Updated 15 May
Less than two years ago Keir Starmer rode to power in a landslide election victory that saw the Labour Party win more than 400 seats in the House of Commons, a majority of 175 over all other parties combined. Last week he presided over the largest mid-term election loss in Labour’s history, halving the party’s vote share. This week his colleagues looked poised to start the process of electing a new leader, who would become the UK’s sixth prime minister in seven years.
Britain doesn’t have American-style mid-term elections, of course: last week’s voting was for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and local authorities in England. But Labour’s extraordinary rout has seismic implications for national politics. If the results were replicated in a general election, Britain’s next prime minister would almost certainly be Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right populist party Reform UK, chief architect of the Brexit referendum and figurehead of the anti–European Union “Leave” campaign.
Projected nationally, Reform’s 26 per cent vote last week would see it comfortably ahead of the newly populist and leftist Greens, who finished in second place on 18 per cent. Labour would limp in joint third with the Conservatives on just 17 per cent, with the centrist Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent.
Britain doesn’t need to hold a general election till June 2029, so none of that is imminent. But it already marks an extraordinary turn in British politics. Less than a decade ago, in the general election of 2017, the country’s two major political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, won 82 per cent of the popular vote between them, with the Liberal Democrats on 7 per cent. The remainder was shared mainly between the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists and the separate Northern Ireland parties. The Greens won just 1.6 per cent (and one seat). Reform’s predecessor, the UK Independence Party, won 1.3 per cent, and no seats.
Now Britain has entered the uncharted waters of seven-party politics. Not only that: the most popular two parties are on the far right and the left, and neither has any experience of government. The Conservative Party is facing an even more existential threat than Labour, having effectively been replaced by Reform as the principal party on the right of British politics.
Britain’s antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system looks likely to buckle under the strain. Labour’s victory two years ago was broad but shallow, with a vote share of less than 34 per cent. Depending on how the various parties’ votes are distributed across constituencies, Reform could win a parliamentary majority in 2029 with just 27 per cent of public support (and less if non-voters are included). That risks looking not merely disproportionate, but illegitimate.
Last week’s results have sent shockwaves through the Labour Party. It has been the dominant party in Wales since 1922 and has governed there continuously since the devolution settlement of 1998. (Wales and Scotland have devolved powers comparable to those of Australian states.) Last week its representation in the Welsh parliament, the Senedd, fell from forty-four seats to nine, and it was beaten by both the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, which will now form the Welsh government for the first time, and Reform UK.
In Scotland, Labour looked on course two years ago to retake the government from the Scottish Nationalists, or SNP, who have ruled since 2007. But last week it lost a fifth of its seats and had the humiliation not just of seeing the SNP retain power with fifty-seven out of the parliament’s 129 seats, but also of ending up level with Reform in second place with seventeen.
In the local elections in England (which are also contested between the national parties), Labour shed more than 1400 council seats, the worst result in its history, and lost more than half the authorities it controlled. The defeats came thick and fast, right across the country, with seats and councils lost to Reform in many of Labour’s traditional working-class heartlands, and even more voters lost to the Greens in London and other cities.
Labour’s door-to-door canvassers reported the same message from the public in every constituency. Voters are angry that the cost of living seems to be rising without end, with skyrocketing energy prices, unaffordable rents and food prices increasingly reflecting the impact of the Iran war. (Charities warn that millions of families are going without food to make ends meet.) Labour was elected on the slogan of “change,” but little change seems visible: healthcare waiting lists are still high (though falling), town centres still depressed, potholes still unrepaired.
Most of all, though, the public has taken against Keir Starmer. He is now on some measures the most unpopular prime minister since such records began, with a public approval rating between minus 50 and minus 57 per cent. Even more significant is the personal vitriol meted out on the doorstep: for reasons no one can quite explain, Starmer is viscerally loathed by very large proportions of the public.
It’s this personal animus heard by Labour MPs in their constituencies that has led many of them to move against him. By Tuesday this week eighty-seven MPs had called publicly for him to stand down, four junior ministers had resigned from the government, and several cabinet members had apparently told him privately that he could not carry on. The media were delightedly reporting on the content of Labour MPs’ WhatsApp groups and the plotting of potential leadership challengers.
Starmer declared he had no intention of resigning of his own free will. On Monday he sought to save his premiership with a speech inevitably billed as his “most important ever.” Declaring that he took responsibility for the election losses but was determined to stay on and “prove my doubters wrong,” he announced policies he hoped would represent a new start: nationalisation of the stricken British Steel company, moving the UK back to “the heart of Europe” and a new youth employment guarantee.
It didn’t work. The reaction of his MPs was almost universally negative. Indeed, in many ways the speech exemplified the problem. He said nothing about the issue most of concern to voters, the cost of living. And none of the policy announcements was actually new: each had been trailed before. The “back at the heart of Europe” claim was just empty rhetoric: so far from committing to rejoin the EU, as many in his party have urged, Starmer couldn’t even bring himself to say that the government would seek to rejoin the EU’s Customs Union or Single Market, which would at least be meaningful steps to stimulate economic growth.
