Bruised, battered, but still in post. There is a world – unthinkable at some points last week – where Sir Keir Starmer could still be in No 10 this autumn.
The premier who oversaw greater rights for sitting tenants could be in the position of prime minister longer than many people in his own party want him to stay. Would be-successors face multiple hurdles just to get to the start of a leadership race.
As Starmer pointed out at last week’s Cabinet meeting, no challenger candidate yet exists. Former health secretary Wes Streeting may claim he’s running to be Labour leader, but even kicking off a bid depends on swathes of sitting ministers resigning their jobs to make up the 81 MP names to nominate him.
Meanwhile, Andy Burnham faces even more obstacles. The Greater Manchester Mayor needs to first get selected for Makerfield on Tuesday, although no one seriously expects that to be a problem. But he faces a much steeper battle to hold on to the seat for Labour.
The constituency near Wigan is a traditional Labour seat, and the party won it in the 2024 general election with 45.2 per cent of the vote, but Reform UK came second, trailing Labour by just 5,400 votes or 31.8 per cent of the vote. Crucially, more people voted for Reform than in any other seat that Labour won across the country.
But an even more telling statistic is how 64 per cent of its voters opted to leave the European Union in 2016. Gains for Reform at the local elections showed voters are still thinking along Brexit lines: at Wigan Borough Council, Reform won 24 out of the 25 available seats.
Labour sources said they expected Reform to field Robert Kenyon, who stood in the seat in 2024 and finished second. Ten days ago, the Army reservist and plumber won his council seat with more than twice as many votes as his Labour rival. With Reform’s considerable spending power behind him, the Muay Thai kickboxing enthusiast would be a formidable opponent. Reform declined to comment on their candidate selection, which is expected by the end of Wednesday.
On Saturday, Streeting pulled out the pin of the Brexit grenade with his teeth and lobbed it at Burnham by speeling out his desire for the UK to “one day” rejoin the EU, a direct appeal to Labour’s base who have been tempted by the Greens or Liberal Democrats. This month, a poll for the website LabourList found 65 per cent of Labour members believe the party should include a commitment to rejoin in its next election manifesto, compared with only 24 per cent who were opposed.
From where Burnham stands, however, there is zero mileage in relitigating Brexit. He afforded the subject fewer than 10 seconds in a Monday speech. “My view is Brexit has been damaging, but the last thing we should do is revisit these arguments,” he told an investment summit in Leeds. “I’m not proposing the UK [should] rejoin the EU. I respect the referendum.”
That’s some distance from what he told a home crowd of Labour Party activists at the party’s annual conference last autumn. “Long term, I’m going to be honest, I’m going to say it, I want to rejoin it. Look, I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin the European Union,” Burnham said back then.
And even if Nigel Farage – who rarely mentions Brexit these days – decides not to talk about it on the doorstep, there are other weaknesses Reform can exploit. Grooming gangs are a local issue. Maggie Oliver, a former detective constable who resigned in 2013 over Greater Manchester Police’s handling of an investigation into the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, has warned Burnham had failed to “grasp the nettle” over grooming gangs.
Even so, there are signs Burnham recognises the fight he is in by pledging to “reindustrialise” deprived areas of the UK; one of Reform’s key talking points. “This is the choice in this by-election. Do you want Makerfield and the North to stay on the same path it’s been for the last 40 years, or do you want a new path which brings the country back together and makes it work for everyone?” Burnham said.
Starmer spent the weekend at Chequers at the end of a bruising week which put his premiership in greater peril than ever before. But he seems to have regrouped. On Monday morning, the Prime Minister visited Labour headquarters to thank party officials for their work in the local and national elections, and to tell staff he was focused on getting on with the job.
In other words, he is not setting a timetable for his departure. All the signs from last week are that the Prime Minister intends to fight as hard as possible to stay in office. Claims swirling about Labour circles that Starmer’s own senior advisers had told him to set out a framework were firmly rebutted by Downing Street.
Also running through the minds of Starmer’s allies is polling, which shows that if Burnham fails to win the by-election, Starmer could defeat Streeting in a leadership contest. A Survation poll of Labour members showed Starmer would beat Streeting by 58-23 per cent. There are also Cabinet ministers and Labour MPs who don’t view Burnham with quite the same veneration as his admirers would have you believe.
In the meantime, some of the Cabinet are behaving like characters in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Labour’s Deputy Leader Lucy Powell were out and about with Burnham this weekend knocking on doors. Both are proclaiming loyalty to Starmer and still serving in his Cabinet, while simultaneously telling voters to back Burnham. This is the bloke who is risking a Labour seat in a self-inflicted by-election purely to come for their boss’s job. Imagine a normal person explaining that one to HR.
Starmer seems to have signed up to this double think, too. He told party staffers he would support the party’s candidate “whoever they are” in the fight between “Labour versus Reform”.
But Starmer knows time is on his side. He may be weak, but he’s still in post. No one can yet challenge him. Ninety-eight Labour MPs have publicly said Starmer should go, but that’s only a quarter of the parliamentary party. There is an equal number who want him to carry on.
A Labour source out door-knocking with Burnham at the weekend said voters’ reactions had been “mixed”. Why would Starmer stand aside? Wait and see what happens to Burnham, first. One fight at a time.
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