbyn into going public. The tactic looks to have been a successful one. Novara Media reckons a steering committee, featuring independent MPs and wider progressive types, has now voted in favour of a “Sultana-Corbyn joint ticket”.

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A Tale of Two Insurgencies

All this said, the nature and detail of Sultana’s pronouncement haven’t altered the substance of the threat Starmer faces from the left. It mostly confirms what has already been long-assumed: a left-of-Labour party will be formed with Corbyn and Sultana involved. On Wednesday evening last week, 24 hours before Sultana’s statement, Corbyn vowed to establish an “alternative” to Labour. And unlike some of her ex-Labour colleagues suspended in July last year, Sultana has made no effort to gain re-entry into the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party). Her criticism has only intensified.

For some observers, Sultana’s intervention merely symbolised the chaos that upstart parties have historically devolved into. A recurring quip mocked the apparent “split” between Sultana and Corbyn — before anything resembling a party had actually formed. Westminster and its watchers experienced a collective déjà vu: politics has advanced into unlikely places since Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, but his tumultuous tenure has not been fast forgotten.

And yet, to dismiss this venture on the basis of its shambolic launch would mark a major miscalculation. The seeds may have been thrown erratically, but they fall on fertile soil. 

On a checklist of my own making — comprising the elements/circumstances a political party must enjoy to successfully disrupt the status quo — a Sultana-Corbyn vehicle passes on several counts.

There are clear pre-existing networks of discontent, with Starmer and mainstream politics, which the party can exploit. Check. It has a clear, resonant message, bolstered by a narrative of betrayal aimed at an embattled, unpopular governing party. Check. It would promote a distinctive, anti-establishment position at a time of widespread disillusion with politics. Check. It has a clear target audience: voters positioned on the left and motivated variously by progressive causes. Check. It has a ready activist base who would be willing to dedicate time to the founding and development of the party. Check. It has a policy platform that could pivot between general grievances and single-issue concerns. Check. Indeed, it would have ample ammunition: concerns on welfare proposals, foreign policy, fiscal policy, SEND provision, rhetoric on immigration and — presumably — several unknowable, unforeseen policy flashpoints. It would be able to take up space in the modern media environment, on account of its predominantly young activist base. Check. (Sultana has more followers on TikTok than any MP except Farage). And finally, in emerging (effectively) from the Labour Party, it has a batch of figures who could be persuaded to defect. Check. Dramatic defections serve as a signal of momentum and credibility as a political force.

Reform has proved that an insurgent model, such as this, can thrive. In a mainly methodological and stylistic sense, a Corbynite copycat vehicle looks like a credible venture. Moderate types could learn to regret mocking it as a fringe fantasy. 

Indeed, in Jeremy Corbyn, the party has an individual with wide public recognition. According to YouGov, he has a popularity rating of 22 per cent (at time of writing). While that is far from high, it makes him the 4th most popular Labour-adjacent political figure. (Keir Starmer’s popularity rating is 27 per cent by comparison).

Crucially, like Farage, those voters who identify with his politics tend to be highly motivated — a crucial point in the development of an “insurgent” party, and reflecting a possible “floor” of support. That is the nature of an insurgent’s appeal: they are often widely disapproved of. 52 per cent “dislike” Corbyn; 40 per cent “dislike” Farage (via YouGov again).

But in a time of multi-party politics, a motivated base can be enough to get an outfit onto the field and into the public eye. Indeed, in isolated instances, this mode of politics has already proved successful: Corbyn’s Independent Alliance currently boasts five MPs — more than Reform’s “bridgehead” (following the suspension of James McMurdock). In other areas, senior Labour figures were run close by the very so-called “Gaza independents” likely to be brought under the umbrella of a left party by the time of the next election. Meanwhile, the Green Party won four seats — including one from Labour in Bristol Central (ex-shadow cabinet minister Thangam Debbonaire’s seat).

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Will the Green Party embrace a populist turn?

Red-Green Menace

Significantly, these electoral breakthroughs came before Starmer emerged as prime minister on 5 July 2024. The opportunities for a left party have only proliferated since.

Logistical problems await, of course: some senior Labour figures on the left, like John McDonnell and Diane Abbott, have stressed their loyalty to Labour. (Although McDonnell is an independent MP; he had the whip suspended alongside Sultana).

