UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer makes his resignation statement outside 10 Downing Street in London, United Kingdom on June 22, 2026. Photo / Getty Images
Less than two years ago, Sir Keir Starmer was elected Prime Minister on a manifesto whose title promised just one thing: “Change.” Perhaps that was the problem.
Starmer had offered himself to the country as a new face after 14 years of chaos and paralysis in government – the opening paragraph of his manifesto essentially said “We are not the Tories” – but, beyond that promise to be someone else, he never seemed able to express his vision for the country nor show the leadership to deliver it.
“Change”, for Starmer, turned into more of a personal commandment. Battered on the left by the unions and an increasingly bolshy parliamentary party, and on the right by the surging populism of Reform UK that constantly led the polls, Starmer committed a series of policy about-turns that made him look weak and undermined his authority.
Meanwhile, the man who solemnly declared to “end the chaos of sleaze” called on the oily Peter Mandelson to forge what he thought might otherwise have been an impossible relationship with US President Donald Trump, given Starmer’s private resentment of just about everything Trump stands for and his ministers’ very public past criticisms of him. The desperation that prompted that appointment – apparently at all costs – severely weakened Starmer.
But it was the extraordinary election losses across the country last month, from the Senedd – where a century of Labour dominance in Wales was ended by Plaid Cymru – to more than 1000 council seats ceded to Reform, that brought to life the worst fears of Starmer’s detractors. It was a mere preview of the wipeout that a general election could bring, and set in motion the sequence of events that would lead to his defenestration.
Catherine West, the backbench MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet, declared that she would launch a leadership challenge if Starmer failed to stand aside. Her intervention provided cover for scores more MPs to issue similar statements – and for the resignation of senior ministers, including Wes Streeting. But there was no getting around the fact that the choice of successor favoured by many in the party was not eligible to stand in a contest. It was Josh Simons, the MP for Makerfield, who moved to change that, triggering a by-election that would allow Andy Burnham to return to Westminster and “drive the change our country is crying out for”.
Starmer’s journey to Downing Street was one of the most extraordinary political ascendancies. A human rights lawyer with scant experience of activism compared with most Labour politicians, he did not become a Member of Parliament until he was 52 and was standing for leader five years later. He had little base within the parliamentary party, no experience of negotiating in dark corners or building alliances.
“He got to the top without any political savvy,” says a politico on Labour’s centrist wing. “I’m not sure he even likes politics. He has an inability to read the room and did nothing to bring the parliamentary party with him. He picked all the wrong fights with all the wrong people at all the wrong times – and then lost them.”
Starmer seemed to acknowledge his lack of nous a few months after he was elected leader in 2020, when the former director of public prosecutions told the BBC that, as a lawyer, he was used to letting the facts speak for themselves. “In politics, it’s completely different because it’s a different art of persuasion,” he said. An art that he was unable or unwilling to learn.
At the beginning, Starmer’s lack of stardust was seen as a positive. After the chaos of the Boris Johnson years and Liz Truss weeks, as well as the shambles of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership that resembled a cult more than a pitch for power, Starmer’s strength was being unshowy. Some called him “Steer Calmer”. A boring helmsman was needed. But Starmer never learnt that you must take the controls in order to steer.
Famously the son of a toolmaker, whose childhood was clouded by his mother suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease, Starmer was driven by a sense of injustice and supporting the underdog but he had not been in politics for long enough to know how to sell a philosophy. When he ran to succeed Corbyn, his pitch was based on making “the moral case for socialism”, opposing austerity and tackling inequality.
One of his senior advisers in opposition explains this by saying that, after the party had been taken over by the hard-left, it would have been foolish to stand for the leadership on a platform that alienated the membership. However, the former aide insists Starmer genuinely entered politics to help the unprivileged. “He is a product of his upbringing. [It] moved him deeply.”
His 10-point platform in 2020 included increasing income tax for the top 5%, the abolition of tuition fees, common ownership of public services, and a Green New Deal. These were all popular with left-wing members, but would the public buy them? When Starmer became leader, Labour trailed the Tories by 26 percentage points. By the end of the year they were within sight, perhaps aided by government chaos in its handling of Covid, but the Tory lead had crept back into double figures in the spring. Moral socialism was not much more popular than Corbynism.
A tipping point was losing the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021. Angela Rayner, his deputy, bluntly told the press that voters didn’t know what the leader stood for. But what did they want him to stand for? Some in the party thought he should move more to the left; others argued that this was why they lost so badly at the 2019 general election and the result was no more than an aftershock of the Corbyn earthquake.