Starmer emphasised his commitment to traditional Labour values, but still offered no overarching vision or story by which his government or his personal beliefs might be defined. He acknowledged Labour needed to offer people more “hope.” But as one Labour observer bitterly noted, acknowledging it is not the demand being made of him. People want him actually to do something that offers it.
Two paths are available for the party to remove Starmer. One is for more ministers to resign from his government, making his position untenable. That is how Boris Johnson was persuaded to leave office in 2022. You can’t be PM if no one will serve under you. If that happens, Starmer could say he will resign in September, say, and initiate a party leadership election to identify a successor by then.
Alternatively, Labour’s rules make an election mandatory if one-fifth of the Parliamentary Labour Party (currently that means eighty-one MPs) declare in favour of a challenger. Starmer could then choose whether to contest it or not.
Two people have long seemed the most likely challengers. On the Blairite right of the Labour Party, the combative health secretary Wes Streeting has been accused for some time of preparing a leadership bid (a charge he has of course denied). On the party’s left the overwhelming favourite is the popular mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.
Burnham is not just liked within the Labour Party. He is by far the most popular politician in the country. He was a minister in the last Labour government under Gordon Brown and stood for the Labour leadership in both 2010 and 2015 (in the latter case when it was won by left-winger Jeremy Corbyn). But he resigned his seat in 2017 to become the mayor of Britain’s fourth-largest city.
In that role he has been a vociferous champion of devolved government and especially for the interests of the North of England. Manchester has enjoyed an investment boom, and Burnham’s policies of integrated public transport and social housing have been widely admired. He has been re-elected twice, the last time, in 2024, with a remarkable two-thirds of the popular vote.
Affectionately known as the “King of the North,” Burnham has an ability to speak to voters in a manner unmatched by any other British politician. Over the last year he has articulated a political project he has called “Manchesterism,” founded on the belief that if governments are to control the cost of living they need to own the major price levers. He favours not just integrated public transport under local authorities, but rent controls, mass public house-building and public ownership — in some form — of the energy and water sectors.
While this is not yet a fully fledged program for government, these ideas and Burnham’s popularity have made him the leading candidate of Labour’s centre-left — but only if he can get back into parliament first. Only MPs can stand for the leadership.
And this is where his problem lies. Just a couple of months ago Burnham successfully encouraged a Labour MP in Manchester to resign their seat, creating a by-election for which Burnham put himself up to be the candidate. But Starmer blocked his candidature, demanding that Labour’s National Executive Committee, or NEC, refuse him permission to give up the Manchester mayoralty. The Greens subsequently took the seat. Polls suggested that, had Burnham been the candidate, he would have won it.
So the questions on everyone’s lips this week were: can Burnham persuade another Manchester MP to fall on their sword for the greater good? If so, would Starmer and the NEC change their minds and allow him to stand? And when is Streeting going to announce he has eighty-one MPs on his side and initiate a leadership election – before Burnham can get back into parliament?
After days of feverish speculation, on Thursday both Streeting and Burnham made their moves. At lunchtime Streeting resigned from cabinet, issuing a scathing letter of criticism of Starmer’s leadership. A few hours later a Labour MP in Greater Manchester said he was resigning his seat to allow Burnham to return to parliament, and Burnham declared he would put himself up for the consequent by-election.
But it didn’t then go the way the media has assumed. Much to everyone’s surprise, Streeting didn’t trigger a leadership election. On the contrary, he said that he thought that in any such contest Andy Burnham should be able to stand. It almost looked like they were collaborating.
So there is no leadership election for now. Rather, there is a very difficult by-election for Burnham to win. Members of Labour’s NEC have already said they will not stand in his way this time. But the constituency of Makerfield, which lies on the edge of Greater Manchester, voted Reform in last week’s local elections. The party took all the council seats available on a vote share of 50 per cent, more than double Labour’s 23 per cent. Burnham is by no means guaranteed to win.
In a curious way, whether he does or not will settle the leadership question. If Burnham loses to Reform he is finished: no longer mayor and not an MP. But if he wins, he will have proved precisely what his party want to know: that this is indeed the leader who can defeat Reform and win the 2029 general election, an election last week’s results showed Labour under Keir Starmer would almost certainly lose.
At that point — the by-election will be on 18 June — Labour MPs and members won’t need convincing that Starmer should stand down. Either he goes of his own accord, setting out an orderly timetable for Burnham to become leader and prime minister, or Burnham will challenge him and he will be defeated in a membership vote.
Starmer’s one hope of remaining in office is therefore that Burnham loses the by-election and he then fends off an alternative challenge from Streeting. It’s not a good look for a prime minister to want to see his party defeated, just to save his own skin. •