But the biggest possible roadblock (electoral system aside) remains the ability to build a cohesive and disciplined internal structure. The groups and causes a left party would unite under one banner would be eclectic from the outset — creating a series of challenges around unity of purpose and messaging. Similarly, on the insurgent right, Reform UK has struggled to find quality candidates. Farage relies mostly on defections for his candidate stock. Such dilemmas await a party of the left.

Nor do we know the name of the party — a perennial pitfall for political start-ups. (Farage stole Reform from a Canadian outfit of the same name that eventually merged into, or reverse-took-over, the country’s mainstream Conservative party).

But there are also logistical opportunities: Zack Polanski, who is running to be leader of the Greens, has signalled he would be willing to work with a new party of the left. Polanski, a self-described eco-populist, reacted to Sultana’s statement a mere 30 minutes after it was posted — long before Corbyn, her alleged “co-leader”. He commented: “Anyone who wants to take on the Tories, Reform and this failing Labour government is a friend of mine.

“Looking forward to seeing what this looks like in practice.”

The post was widely shared, achieving over 10,000 likes, reflecting at least an online enthusiasm for some Green-Red blend. Indeed, this merger is arguably already in motion: in recent weeks, James Meadway, a former adviser to John McDonnell, and commentator Grace Blakeley have both joined the Greens to back Polanski. They have encouraged like-minded lefties to join the Greens by 31 July, the deadline, to vote for eco-populism. 

In the event that Polanski wins the Green leadership — the contest culminates in August and he is competing with (and beating) rural conservationist MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns — some alliance would be likely, and surely the worst case scenario for Starmer. 

Polanski and Sultana in particular, are giving political definition, and crucially institutional shape, to progressive disillusion with this Labour government. How their outfits eventually interact will be crucial in determining progressive success in a multi-party political order.

Notably, of the 40 seats where the GPEW (Green Party of England and Wales) and its sister parties finished second in the 2024 election, 39 are currently held by Labour. 

The Sultana of swing (voters)

Implicit in the Labour government’s political strategy, spearheaded by No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, is the cold calculation that progressive voters will return to Labour by the time of the next election — if only to support the primary opposition to Nigel Farage and the prospect of a Reform government. A vehicle to Starmer’s left, with a larger media megaphone than is currently afforded to the Green Party, would be able to combatively present the counter-argument. Sultana’s statement, whatever Westminster’s quibbles about process, was liked over 240,000 times on Instagram. 

Virality is a communication strategy Starmer and Labour have yet to master. They will have the teams behind the scenes with the necessary “savvy” — but mainstream outfits are simply unsuited to the genre. They do not have the cultural clout, the striking message, the personality. Insurgents dominate social media because such platforms reward authenticity, rapid response commentary and a clearly defined, emotionally-driven, usually oppositional identity. Mainstream messaging simply militates against social media success. 

The left in Britain is searching for its answer to Zohran Mamdani, the progressive Democrat who could run New York City as mayor, and whose social media fluency and digital charisma far outstrips his contemporaries. Polanski and Sultana may not be that — yet or ever. But they could still make Labour’s “forgotten flank” impossible to ignore at a febrile electoral moment. 

Polling by More in Common, first reported in the New Statesman, suggests that a hypothetical “Corbyn-led” party of the left would win the support of 10 per cent of the electorate — reducing Labour to 20 per cent (level with the Conservatives). One crucial caveat is that each polled voter will be picturing their ideal party with the perfect policy platform from their perspective. But the specified characteristic of “Corbyn-led” is significant. 10 per cent of voters, this data suggests, could get behind the former Labour leader. In this scenario, the Greens stand on five per cent (down four points).

The threat posed by a left party is considerable then. A new outfit would broaden and deepen Starmer’s strategic dilemma in a manner eerily reminiscent of the electoral reality Rishi Sunak oversaw as prime minister. Insurgent vehicles could emerge to his left and right as receptacles for discontent with the government: parties whose appeals will be explicitly devised to target disillusioned 2024 Labour voters. It cannot be overstated how exposed Starmer’s electoral coalition is to such a pincer movement.

