Wes Streeting is preparing to resign as Health Secretary and challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party, his allies told the Times and Bloomberg on Wednesday morning. Streeting is expected to announce his decision as early as Thursday, opening a contest at the moment the parliamentary arithmetic is most fluid.
Streeting arrived at Downing Street at 7:42am for what aides described as a "short meeting" with the prime minister, leaving the building at 8:01am. Neither side briefed the substance afterwards. The encounter was overshadowed by the State Opening of Parliament later in the morning, where King Charles delivered a Starmer-drafted speech centred on national security, defence and energy.
Eighty-one MPs — 20 per cent of the 403-strong parliamentary party — would be required to trigger a formal contest under Labour's rules. Sky News's running count on Tuesday afternoon put the on-the-record number of Labour MPs calling for Starmer to step down at 75; by Wednesday morning the lobby-journalist tally had ticked up to 79 after Stephen Doughty and Jess Phillips added their names overnight.
A Streeting resignation, his allies have privately argued, would tip the count past 81 within hours by giving cover to MPs who have so far held back. The health secretary spent Sunday and Monday in private conversations with senior MPs to test support; one mid-ranking shadow front-bench source told the Times that "a clear majority" of those approached said they would sign a nomination paper if Streeting moved first.
Starmer's allies on Wednesday morning continued the line he set on Tuesday: that he intends to "get on with governing" and that no nomination paper has reached the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The prime minister's spokesperson, briefing reporters at Downing Street before the King's Speech, declined to address the Streeting reporting directly. Starmer is scheduled to take Prime Minister's Questions at noon on Wednesday.
Markets responded immediately. The pound slipped 0.4 per cent against the dollar to $1.2362 in London morning trade, with gilt yields adding two basis points on the ten-year benchmark. Sterling has lost roughly 4.6 per cent against the dollar since the start of the year as the Iran war and the gilt market's discomfort with Chancellor Rachel Reeves's autumn fiscal plan have combined.
Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan chief executive, added a separate political note from London on Wednesday morning when he told CNBC that the bank would "rethink" its new London office expansion if the "very smart" Starmer was ousted. The remarks were widely read in Westminster as a calculated piece of pre-emption, and several Streeting-aligned MPs privately said they found the intervention counter-productive.
The mechanics of a contest, if one were triggered, would use an alternative-vote ballot first of MPs and then of party members, in line with the rule book changes Starmer himself drove through in 2022. A three- to six-week campaign is the broadly expected length. Streeting is the favourite in the betting markets, with Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner the second-most-likely contender and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham — who would need to win a by-election before he could seek nominations — the long shot.