Keir Starmer Won’t Survive This
Local elections in England—to town and city and rural councils across the country—are usually low-turnout affairs, in which the national government of the day takes a bit of a shellacking, apologizes, reassures voters that it is paying attention to the stuff that they actually care about (usually garbage collection, or the state of the roads), and then moves on without a second thought. That didn’t happen this year. The results on May 7th, which coincided with elections for the national assemblies in Scotland and Wales, proved to be a catastrophe for the Labour Party and a personal crisis for Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister.
Starmer, who is sixty-three, has been a national figure in Britain for the past six years—as the leader first of the Labour Party, then of the country as a whole. For most of this time, he has been tolerated but unloved, a walking synonym for “wooden,” “stolid,” and “middle-aged haircut.” On Monday night, three days after the local-election results came in, his Cabinet showed signs of abandoning him. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary and one of Labour’s more convincing politicians, was one of several ministers who asked the Prime Minister to set a timetable for his departure. Around eighty members of the parliamentary party publicly made clear that they agreed, enough to set in motion a formal leadership challenge to Starmer, if they coalesce around a rival candidate.
But, at a Cabinet meeting in Downing Street on Tuesday morning, Starmer refused to step down, leaving British politics in that queasy, all-too-familiar zone in which no one knows what is happening and none of the possible futures looks particularly appetizing. “The Labour Party has a process for challenging a leader and that has not been triggered,” Starmer told his Cabinet colleagues, according to a statement. “The country expects us to get on with governing.” I’m not sure the country expects much of anything anymore.
Something like this has been coming for a while. For the past year, Starmer has been bumbling along with a net approval rating below minus forty—about twice as bad as President Donald Trump’s—while Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform U.K. Party has led the polls. But, for the Labour Party, there was a difference between having an anxiety dream and waking up to find that it was real. About five thousand of England’s council seats were up for election last week, and Labour lost some fifteen hundred, about a quarter of its representatives in local government. The Party stumbled to its worst result in the Scottish Parliament, and lost control of Welsh politics for the first time in a hundred years. But the headline results, bad as they were, masked Labour’s evisceration in places that have supported the Party more or less since its formation. Wigan, in Lancashire, has elected Labour M.P.s since 1918. Last week, twenty-five local councillors were up for reëlection, twenty-two from the Labour Party. Every single one lost. Reform took twenty-four of the twenty-five seats. “This election didn’t come down to big ideas,” Anas Sarwar, the Party’s leader in Scotland, said. “It came down to a big national wave and a general vibe that we couldn’t change.”
Starmer was at the center of that vibe and yet insufficient to explain it. He isn’t so interesting or consequential a politician to have caused such a degree of feeling. Zoom out and he is Friedrich Merz, in Germany, or Emmanuel Macron, in France, just another European centrist in a cruel world, hemorrhaging votes—whether because of Gaza, or immigration, or the cost of living, or a tired and dilapidated welfare state—to populist parties that didn’t exist, or didn’t matter, until ten years ago. One experienced Labour M.P. described canvassing during the recent campaign and taking flak from both Reform-inclined voters and Green Party supporters—Labour’s freshest rivals to the left—within the space of a few minutes. “That polarization was the clearest thing that I saw,” the M.P. said. “I could knock on doors that were literally next to each other and have people saying diametrically opposed things about Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.”
Apart from Labour’s losses, the most striking thing about the election results was how evenly the vote was distributed among Britain’s major political parties, of which there are now five. According to modelling by the BBC, if the whole country had voted, Labour, the Conservatives, the Green Party, and the Liberal Democrats all would have won between sixteen and eighteen per cent of the vote, with Reform a notch higher, at around twenty-six per cent. British politics in 2026 is a landscape of meh, with Farage’s grin poking over the horizon.