There is still plenty to be decided. But pressure is building on the prime minister. Starmer rose to power punching the left; now the left is fighting back.

As Labour leader in opposition, Starmer made a political point of exorcising the spectre of Jeremy Corbyn from his “changed” party. Some five years later, the ghost of Corbynism has found new vessels — and it looks well placed to haunt Starmer this parliament. 

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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The PM’s inaugural confessional came on the fringes of the G7 summit last month. Beth Rigby of Sky News urged Starmer to volunteer his biggest “mistake” in office. Prime ministers tend to baulk at this media cliché, communicating a confused stream of passive-voiced regret, cynical deflection and banal excuses.

Starmer delivered an abstract answer, but one few would dispute. He conceded that the government had not “always told our story as well as we should, explained our decisions in the way that might in retrospect have been better.”

The prime minister continues to bare the soul of his administration. Asked by The Sunday Times how a mass rebellion of over a third of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) ambushed Downing Street, Starmer admitted he was distracted. “I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East”, he said, referring to the recent summit in the Netherlands. Only on Wednesday night — just hours after dismissing the objections of over 120 Labour MPs as “noises off” — did Starmer “fully” turn his attention to the doomed welfare bill.

It is no secret that the welfare rebellion has coloured much of the commentary on the eve of this government’s first birthday. Starmer, laudably, has not shirked from his responsibility to deliver answers. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking podcast, he said he “did not engage” properly with Labour MPs before conducting a series on damaging U-turns. “My full attention really bore down on this on Thursday”, Starmer declared.

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But the peak of the PM’s apologia arc came in his interview with the Observer, published last Sunday. Speaking to former Labour adviser and Starmer biographer, Tom Baldwin, he touched on the controversy surrounding his “islands of strangers” speech, delivered on 12 May.

“That particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it”, Starmer said. Had he held the speech’s contents “up to the light a bit more”, he would have concluded not to use the line.

The confession reflects a level of candour that prime ministers only really express once they have left office. These extensive revelations are saved for the memoirs – or podcasts. Rishi Sunak disavowed his “stop the boats” slogan as part of a sit-down with BBC Radio 4’s Nick Robinson in March. But Starmer does not recoil from the fact that he is fallible. He sees value in tipp-exing over his government in real time. 

It’s surely a personal strength that Starmer has publicly skipped the self-righteous denial phase his predecessors spent whole premierships festering in. His introspection projects both an assured self-awareness and a vulnerability that are rarely visible in prime ministers.

But there is a reason that Starmer’s predecessors struck coy poses when asked to evaluate their own inadequacies. The calculus of his public confessions is curious; unconditional self-incrimination is a bold political strategy. 

Indeed, Starmer’s commendably objective appraisals border upon brazen when considered collectively. In their own way, each of the missteps Starmer described are fundamental: communication, multi-tasking, party-management and speech work. These are not marginal elements of the office, or supplementary tasks to the daunting duties 10 Downing Street confers on its incumbent. They are the aspects that make the prime minister’s power possible — the channels through which authority is established.

Starmer’s “islands of strangers” indiscretion, an avowedly inadvertent echo of Enoch Powell, is instructive. In one fell swoop, Starmer released a whole series of unedifying admissions into the SW1 ether.

There is important context, of course: the prime minister had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, and, on the morning of the speech, the porch of his former family home, occupied by a relative, was fire-bombed. 

But one cannot escape the conclusion: Starmer delivered an immensely significant speech that he had not fully read and/or understood. It’s an extraordinary admission. 

It is no secret that every prime minister is surrounded by speechwriters, whose words they recite. But for Starmer to cast himself as a passive figure, whose political views are literally dictated to him, seems ill-judged. Crucially, it lends credence to one of the PM’s more reasonable caricatures: that prime minister Keir Starmer is a daily construct of his advisers, above all No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.

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From incoherence to dysfunction and back again

Every premiership, consciously or not, develops a theory of governance. The prime minister’s personality and politics infuse the office. No 10 is moulded in the image of the individual who inhabits it.

