Eighteen months ago, Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history. Today, he is fighting simply to keep his job.
The collapse has been swift and brutal. In this month’s local elections, Labour lost nearly 1,500 council seats across England, while Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK swept up 1,454 — a near-perfect transfer of power from the governing party to its insurgent rival. For a party that won a landslide in 2024, the result was less a warning shot than a verdict.
The resignation that changed everything
The crisis sharpened dramatically on May 14, when Health Secretary Wes Streeting walked out of the cabinet. In his resignation letter, Streeting said he had “lost confidence” in Starmer’s leadership and that staying on would be “dishonourable and unprincipled.”
Notably, Streeting stopped short of the obvious next step. He did not formally launch a leadership contest — and to trigger one, he would need the backing of one fifth of Labour MPs, currently 81 lawmakers. The restraint is telling. It suggests the would-be challengers can read a whip’s tally as well as anyone, and the numbers are not yet there.
A party split three ways
What makes this moment so dangerous for Starmer is not a single rival but the sheer fragmentation of his own benches. According to LabourList, 159 Labour MPs back the Prime Minister, 97 want him to resign or set out a departure timetable, and 147 have taken no public position at all.
That silent middle is the real story. By mid-May, one cabinet minister, four junior ministers and four ministerial aides had resigned in protest — yet over 110 backbenchers had also signed a letter arguing that a leadership challenge should not happen at all. A party this divided cannot easily remove its leader, but it cannot easily govern with him either.
Starmer digs in
The Prime Minister, for his part, is refusing to go quietly. “I’m not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos,” Starmer told the BBC. “I think the right thing to do is to rebuild and show the path forward.”
In a make-or-break speech, he accepted responsibility for the “very tough” results while insisting Labour’s biggest decisions had been right — including keeping Britain out of the US–Israel war on Iran — and arguing that “the fundamentals are sound,” pointing to falling NHS waiting lists, child poverty and immigration figures.
What happens next
The succession question is already being mapped out. Potential candidates being floated include Andy Burnham, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, Streeting himself, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband — and Burnham has announced he will stand in the Makerfield by-election, a move widely read as positioning for a return to Westminster.
For now, Starmer survives — not because his party has rallied behind him, but because it cannot agree on who, or what, should come next. That is a fragile kind of safety. The Prime Minister who once promised stability after years of Conservative turmoil now governs a party that looks remarkably like the one he replaced.