But, even if the forces at work are much larger than Starmer, he has proved unsuited to this moment. Since he took office, two summers ago, his premiership has been marked by a deep political clumsiness. His mistakes have included depriving vulnerable older people of a benefit to heat their homes; raising payroll taxes on employers, while simultaneously asking them to hire more young people; and seeking a new relationship with the European Union, but never spelling out what that means. For the past six months, Starmer has been haunted by his only flamboyant decision as Prime Minister: to hire Peter Mandelson, a suave old fixer, to be Ambassador to the U.S., only to dismiss him because of revelations about Mandelson’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. But even Mandelson wasn’t a very flamboyant choice really. He was probably at the peak of his powers during the early days of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, almost thirty years ago. (He had to resign from that, too.)
The politics that Starmer embodies is cautious, patriotic, a little square. Perhaps his greatest achievement as Prime Minister has been to stay out of Trump’s war in Iran, a decision for which he has received absolutely no credit, just an even tougher economic climate in which to enact a domestic-policy agenda that no one can ever remember. (When I checked the Labour Party website on Monday, it said, “Economic Stability. Secure borders. National Security.” Not exactly “La Marseillaise.”) For most people, Starmerism is incrementalism leading nowhere in particular—a program that is nowhere near adequate to confront Britain’s economic stagnation or its political splintering.
Over the weekend, I spoke with Jonathan Rutherford, a longtime Labour adviser, who was invited into the government, briefly, last year. He despaired at the gulf between the party’s London-based leadership and the voters who live in the country’s post-industrialized former heartlands—a gulf that Starmer’s rather inert leadership has only deepened. “We’re living through an élite class that is, in cultural and political terms, wholly different to the people it claims to represent,” Rutherford told me. “Go up north. He is hated,” he said, of Starmer. “In a way, that’s sort of deeply unfair to him. He is viscerally hated, and I don’t think he understands that. I don’t think that people in No. 10 quite understand it.”
The question is whether replacing Starmer at this point will actually help, or make matters even worse. On Monday morning, the Prime Minister gave a speech that was intended to show that he understood the gravity of his situation and that his government must be bolder from now on. A few minutes before he stepped onstage, I spoke with a peer who has worked with Starmer and endured Labour’s ups and downs for decades.
The peer reminded me why the Party elected him in the first place—as an antidote to the soap opera of the Conservative party, which was in power at the time, and as a way to move on from Labour’s internal bickering under Jeremy Corbyn. “We voted for a man in a suit that wasn’t Boris Johnson or Liz Truss,” the peer said. “There was never deep love for him in the Party, but absolutely the awareness that this man could do it.” Whereas Labour’s former troubles were mostly ideological and internecine, the peer was struck by the external nature of the challenges it now faces—namely, Britain’s fiscal reality and the shallowness, and brittleness, of its public support. “During Corbyn, the problem was in the Labour Party. So we knew what to do,” the peer said. “It was really hard work, but it was within the Labour Party. This problem is not within the Labour Party. This problem is much bigger.”
Starmer’s speech—even the idea that a speech might still alter people’s perceptions at this stage—summed up everything about him. It was sincere but small-bore. He stressed the danger posed by Britain’s adversaries abroad and by Farage’s popularity at home. “This hurts,” Starmer said. “Not just because Labour has done badly, but because, if we don’t get this right, our country will go down a very dark path.” He was in his shirtsleeves, oddly enthused, still in campaign mode, even though the polls had closed four days earlier. Starmer promised narrative and emotion. “Stories beat spreadsheets,” he said. “People need hope.” And then, because he is Starmer, he announced a list of policies—the government would nationalize a steelworks, continue its negotiations with the E.U, and really crank up its work “in apprenticeships, in technical-excellence colleges, in special-educational needs”—that made it sound like he was reading from a spreadsheet.
He was at his most convincing when he talked about the harm that would be caused by yet another change of Prime Minister—Starmer is the sixth of the past decade—and all the uncertainty that it would bring. “We tested it to destruction with the last government, and it inflicted huge damage on this country,” Starmer said. “Labour will never be forgiven if we repeat that.” And yet, within hours, that is what dozens of his colleagues were attempting to orchestrate. “I do have quite a lot of people saying to me they don’t want chaos,” the Labour M.P. told me. “And I understand that. However, they are much smaller in number than the number of people who have rejected the Labour Party this time. So, there will have to be a change.”