Across his first twelve months in power, Starmer has forged a model of governance of remarkable, almost hermetic, centralisation. Decisions, such as those on winter fuel and welfare, are conceived in the Downing Street bunker before being released unto the PLP. MPs are entrusted with communicating the contents to their constituents; but there is no sense of wider political consultation with Starmer’s parliamentary stakeholders. Decisions of state are dictated under the threat of suspension — not deliberated.

For months, this top-down system was sustained by the complacent assumption that the sheer size of the government’s majority would insulate it from internal rebellion. That belief, along with the government’s newly filleted flagship welfare bill, today lies in tatters on the commons floor.

Labour rebels offered eleventh hour concession on welfare cuts

Starmer’s welfare debacle was highly revealing: not only of the assumptions and anxieties that pervade No 10 — but also of the distance between Downing Street and the median Labour MP. The prime minister, again to his credit, does not resile from this observation. As per his BBC Radio 4 interview, he admits No 10 got the “process” wrong and did not “engage” well with Labour MPs. In the weeks leading up to summer recess, before MPs scuttle back to their constituencies, reports suggest Starmer has begun an overdue outreach programme. 

Confessionals, of course, are not the only way a prime minister can admit failure. Starmer’s ceasefire with his parliamentary party, after weeks of menacing ultimatums from the Whips’ Office, is a more tacit but no less lucid declaration of historic dysfunction.

Starmer, we know, doesn’t like Westminster. In a January 2023 interview with the News Agents podcast, Starmer revealed — with barely a moment’s hesitation — that he would “choose” Davos, the seat of the World Economic Forum, over the parliamentary estate. Starmer came to politics later in life than most politicians — and certainly prime ministers. He hasn’t taken to all of its elements naturally; nor does he show any signs of wanting to. Perhaps that was a strength in opposition. In government, this position has emerged as a glaring vulnerability. 

Parliamentary parties, especially large ones, are complex organisms. They contain a whole host of contrasting characters, literally, from all over the country. They are stratified, officially and unofficially, by seniority, ideology, geography and electoral majority. And so they require deft management and accommodation. 

Meanwhile, it is the job of the prime minister’s political operation to locate, account for and manage their boss’ weaknesses. If Starmer’s foremost flaw can be loosely defined as “politics”, his political operation should step in to make the informed judgements his instincts cannot. Nor is the prime minister’s time, a scarce and valuable resource, best spent on Kremlinology of the contemporary Labour Party.

This nature of Starmer’s time management has been brought to the fore by Labour’s recent tumult. The PM pointed to his appearance at the Nato summit as one reason he was not across the welfare rebellion. The “islands of strangers” phrase slipped into the PM’s immigration speech, in part, because Starmer was detained in Ukraine.

This is not, solely, his fault. There is no doubt that recent blunders reflect a failure of the Downing Street apparatus that surrounds Starmer.

The prime minister has two parliamentary private secretaries (PPSs), Liz Twist and Chris Ward. In theory, they are the connective tissue that joins Downing Street to the PLP. They are tasked with spotting problems before they arise and communicating them, concisely and in a way the prime minister can manage alongside his more “important” duties. This process, overseen also by the PM’s political secretary, Claire Reynolds, has failed. 

What’s striking, is just how ill-judged and unsubstantiated the government’s complacency was. Far from being protected by a parliamentary supremacy of servile Starmtroopers, the government is uniquely exposed to the possibility of rebellion. This observation flows from the nuanced nature of Labour’s landslide victory, recorded a year ago yesterday. 

Starmer secured 400+ MPs on 34 per cent of the vote: a loveless landslide, a monumental sandcastle, a wide but not deep mandate. Pick your cliché. In short, Morgan McSweeney masterminded an electoral strategy that saw Labour lose support where it could afford to — but make strong gains in unlikely areas. That resulted in a massive net gain of seats. 

Managing a party elected on these terms is inherently challenging, no matter the size of the majority. 

McSweeney’s strategy stuffed parliament with Labour MPs on perilously small majorities. These parliamentarians, it follows, will be hyper-aware of constituents’ complaints: political seismographs attuned to any kind of tremor. As such, when Downing Street places Labour on the wrong side of public opinion, MPs become understandably nervous. Do this ritualistically for a year, and the Westminster incentive structure that rewards loyalty will dissolve.