Affected by the criticism and a crisis of confidence, Starmer told aides that he wanted to resign. “I’m not fulfilling some life-long dream here,” he said. “I could happily work in a bookshop or something.” His wife, Victoria, persuaded him to stay, as did a think-tank director who would later become his chief of staff: Morgan McSweeney. But something would clearly have to change in the way he presented himself. Starmer adopted the old Groucho Marx joke: “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I’ve got others.”
As the general election approached, and especially when it became clear how badly the pandemic had wrecked the economy, Starmer realised he could not maintain many of his pledges and win public support. Moral socialism was ditched. The tax-and-spend ideas were watered down. “He was shaped by the circumstances he found himself in,” the adviser says. “Labour doesn’t win power very often and we had to look credible on the economy.”
The problem was that he didn’t or couldn’t explain this necessity to the party who had elected him leader. “He had to balance the books and that was coming up against the politics of a party that was not in the same place,” the same adviser says. “He understood that people want to be given opportunities to lift themselves, not to rely on the state, and sometimes the Left really misses that.”
The centrist source, who would prefer Wes Streeting to be leader, nonetheless gives Starmer credit for restoring sanity to the party. “We were unelectable after five years of Corbyn,” he says. “To turn that position around from not being able to win a core Red Wall seat to forming a government with a huge majority took discipline. But let’s be honest – the Tories being rubbish helped. The problem is, we started shooting ourselves in the foot as soon as we were in office.”
Labour’s majority after the 2024 election was large – 174 seats – but its support was not deep. Its vote share was just 33.7%, the lowest of any post-war governing party. Graham Stringer, a veteran backbencher, points out that things went wrong within weeks as, having made a virtue out of his party’s higher ethics, it was discovered that the Prime Minister, his deputy and the chancellor had all been accepting generous gifts of clothes, glasses and concert tickets from donors. “It wasn’t illegal,” Stringer says. “But it left a bad smell.”
Within weeks, Starmer’s opponents on the Right were accusing him of a “two-tier” approach to law and order after his repeated condemnations of the disorder and protests that followed the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on July 29 by Axel Rudakubana, about whom he seemed to say far less.
Economic arguments broke out from the off. Before the end of the first month, Starmer had removed the whip from seven MPs who signed an SNP amendment to scrap the two-child limit on child benefit, something Labour would do themselves a year later. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, also announced early on that she would be removing winter-fuel payments for 10 million pensioners. More than 50 Labour MPs refused to vote for it. Reeves would backtrack on this too.
Her first Budget in October 2024 went down badly, especially the rise in employers’ National Insurance contributions. The same month, Sue Gray, the civil servant old hand who had been appointed Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition with a mission to prepare Labour for government, was forced out after a power struggle in Downing Street and replaced by McSweeney. MPs complained about rude and high-handed treatment from Downing Street, and a tendency to lecture rather than lead. Further uproar came with the news of a deal to hand the Chagos Islands – including Diego Garcia, a joint UK-US military base – to Mauritius. The honeymoon was over.
About-turns now came regularly. Starmer was pressured into creating a national grooming gangs inquiry, having originally attacked Tory demands for one as “jumping on a bandwagon of the far-Right”; he had second thoughts about a compulsory digital ID system four months after announcing it; he cut the foreign aid budget despite a manifesto pledge to raise it; he made reversals on business rates for pubs and inheritance tax on farmers; and he dropped plans to postpone the elections of 30 local councils. Wherever opposition arose, he buckled. A Prime Minister with a majority of 174 had adopted the philosophy of Yes, Minister’s Jim Hacker: “I am their leader, I must follow them.”
Starmer even disowned his own rhetoric. After Reform’s good showing at the local elections last year (and perhaps conscious that he had little to show for his pledge to “smash” the gangs behind small boat crossings), he promised a significant fall in immigration by curbing judges’ powers to block deportations. But then he had to row back on a line in his speech that said “we risk becoming an island of strangers” when some complained that it was reminiscent of Enoch Powell. “I deeply regret using [that phrase],” Starmer said, rather than arguing the point he wanted to make. Reform leader Nigel Farage seized on the remark, saying that this was “absolute proof that Starmer has no beliefs, no principles and just reads from a script”.
Allies began to brief the press about their irritation at his lack of constancy and loyalty to his supporters. “One of the problems with U-turns is it makes people who defend the old position look silly,” says another of Starmer’s former advisers. “They become less willing to go out to bat for it.” Some Cabinet members openly grumbled about McSweeney’s influence, forcing the Prime Minister to order them to stop briefing against his chief of staff. “None of us would be sitting around this Cabinet table without him,” he said.
