London
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer is fighting to keep his job after his appeal for a “reset,” following disastrous results in last week’s local elections, was met with scores of lawmakers in his governing Labour Party calling for him to quit.
In a speech to the Labour faithful in London, Starmer said he took responsibility for the heavy losses in councils across England and in elections for the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. But he vowed to stay in his job, saying a change in leadership would plunge Britain into the “chaos” that flourished under the Conservative Party, which ousted two leaders in the two years before Starmer took office.
“What we witnessed with the last government was the chaos of constantly changing leaders, and it cost this country a huge amount,” Starmer said Monday morning. “A Labour government would never be forgiven for inflicting that on our country again.”
Yet by Monday evening, the Labour Party appeared to be on the brink of doing just that. More than 70 Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) have publicly urged Starmer to resign as prime minister or set out a timetable for his departure, while several have quit as ministerial aides. If Starmer chooses to step aside, or is ousted, his successor would become Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade.
Despite winning a landslide election in 2024, the British public soured on Starmer almost as soon as he took office. Attacked from the right over his perceived failure to control illegal immigration, from the left over unpopular economic policies – and by many across the political spectrum over his lack of charisma and political vision – Starmer’s position had been deteriorating for months.
Last week’s local election results – which saw Labour lose more than 1,400 seats across English councils and control of the Welsh parliament, where it had been the largest party for decades – appear to have convinced dozens of Labour lawmakers that Starmer is not capable of winning the next general election, due by the summer of 2029.
Although Starmer has repeatedly vowed to fight on, his party has ways of making him walk. His opponents need 81 signatures – equivalent to a fifth of Labour’s seats in parliament – in support of a challenger to trigger a leadership election among the party’s membership.
Unlike the Conservative Party, however, Labour does not have a history of regicide; the party has never mounted an official challenge against a sitting prime minister. When Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister in 2007, in part due to divisions in the party over the Iraq War, his long-anointed successor, Gordon Brown, was elected unopposed to take over as prime minister and party leader.
This time would likely be messier. It is not clear if any of Starmer’s rivals have the signatures required to mount a challenge, and many of the potential frontrunners are either untested or mired in scandal.
Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister who resigned last year over her failure to pay the correct amount of property tax, has not formally announced that she will challenge Starmer as leader, despite being considered a serious contender. In a statement on Sunday, she called on Starmer to “meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.”
In his Monday morning speech, Starmer tried to do that. “Like every prime minister, I have learned a lot in the first two years in the job in terms of the policy changes that our country faces. Incremental changes won’t cut it,” he said.
Starmer would not be the first leader to suffer disastrous local election results after two years in office, before winning a second term at the next a general election. The Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lost more than 1,000 council seats across England in 1981 local elections, before winning in a landslide in the 1983 general election. Blair lost more than 1,000 council seats in 1999, before winning his second landslide in the general election two years later.
But if Starmer was hoping that the promise of more radical change could force this history to repeat itself, the change he promised was far from radical. He promised to move Britain closer to Europe, following years of antagonistic relations over Brexit – the policy championed by Nigel Farage, the leader of the hard-right Reform UK party that surged in last week’s local elections.
Asked for specifics about his vision for Britain’s relationship to Europe, Starmer said only that he wanted to take a “big leap forward” at a summit with the European Union this year.
For many Labour MPs, such responses were typical of Starmer’s perceived timidity. As dozens of lawmakers published letters calling on Starmer to step aside, many cited his lack of ambition and clear political vision.
By late Monday evening, those pressuring Starmer to resign reportedly included members of his cabinet, not just backbenchers. The BBC reported that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is among a number of cabinet ministers to have urged Starmer to set out a timetable for his resignation. The cabinet will meet in Downing Street early Tuesday morning.