At this febrile juncture, Starmer must learn to view party-management as integral to the worthy work of government — rather than as a distraction from it. He is good at diplomacy; he should do it at home too. 

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Fourteen years one year of chaos

These points reflect the defining paradox of Keir Starmer’s premiership. 

His operation is highly centralised, personalised, even presidential. It is dictatorial, distant and, according to some MPs, dismissive. 

But the orders that emerge from the centre are disjointed and incoherent. The welfare bill, since hollowed out by MPs, stood as the government’s “flagship” legislation. But it was also isolated: divorced from any form of positive argument that could possibly imbue it with political meaning.

It is a perverse formula that appears almost uniquely constructed to generate chaos: muddled messaging, disseminated by a detached and distant Downing Street, reflects a self-reinforcing recipe for political dysfunction.

The result is a Downing Street that looks buffeted by events; that lacks consistency, knowledge of its parliamentary party and/or the political acumen to anticipate danger. Meanwhile, backbenchers see a vacuum where the vision should be, and rush in. The confusion around the prime minister’s own politics, exemplified by the “islands of strangers” saga, incentivises rival political actors to compete for and manage the image of the real Keir Starmer. That only contributes to the immediate sense of incoherence.

Starmer vowed to lead a stable and dependable administration. Instead, he has accidentally created a political operation that generates the kind of strife that sickened the country of Conservative rule. 

It is little surprise that the data suggests the government is in mortal danger. Britain Elects has compared Starmer’s standing at the end of his first year in office with those of his predecessors. As of day 357, the PM’s -33 approval rating was six points lower than Rishi Sunak’s (-27) at the same point, 32 points lower than Boris Johnson’s (-1), 31 points lower than Theresa May’s (-2), 27 points lower than David Cameron’s (-6), and 77 points below Tony Blair’s (+44). (Starmer does best Gordon Brown by 11 points, that said.)

At the same time, new YouGov polling shows that as many people think it would have been better if Sunak and the Conservatives had won the last election (33 per cent) as say it is better that Starmer and Labour won (33 per cent). (A further third, 33 per cent again don’t know).

Downing Street should interpret this finding as a crushing blow: it evinces failure on two parallel tracks. Labour has failed to signal “change” in its first year; but nor has it succeeded in comprehensively toxifying the Conservative Party’s reputation. 

Starmer has shown himself to be uniquely comfortable confronting his flaws. This, and what we know about the PM’s ruthless streak, would suggest a far-reaching reset is on the horizon. That will be characterised by a restructuring of Downing Street’s operation and a renewed focus on the bonds that bind Starmer to the parliamentary party he leads. 

Starmer, our self-aware premier, has correctly identified his government’s chaotic output. He must now understand its causes and make the requisite adjustments, however brutal they may be.

Candour is no substitute for competence, or the felt change Labour must deliver to stem the tide of disillusion. From the government’s perspective, the stakes — symbolised by the insurgency of Reform UK and Nigel Farage — could hardly be higher. 

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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Week-in-Review: Welfare rebellion has permanently damaged Starmer

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The chancellor told her audience, gathered at a hospital in east London, that it was “great to be here today”. She said Labour would “always deliver on the priorities of ordinary working people” and ensure the NHS is “there for those who need it for the next 77 years and many more beyond that too”.

It was left to Keir Starmer and Streeting to outline the detail of the government’s “three-way plan” to “transform healthcare in this country”. They propose moving care into the community, digitising the NHS and focusing on sickness prevention.

The PM announced neighbourhood health services of “pioneering teams” will soon be rolled out across England. The goal is for patients to more conveniently access a full range of healthcare services close to home, and to shift care out of overstrained hospitals.

Starmer remarked: “The NHS should be there for everyone, whenever they need it.

“But we inherited a health system in crisis, addicted to a sticking plaster approach, and unable to face up to the challenges we face now, let alone in the future. That ends now. Because it’s reform or die.”

He added: “Our 10-year health plan will fundamentally rewire and future-proof our NHS so that it puts care on people’s doorsteps, harnesses game-changing tech and prevents illness in the first place.”

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In the chancellor’s contribution, there was no reference made to her tearful appearance at prime minister’s questions yesterday, which rocketed Westminster into a bout of feverish speculation as to her future.

