Sir Keir Starmer woke to a Cabinet divided over the most basic question a government’s top team can face: should the prime minister continue in office? The split at the top is intolerable in the long run — ministers must either resign or be dismissed, or the prime minister himself must step down.
Ministers who went into last night’s meetings came away with very different counsel. Some urged him to fight on; others advised setting out a clear timetable for leaving; and a number of colleagues, while weighing his options, tried to help him plot how he might manage the unfolding crisis.
Over the past day the dam appears to have burst: Labour MPs are increasingly going public with expressions of no confidence, doing so with a frequency that has made counting them difficult. The reaction to the prime minister’s crunch speech on Monday was immediate and corrosive. One MP privately described it as devastatingly poor; others have been even more blunt in public.
Many in the parliamentary party fear Sir Keir is deeply unattractive to swathes of voters just as Labour wrestles with how to counter Reform UK. At the same time, there are MPs who are appalled by the implosion they are being asked to defend — and who would prefer the crisis did not exist at all. Several have warned that, with an international conflict under way, economic pressures linked to tensions with Iran and volatile gilt markets, preserving stability should not be underestimated.
People close to the prime minister say he remains determined to stay. He believes a drawn-out leadership contest would be damaging for both party and country, risking a successor who lacks a clear democratic mandate because they would not have been chosen by a general election.
But the arithmetic he faces looks bleak, and the political mood around him is darkening. Friction within the Labour movement has hardened: rival camps are briefing against one another and the blame game is already under way.
Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting promised to be among the most uncomfortable and consequential in living memory. Around the table sit ministers handpicked by the prime minister who now disagree over how long he should remain in office.
A personal note: it is four years this week since I became Political Editor. In that time I have reported on four prime ministers — Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer — a pace of change that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago. I was 27 before I had seen four prime ministers in my lifetime; that point came in 2007 with Gordon Brown. In the quarter-century before that there were only three: Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.
Short-lived leadership and rapid turnover at Number 10 have become the new normal — and neither a large parliamentary majority nor a long spell out of office protects a party from that reality.