If the winter-fuel allowance made his MPs cross, that was not a patch on the reaction to £5bn of proposed cuts to disability benefits last June. “Taking money from pensioners frayed their loyalty, but on welfare it snapped,” the same adviser says. “Every Labour Prime Minister has problems with welfare reform, it’s like Europe for the Tories. It really requires careful handling.”
More than 120 MPs signed an amendment to the Government’s bill to wreck the policy, something that the adviser blames on Starmer and McSweeney’s failure to take time to persuade their MPs. The lawyer in him dealt in facts not emotions. “You have to sell it to the party,” the adviser says. “It’s a big deal for them. I can’t remember Starmer giving a speech to roll the wicket. Most of our MPs are pretty middle of the road but they could see who was going to get hit by the policy and thought that is not what they went into politics to do. The PM’s authority has never been reasserted since that moment.”
Attempted relaunches of his Government were overtaken by events. A September reset was drowned out by Rayner’s resignation after it emerged she had underpaid tax on a house purchase. Then came Peter Mandelson’s sacking as ambassador to the US, once details came out about his closeness to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – followed by his arrest five months later.
Under constant pressure at home, it is little surprise that the man who chose an atlas as his book for Desert Island Discs so heartily embraced foreign policy. He achieved some success as a statesman, forming, perhaps in part thanks to Mandelson’s efforts in Washington, a closer relationship with Trump than many expected and leading Nato’s “coalition of the willing” on Ukraine.
But that also brought him criticism and, as a result of dozens of overseas trips, the nickname of “Never Here Keir”. And the risk he took with Mandelson – insisting that the former Labour spin doctor should become Britain’s man in Washington despite his known connections to Epstein – would dramatically backfire. Starmer’s relationship with Trump, meanwhile, reached a low point, with the US president effectively kiboshing the Chagos deal in April by withdrawing his support, having already observed that the UK Prime Minister was no Sir Winston Churchill.
In the tradition of Prime Ministers in mortal danger Starmer has, in recent weeks, sought to hurriedly assemble something resembling a legacy, with a defence investment plan and an announcement that the Government will impose a social media ban on under-16s. But the defence proposals prompted the resignation of his highly regarded defence ministers, John Healey and Al Carns, over concerns that funding was nowhere near sufficient to protect Britain from its adversaries. And now Starmer’s successor will be able to take credit for the social media ban when it is introduced next year.
“I don’t think he is a bad man,” says Stringer of Starmer. He just did “a very difficult job, not very well”: “It was probably the most loyal parliamentary party when it was elected that there has ever been, with 211 new MPs. Most had been hand-picked and wanted to do nothing but support the Government. Those same people are now in despair about their seats.”
The thought of a massive reverse at the general election, even if it is still three years away, focuses the mind. Burnham’s comfortable win in Makerfield offers hope of what might be possible, but few think the result on his own turf and essentially standing on a platform to depose Starmer – could be replicated across the country. The Streeting supporter says that anyone with a majority of 3000 will be looking for another job. “I hate myself for saying this, but I find myself hoping the Tories will get better,” he says, “if only to reduce the number of Reform MPs.”
On July 5, 2024, Labour’s first Prime Minister for 14 years had stood on the steps of Downing Street and promised change. His administration would “end the chaos” that had blighted the previous government and bring brighter days.
Just over 19 months later, having lost his second chief of staff over his pushing for Mandelson to be made ambassador, and his fourth director of communications, the dark clouds and chaos were back. As he fought for his political life in February, during the fallout over Mandelson, Starmer told Downing Street staff: “The thing that makes me most angry is the undermining of the belief that politics can be a force for good and can change lives.”
Starmer’s failure to realise that he had done so much of the undermining significantly accelerated his downfall. While he was able to secure a brief extension thanks to the Cabinet deciding not to strike against him when he appeared at his most vulnerable in February, his leadership was severely wounded by the damning revelations that Mandelson got the job despite failing initial security checks.
Then last month’s local election results – effectively a mass revolt against Labour and its leadership – proved fatal. Countless Labour candidates said that voters railed against Starmer in doorstep conversations during the campaign. MPs and activists campaigning in Makerfield in recent weeks were under no illusion about the strength of feeling towards the Prime Minister. On Friday it fell to Harriet Harman – appointed by Starmer as an envoy only last month as he sought to shore up his position after the local election – to warn that the herd was “not just moving” but “stampeding” against him.
In his desperation to succeed, Starmer had become the epitome of the flaws he had railed against – and the public delivered its verdict. Now his party will be left to pick up the pieces.
- Daily Telegraph UK
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