But those scenes in the commons continue to occupy a central place in the news agenda as we approach the end of a torrid week for the prime minister. Starmer was duly forced to address the matter in the Q&A portion of his NHS presser today. Asked about the chancellor’s experience, Starmer said her tears came over a “personal issue” and that he “certainly won’t” speak for her or say anymore.

As for why he didn’t show support for the visibly distressed Reeves, Starmer pointed to the very nature of prime minister’s questions. He said: “In PMQs, it was like bang bang bang… that’s what it was yesterday, and therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything going on in the chamber.”

Speaking after the NHS event, Reeves addressed her tearful moment at PMQs for the first time, telling broadcasters that “clearly I was upset”.

She added: “It was a personal issue and I’m not going to go into the details of that.

“My job as chancellor at 12 o’clock on a Wednesday is to be at PMQs next to the prime minister, supporting the government and that’s what I tried to do.

“I guess the thing that maybe is a bit different between my job and many of your viewers’ is that when I’m having a tough day, it’s on the telly and most people don’t have to deal with that.”

Reeves’ appearance today, and the prime minister’s comments in the last 24 hours, are intended to serve as an incontrovertible, unmistakable symbol that the chancellor isn’t just staying put — but that she is an integral member of the government.

Starmer said as much in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking podcast, broadcast this morning. He is in “lockstep” with Reeves, he maintained, nodding to less cordial relationships between prime ministers and chancellors down the years.

The PM commented: “She’s done an excellent job as chancellor and we have delivered inward investment to this country in record numbers.”

He added: “She has done a fantastic job. She and I work together, we think together.

“In the past, there have been examples — I won’t give any specifics — of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.”

Speaking to Virgin Radio this morning in a live interview, Starmer declared that Reeves will stay as chancellor up to the next general election — and beyond if Labour wins it.

Starmer stated: “She is an excellent chancellor, she will be chancellor for a very long time to come, into the next election and beyond it. And she and I are absolutely committed to our fiscal rules and the economic stability that is so important to this country.”

It comes after the prime minister conspicuously refused to confirm that Reeves would be in post “until the next election” in response to a direct question at PMQs.

Starmer’s equivocation on this point, combined with the images of Reeves in tears, was interpreted as a signal that the chancellor could be on her way out. The episode contributed to the sense of instability that has engulfed the government in recent weeks. And the markets took notice.

Following PMQs yesterday, the value of the pound dropped and government borrowing costs rose, via the interest rate on both 10 and 30-year bonds. According to Reuters, “the yield on the 10-year government bond, or gilt, rose as much as 22 basis points on the day at one point, to 4.681%, as investors ditched British debt. It then recovered somewhat to 4.60%”.

All this came after the government’s huge climbdown on welfare — which did little to change expectations. Today, with Starmer having latched himself to Reeves in no uncertain terms, UK government bond markets have rallied.

This fluctuation is revealing on several fronts. Firstly, whatever Starmer’s instincts or anxieties, sometimes it is just better to answer the question. Had Starmer confirmed that Reeves would remain in post yesterday, he could have avoided some of the damaging speculation that has afflicted the government in the last 24 hours.

Speaking today, he has confirmed — with no caveat in sight — that Reeves is an integral member of his government. Why couldn’t he do so when the moment demanded?

Secondly, the saga shows how finely financiers are scrutinising Reeves’ status. Their reaction reflected the direct relationship between the chancellor’s emotional state and the state of the markets.

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I have commented before that Reeves is an exposed politician because she does not have a clear political base of support — aside from within No 10 itself. Reeves is the most disliked member of the cabinet among Labour activists (she has a net favourability rating of -27.84, according to LabourList); she is a frequent target of hostile briefing from Labour MPs; and her public approval ratings are dismal. Ipsos suggests they mirror the standing of Kwasi Kwarteng in the weeks following the 2022 mini-budget (51 per cent of Britons say that Reeves is doing a bad job). Meanwhile, Reeves’ record in office has raised difficult questions about her political judgement.

These were the facts that determined (and determine) the chancellor’s political weakness. Her political proximity to Starmer made any swift sacking untenable. But she was nonetheless counted as a liability.

