Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said it is a personal decision for Sir Keir Starmer whether he would fight any future Labour leadership contest. Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, she argued Sir Keir has ‘shown before that he’s up for a fight’ and said she would not write off the prime minister.
The PM has resisted calls to resign after almost 90 Labour MPs urged him to step down and five ministers quit in recent days. Nandy, who represents Wigan and is an ally of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, also expressed support for Burnham returning to Parliament and having a role at the centre of government.
Burnham is seeking to stand for Labour in the Makerfield by-election and is widely expected to launch a leadership challenge if he wins. If a leadership contest happens, Sir Keir would automatically appear on the ballot and has indicated he would stand.
Asked whether Sir Keir should be replaced, Nandy replied no and said she would not remain in his cabinet if she believed otherwise. She said Labour was elected to bring an end to ‘chaos’ and stressed the decision to run would be for the prime minister alone. Nandy said she had not spoken to him over the weekend but had done so several times during the past week, and pointed to his 2024 landslide victory as evidence of his willingness to fight.
At the same time, she acknowledged that recent poor election results showed voters feel Labour has not shown enough fight. ‘People want to see us on the pitch fighting harder, speaking louder and doing more,’ she said, describing feedback she heard while campaigning with Burnham in Makerfield.
Nandy, who stood against Sir Keir for the Labour leadership in 2020, ruled out running in any future contest herself.
The by-election developments include Labour MP Josh Simons saying he would step down to make way for Burnham, and allies of Sir Keir signalling the prime minister would not try to block Burnham’s return to Parliament. Nandy warned it would be a tough contest: Reform UK performed strongly in the area in recent local elections.
Labour won Makerfield in 2024 with a majority of 5,399, but Reform UK has led national polls since last year. Local vote shares are hard to compare precisely because ward boundaries do not match the constituency, though Reform UK took roughly half the vote in the area during the local elections. Burnham’s supporters point to his strong personal backing across Greater Manchester, where he has won three successive mayoral landslides, and say that personal appeal could win back voters who did not back Labour in the local contests.
Simons told the programme that losing Makerfield would be ‘existential’ for Labour, framing the contest as a test of whether the party can regain the trust of working-class voters. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch dismissed the debate over personalities, saying the problem is the Labour Party itself.
The UK’s relationship with the EU is likely to surface in any leadership fight. Labour MP Wes Streeting said leaving the EU had been a ‘catastrophic mistake’ and argued the UK should ‘one day’ rejoin, while Burnham has suggested rejoining might be appropriate in the long term but is not advocating that in the by-election campaign.
Nandy, who campaigned for Remain in 2016, warned that rejoining the EU would not by itself resolve long-standing regional economic problems. She said voters in towns like Wigan have suffered from deindustrialisation and a decline in living standards and that addressing those issues, not just EU membership, must be central to Labour’s agenda.
