Keir Starmer's premiership entered its most dangerous week on Tuesday with three junior ministers resigning before the morning cabinet meeting and 75 Labour MPs — by a Sky News count circulated to lobby journalists before noon — on the record calling for the prime minister to set a date for his departure. A formal leadership challenge requires nominations from 20 per cent of the parliamentary party, or 81 MPs of the 403 currently sitting on Labour's benches.
The trigger was Thursday's local-election performance, in which Labour shed roughly 480 councillors and lost overall control of seven councils including its long-standing strongholds of Sunderland, Sandwell and Cardiff. Reform UK overtook Labour in vote share for the first time in any nationwide contest, and the Green Party — whose support has been concentrated in younger urban seats — broke double digits.
The three ministerial resignations — Sarah Owen from the Department for Levelling Up, Jonathan Ashworth's deputy at the Cabinet Office, and a parliamentary under-secretary at Defra — were timed for the start of cabinet. Owen, in a letter to Starmer made public at 8:14am, wrote that "the patience of the parliamentary party and the country has been exhausted" and asked the prime minister to "consider his position with dignity and on his own terms".
Starmer's response, delivered to cabinet shortly after 9am and immediately briefed out by Downing Street, was a refusal to discuss timetables: "I am going to get on with governing." Aides confirmed that he intends to deliver Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday as scheduled. His allies are openly arguing that no challenger has yet declared and no nomination paper has reached the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
The leading potential challengers — Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham — have all been silent in public. Streeting is widely tipped to mount the most serious challenge; Burnham, who would need to win a by-election before he could even seek the necessary 81 nominations, is the long-shot option. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday morning that Streeting had spent Sunday and Monday in private conversations with senior MPs to test the level of support.
The mechanics of any contest are now Whitehall's favourite parlour game. If 81 MPs sign a nomination paper, a contest is triggered automatically; if the prime minister resigns first, the National Executive Committee sets a timetable. In either case the campaign is expected to last between three and six weeks and use an alternative-vote ballot first of MPs and then of party members, in line with the rule book changes Starmer himself pushed through in 2022.
Markets, sensitive to the prospect of a renewed fiscal debate, edged lower. The pound slipped 0.6 per cent against the dollar to $1.2412 in London afternoon trade. Gilts widened, with the ten-year benchmark adding three basis points. Sterling has lost more than 4 per cent against the dollar since the start of the year as the Iran war and the gilt market's discomfort with the autumn fiscal plan have combined.
The wider political question — whether Labour's problem is Starmer himself or the structural difficulty of governing through wartime inflation — has not yet broken open. For now the parliamentary arithmetic favours the prime minister: 75 names is six short of the threshold, and four of the names on the published list have privately told whips they are still open to persuasion. The next major test is Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday at noon.