It is now clear that Reeves does have a support base: the markets.

The chancellor is still seen as a symbol, a personification, of fiscal rectitude. An attempt to remove her, trader logic follows, would mean a shift to more borrowing under a chancellor whose standing better reflects Labour’s historic reputation.

Of course, financier fears that Reeves’ tears suggested a forthcoming departure were unfounded. But in so reacting, they revealed their preference: the market actually likes Rachel Reeves. At least, her hypothetical replacement is seen as less fiscally credible.

That is the supreme irony of the situation: a moment of acute political and emotional vulnerability has paradoxically strengthened the chancellor’s position.

Indirectly, the market movement yesterday could also serve as a signal to Labour MPs. They have been reminded of the precariousness of the UK’s financial position — and the importance of Reeves to it. In other words: undermining her with rival plans and negative briefings has consequences.

Of course, Reeves’ political authority has undoubtedly been diminished as a result of successive, expensive climbdowns. But the markets — and Downing Street’s damage limitation operation — have bound Starmer and his chancellor together, just when politics looked to be pulling them apart.

The PM knows he cannot risk spooking the markets, and so he has no choice but to go all in with Reeves. There is no manageable alternative. (A small problem, one supposes, is that Starmer appears a little passive. Whatever the reality, the reaction reads as though the PM has been bounced into backing Reeves after equivocating yesterday).

A more significant problem for Starmer is that, by signalling No 10 and No 11 are in “lockstep”, he will be inviting criticism of Reeves onto him. Meanwhile, the political and fiscal outlook is no rosier. Difficult decisions await and Reeves must make them. That is where she has come unstuck this parliament.

Indeed, the markets may have spoken, but her Labour sceptics remain unconvinced. For Reeves, winning their trust — or governing without it — will be the defining challenge of the difficult years ahead.

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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He did so against an immediate backdrop of political chaos.

It took just days for the government’s bullishness on its flagship welfare bill to reimagine itself as meek acquiescence. Facing possible defeat in the commons, Starmer approved one final, eleventh-hour concession on his government’s welfare proposals. The result is a gutted bill: legislation straddling the liminal plane between existence and expiration.

It was left to Sir Stephen Timms, the disabilities minister, to banish the bill into political purgatory at around 5.26 pm yesterday. After crunch talks between Downing Street and Labour’s rebel representatives, Timms told the commons that changes to restrict eligibility for the Personal Independence Payment (Pip) will be delayed until after a review of the disability benefit, instead of coming into force in November 2026 as set out in the bill.

The government’s original welfare reforms were designed to save approximately £5 billion by 2030. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has decreed that, as a result of Starmer’s concessions, the government savings amount to zero, nothing.

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Rachel Reeves has been forced back to the drawing board by Labour MPs. The PM can no longer rely on his massive working majority, of no less than 165 MPs, to rubber-stamp his difficult decisions.

In the end, the zombie welfare bill staggered over its first commons hurdle with 335 votes in favour versus 260 against. Despite Starmer’s successive U-turns, 49 MPs still voted against his reforms. And so the prime minister’s majority was sliced by over half (to 75).

Starmer vowed to end the chaos — the steady churn of psychodrama that sickened the nation of Conservative rule. That was the central promise of Starmerism. But the scenes in the commons yesterday were eerily reminiscent of the decadence of late Conservatism. Not since an October 2022 opposition day vote on fracking, which preceded Liz Truss’ downfall as PM, has the chamber been such a pit of political acrimony.

Starmer’s task now is to show yesterday’s drama was a blip — and not the latest lamentable loop on the doom spiral of decay.

It’s a cruel reality for any prime minister — especially one whose premiership is, in simple temporal terms at least, relatively fresh. But it is sweet succour for a leader of the opposition. Starmer seized on prime ministerial implosions as LOTO. With the PM exposed, how did Kemi Badenoch fare today?

The Tory leader has been getting her practice in as a commons performer. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, and Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, stepped in to helm recent sessions of PMQs — but Badenoch has returned the favour by subbing herself in for shadow ministers. She responded (in Philp’s stead) to the home secretary’s statement last month on the Casey report. And she took on work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall in the commons yesterday, delivering a typically combative response in the welfare bill debate.

