Embattled UK prime minister Keir Starmer will on Monday put closer ties for Britain with the European Union at the centre of his pitch to save his job, as internal rivals circle him following the Labour Party’s dire performance in elections last week.
Starmer is facing into a crunch Monday with his future on the line, as backbenchers threaten to start a leadership contest while he prepares to deliver a fightback speech in London.
Up to 40 Labour MPs have publicly called on him to quit after Labour lost 1,500 council seats in England, most of them to Nigel Farage’s populist right wingers Reform UK and also to the Green Party.
Labour’s century-long dominance of Welsh politics also ended as the nationalists of Plaid Cymru trounced Labour in parliamentary elections for the Senedd, while the Scottish National Party won its fifth Holyrood election in a row, leaving Labour far behind in joint-second place with Reform.
Members of Starmer’s cabinet have so far offered him varying degrees of backing, but former junior minister in the UK’s foreign office Catherine West has threatened to spark a leadership campaign on Monday if other, more senior Labour figures don’t tell Starmer his time is up.
While many of the Labour MP’s calling for Starmer’s head include long-time critics of him, they also include former loyalists such as Josh Simons, a former minister who said on Sunday that Starmer had “lost the country”.
Before becoming an MP, Simons used to run the Labour Together think tank that helped to mastermind Starmer’s rise to power. It had previously been run by Corkman Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer’s closest political ally until he quit in recent months.
Starmer’s main internal rivals for the leadership of the party, including Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, have mostly held back on direct criticism of the prime minister. However, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner warned Starmer on Sunday that his government was in “last chance” territory.
Rayner also called on the party’s ruling national executive committee, which is stuffed with leadership loyalists, not to stand in the way of a Westminster return for Burnham. He cannot formally challenge Starmer unless he wins a byelection and returns to Westminster as an MP.
“If Burnham was in parliament it would be all over [for Starmer],” one MP told The Irish Times at the weekend.
Allies of the Manchester mayor in Labour’s parliamentary party were also trying to get West to call off her threat to force an early leadership contest, as Burnham would not be able to contest it. She would need the formal backing of about 81 MPs to force a contest and Labour sources speculated she might struggle to hit that target on Monday.
If there were an early leadership contest, Starmer could also face a challenge from cabinet members such as the UK’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, or even former leader Ed Miliband, a standard bearer of the Labour left who insists he doesn’t want to challenge Starmer but may be urged to do so by opponents of Streeting.
If Burnham cannot stand, Rayner would also be expected to consider a challenge although she has outstanding tax issues that would present an obstacle.
Starmer, meanwhile, is expected to give a defiant speech on Monday morning in which he will promise to put Britain back “at the heart of Europe”.
The prime minister is expected to say “incremental change won’t cut it”. He is set to accuse Reform leader Farage and the Conservatives of being “defined by breaking our relationship with Europe”.
“This Labour government will be defined by rebuilding [the] relationship,” he is to say.