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Cabinet allies of Sir Keir Starmer have urged Labour MPs to back the prime minister and avoid a leadership contest, as the ruling party braces itself for devastating results in local elections on Thursday.
The interventions by transport secretary Heidi Alexander and housing secretary Steve Reed come as intrigue swirls in Westminster about Starmer facing a challenge in the aftermath of the elections in Scotland, Wales and 136 English councils next week.
Analysts predict Labour may suffer its worst performance in local election history, shedding swaths of votes to Reform on the right and the Greens on the left. Labour is set to chalk up a net loss of about 1,850 council seats, according to a forecast by Conservative pollster Lord Robert Hayward.
Polling suggests Starmer’s party is also on track to cede control of Wales for the first time since devolution in 1999, and could be pushed into third place in Scotland behind the Scottish National Party and Reform.
Supporters of health secretary Wes Streeting, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham are talking up their prospects of replacing Starmer in the event of dire results.
But Alexander on Sunday warned that any leadership contest would be “self-indulgent” and “wrong”, and called on colleagues urging such a move “to give their head a gentle wobble”.
Changing the party leader would mean repeating the “mistakes that the Conservative government made in churning through prime ministers”, Alexander told Sky News.
Tory MPs ousted three consecutive prime ministers — Baroness Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — before Rishi Sunak was removed from office in the 2024 general election, when Labour won a landslide.
Alexander said voters would not reward Labour if it “turned into some sort of self-indulgent debating society”, stressing that Starmer was “the best person to lead our country”.
Her comments came after Reed warned MPs that considering ditching the prime minister in the wake of Thursday’s elections “would be madness”.
Urging colleagues to demonstrate loyalty, Reed told The Times: “When we turn in on ourselves, we’re basically telling the British public that we’re making ourselves irrelevant.”
Starmer has come under heavy pressure in recent months over his decision to appoint Lord Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US. The scandal has already led to the exit of his top aide and highlighted wider dysfunction in his administration.
But both Alexander and Reed echoed Downing Street’s line of argument about Starmer being best placed to lead against the volatile geopolitical backdrop, citing his deft manoeuvring to keep Britain out of the Iran war.
Burnham put his head above the parapet last Wednesday to demand the party take a “different course” and floated the idea of higher defence spending funded by borrowing outside the fiscal rules — a proposal viewed as a bid by the soft-left politician to appeal to Labour’s right flank.
Support for Streeting, who is on the right of the party, has passed the threshold of 80 MPs willing to publicly back him, the number required to trigger a leadership race, according to media reports.
But Streeting hit back, accusing journalists of engaging in “fishing expeditions” that were fuelling unhelpful narratives. “Don’t feed it. It undermines all of us fighting elections locally,” he told a WhatsApp group of Labour MPs on Friday.
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Speculation is also rife that Starmer may invite Rayner, who is popular on the Labour left, back into the cabinet as part of a reshuffle aimed at resetting his leadership after Thursday’s elections.
Rayner quit as deputy prime minister and deputy Labour leader last autumn over a tax scandal that she has yet to settle with HM Revenue & Customs, presenting a big obstacle to any immediate leadership run.
While some Labour MPs who fear for their own future at the next general election are keen for a change of direction, not all Labour MPs believe a challenge is inevitable.
“There will be extremely choppy waters immediately after the elections, but my prediction is Keir somehow muddles through,” one said.
“Everyone thought there’d be a challenge by the end of the day, but the PM weathered it,” the MP added, referring to the leadership crisis that Starmer saw off in February when Scottish Labour’s head Anas Sarwar called for him to go.
Source:
www.ft.com