She continued in this vein this afternoon. Rising to the opposition despatch box, the Conservative leader first sought an admission that the welfare bill will amount to zero “savings” after the government’s U-turns.

The prime minister defended his watered-down bill, saying it would “rebalance Universal Credit” and that it was “consistent” with the principles he had spoken to “throughout”. The evasion prompted Badenoch to answer her own question. The welfare bill had been “completely gutted”, she said, and it “doesn’t save any money — it is going to cost billions”.

The Tory leader added: “This is the first prime minister in history to propose a bill to save money who ended up with a bill that costs money.”

It did not take long for Badenoch to direct her fire at Rachel Reeves, the embattled chancellor. Gesturing to the government frontbench, she said Reeves looked “absolutely miserable”.

“Labour MPs are going on the record saying that the chancellor is toast and the reality is that she is a human shield for his incompetence.

Badenoch asked: “In January, he said that she would be in post until the next election. Will she really?”

Starmer refused to back his chancellor in so many words. Rather, he used the opportunity to mock the Conservative leader’s PMQs performances, which he maintained “always” cheer him up. “[Badenoch] makes a complete mess of it and shows just how unserious and irrelevant they are”, Starmer added.

At cabinet yesterday, Starmer leapt to the defence of his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who has faced a similarly unrelenting torrent of hostile briefings in recent days. The PM declared he “will not countenance” criticism of McSweeney, crediting him with Labour’s general election victory in 2024.

Today, albeit in a public setting, the PM refused to do the same for his chancellor. It’s an inconsistency Starmer should avoid any suggestion of — lest excitable commentators begin to over-interpret his intentions.

Indeed, at that moment — whatever No 10 went on to clarify later — Badenoch’s question demanded an answer. The risk was obvious: the PM’s decision not to explicitly guarantee Reeves’ position would contribute to the sense of instability and drama.

As the prime minister equivocated, a lone tear rolled down Reeves’ face. The scene was quickly clipped up for social media, sending Westminster into a frenzy of speculation.

A spokesperson later confirmed that Reeves was reacting to a “personal matter, which — as you would expect — we are not going to get into”. They added: “The chancellor will be working out of Downing Street this afternoon.”

Reeves is reported to have had an “altercation” with commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle prior to PMQs.

With the chancellor visibly upset, Badenoch’s response bordered on being overly personal. She remarked: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she will stay in place.”

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Starmer, for his final contribution, issued what in other circumstances could be read as a fulsome statement of support. He listed a series of purported Labour achievements, celebrating each as a “promise made [and] delivered”. He closed: “We’re only getting started. The chancellor has led on all these issues, and we’re grateful to her for it.”

But having refused to guarantee Reeves’ position, this remark could just as easily be interpreted as a statement of thanks before a summary sacking.

As PMQs concluded, Reeves was met and comforted by her sister Ellie, who serves as Labour chair. They left the chamber together.

No 10 went on to insist that the chancellor is “going nowhere” and that she has the prime minister’s “full backing”. As for why Starmer did not express his support for Reeves at the despatch box, the spokesperson responded: “He has [backed Reeves] plenty of times, he doesn’t need to repeat it every time the leader of the opposition speculates about Labour politicians.”

But the brutal reality of politics is that Reeves’ standing has been vastly diminished as a result of the welfare climbdown yesterday. Her reputation as an “iron chancellor” — of certain resolve and unyielding will to sell tough decisions to a squeamish party — has been undermined by the evidence of Labour’s welfare fiasco.

This reputation, forged over years in opposition, was the source of her political authority. It is unsurprising then, that speculation as to her future has refused to abate.

Briefings against Reeves and her policies are an increasingly recurrent feature of the political news cycle. Her policies have been rebuffed on more than one occasion by Labour MPs. Crucially, some of her colleagues have come to the conclusion that the chancellor is the common denominator underpinning their party’s travails.

Starmer will know the risks of losing a chancellor so early into his premiership, of course.

For all the speculation today and Badenoch’s targeted attacks, the government’s woes are far bigger than any one person. The welfare debacle reflected a collective failure of strategy, management and authority: a total political breakdown.

A single sacking will not repair the disorder it revealed — or the damage it wreaked.

Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.

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