The problem for the Party—and for Starmer, in a curious way—is that he has no obvious successor. All of the likely contenders face considerable obstacles of their own. Wes Streeting, the country’s ambitious young Health Secretary, is disliked on the left of the Party and stalked by questions about his own relationship with Mandelson. Angela Rayner, Starmer’s charismatic former deputy, has been undergoing a tax investigation. (She was cleared of wrongdoing.) Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Manchester, doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons, so one would have to be engineered for him. Other possible candidates include Mahmood, the Home Secretary, who isn’t widely known to the public, and Ed Miliband, a former leader of the Party, whose spell in charge was littered with mistakes that weren’t all that dissimilar from Starmer’s. As the adrenaline levels rose on Monday and Tuesday, and the familiar choreography of another British political crisis began to play out—ministerial resignations, spiky statements on X—the collateral damage that Starmer had warned against started to encroach, once again, upon the scene. The pound fell against the dollar. The stock market tottered. The interest rate on thirty-year British government bonds rose to its highest level since 1998.
By Wednesday morning, a jittery calm had returned. Starmer’s realism—or obstinacy, depending on your point of view—had seen off an immediate challenge. None of his senior Cabinet ministers had resigned. Streeting, who was thought the most eager to break cover, walked into Downing Street for an early-morning confrontation with the Prime Minister. Reporters standing outside timed the meeting at sixteen or seventeen minutes. Either way, Streeting left without a word.
The main reason that the crisis had paused was that Wednesday was set aside for one of Westminster’s grand ceremonial occasions: when the monarch opens the new parliamentary session. I arrived at Downing Street not long after Streeting left. The roads were closed to traffic, and there was the sound of marching bands. Overnight, indentations in the tarmac had been filled with sand, to ease the passing of the royal carriages. Tall soldiers in bearskin caps shuffled a few inches to the left, or right, to give the parade its proper visual proportions. There was a sudden spring shower, which stiffened into rain. Just after 10:30 A.M., Starmer’s motorcade swept out, and the band played “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
The rain had cleared by the time King Charles came past, half an hour later. In Parliament Square, the music was drowned out by the peals of Westminster Abbey. The Household Cavalry, on dark horses and with brightly shining breastplates, trotted past, jingling like a cutlery drawer. The King rode in the Irish State Coach, built in 1852, accompanied by the royal Bargemaster. The machinery of the British state is still a sombre, stirring thing to behold. Inside, in accordance with custom, the King sat on a throne in the House of Lords and read out the government’s legislative program for the year ahead, as if it were his own. “My government will respond to this world with strength and aim to create a country that is fair for all,” he said. There were thirty-seven bills in all, covering everything from leasehold reform to a new form of digital I.D. card. Few of them were contentious; even fewer were particularly ambitious.
The scene was impressive but beside the point. There have been a dozen political crises in Britain in the past decade, when Prime Ministers have fallen, elections have been called, and helicopters clattered overhead. But what is different about the downfall of Starmer, which is now under way, has been the timidity of his premiership, its chronic self-doubt, as if its voice were permanently stuck in its throat. For almost two years, Labour has enjoyed a working majority of a hundred and sixty-five seats in the House of Commons—allowing it the kind of political freedom that other centrist governments around the world can only dream of—and yet all it has managed to do is trip over itself. As the King intoned the details of Starmer’s legislative agenda, no one in the chamber really believed that the Prime Minister would be around to implement it. “I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels,” the King said. Starmer will be replaced, most likely by Burnham, before Labour has to face the public at a general election. When the ceremony was over, news spread on people’s phones that Streeting was getting ready to mount his challenge. He resigned on Thursday to start this campaign. “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift,” Streeting wrote. Power in Britain has never felt as hollow as this. ♦