Thursday briefing: ​Is this Starmer’s last stand?

Good morning. Going into yesterday, Keir Starmer’s to-do list might have looked rather simple: “Listen to king announce all my new policies. Draw a line under leadership nonsense. Keep calm, and carry on”. As-yet-still health secretary Wes Streeting appears to have had very different ideas, at least according to sources close to him. Streeting’s aides spent the day briefing that their man had the backing of enough MPs to launch a leadership bid, and that he was preparing his ministerial resignation. In the last couple of hours another plot twist emerged, as the Guardian revealed Angela Rayner has been cleared by HMRC over her tax affairs, clearing the way for a potential leadership bid. While it seems Starmer’s eventual departure from Downing Street is now all but certain, far less clear to most Westminster-watchers is by what mechanism the PM could actually be replaced. For today’s newsletter I asked Dr Richard Johnson , senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, about the constitutional nuts and bolts of what happens now, and the challenges this situation, unprecedented for Labour , creates. First though, the headlines. Five big stories UK news | Keir Starmer has laid out long-promised changes to education, health and the courts in the king’s speech , which maps out the government’s agenda for the next year. UK politics | Nigel Farage is facing a formal investigation by the parliamentary standards watchdog over a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. US news | Donald Trump has said the growing financial pressure inflicted on Americans by the war on Iran is “not even a little bit” motivating him to make a peace deal with Tehran. Ukraine | Russia targeted Ukraine with more than 200 drones in a large-scale daytime assault on Wednesday, hours after a previous barrage of civilian areas had killed at least eight people. Europe news | French authorities have confined more than 1,700 passengers and crew members to a cruise ship docked in Bordeaux after a suspected norovirus outbreak, officials have said. In depth: A constitutional conundrum with ‘very badly written rules’ Wes Streeting spent less than 20 minutes inside number 10 on Thursday, but does he plan to move in? Photograph: James Manning/PA The last time the parliamentary Labour party tried to remove a leader by force was in 2016, when Owen Smith challenged an incumbent Jeremy Corbyn. First came the flurry of ministerial resignations, then a vote of no confidence by Labour MPs, which Corbyn lost resoundingly. Eventually came a fully fledged leadership election contested by Owen Smith. The Labour membership backed Corbyn with a thumping majority. A decade on, a significant chunk of Labour’s current crop feel it’s Keir Starmer’s turn. Only there is one vital difference. Starmer is prime minister, which makes attempting to topple him a far more complex constitutional conundrum. A sitting Labour prime minister has never faced an official challenge of leadership from their MPs. And, as Johnson informs me, the rules governing any contest are “very badly written” and contain a lot of ambiguity. How do Labour leadership elections work? Here’s what we know: Labour’s leadership elections are governed by section 4 of the Labour party rulebook. Any attempt to oust Starmer will require a challenger to secure written public nominations from 20% of Labour MPs – that is currently a total of 81 backers. The prime minister would automatically qualify for the ballot, and would continue as PM throughout the election process. Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) holds all the cards on timing, with the final stage being a choice put to party members and affiliated union supporters who rank candidates via the alternative vote system. If nobody secures a majority upfront, the bottom candidate is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to their supporters’ next preferences, until a winner emerges with more than 50% of the total. That much is clear. But if Starmer were to resign, the rules around the contest would become more complicated and create a more drawn-out process. When a Labour leader resigns, leaving a vacancy at the top, leadership candidates are expected to also gather the support of 5% of either constituency Labour parties (CLPs) or affiliated trade unions in order to reach the ballot. “The rules are the product of multiple attempts to tidy up past rules,” Johnson says, “in a way that has only added confusion.” “I’ve spoken to supporters of Streeting who believe he still needs to go and secure those union and CLP nominations.” Others are not convinced that’s the case. “If that is, it makes a truncated, high-speed election impossible. Every CLP in the country would need to have a meeting. The sheer infrastructure of the Labour party makes it very difficult to move at the speed a government in crisis requires.” Would it result in a general election? Like many of the British governmental customs, while what happens is understood , there is no formal written constitutional process. If Starmer were to resign, the cabinet and Labour’s NEC could simply consult to appoint a new leader from within their ranks and recommend them to the monarch as prime minister. This scenario could play out if only one real contender emerged, removing the need for a contest. This would not be an “interim” or “caretaker” prime minister, but the real deal, as long as she or he retained the confidence of the Commons, a task (on paper, at least) made considerably easier by Labour’s large majority. There would be no need for a general election. But the Labour rulebook appears to make its own additional stipulations. “In opposition,” Johnson explains, “if a Labour leader resigns, the deputy automatically becomes acting leader. But in government, the rules say the cabinet – in consultation with the NEC – selects an acting leader from among their own ranks.” That last bit could prove important. It appears to open up the possibility of a scenario in which Streeting resigns from cabinet, Starmer immediately steps down as leader, and Streeting is at that point ineligible to become prime minister – because he is no longer at the top table. Again, there is little clarity. What precedents do we have? As the saying goes, “all political careers end in failure”, and we have plenty of precedent for that in living memory. In recent years, only Rishi Sunak, Gordon Brown and John Major have handed over the keys to Downing Street after losing an election. Everybody else since Margaret Thatcher has ceremonially fallen on their sword after being ousted from No 10 by their party. Johnson reminds me that when Tony Benn challenged Neil Kinnock’s leadership of Labour in 1988, Kinnock went out and collected nominations from his MPs, even though he didn’t need to. Starmer could well do the same. “It’s a way of pinning people down. You go to your ministers and say: ‘If you want to stay in this government, you sign this paper now.’ It stops people from peeling away.” Starmer, Johnson says, has one other potential route to garner support from Labour MPs and members who might be unenthused at the prospect of a Streeting premiership. “He could appeal to the soft left. He could frame himself as a proxy for Andy Burnham – promising the membership that he will create a path for Greater Manchester’s mayor to return to parliament in exchange for their support now in stopping Streeting.” How long can this go on for? How long is a piece of string? Even if Streeting’s challenge doesn’t materialise today, or in the next few days, the prime minister’s days are surely numbered. His authority has been severely eroded. If Streeting does decide to go for it, it isn’t entirely clear that he can win the support of the party at large, even if he convinces his Westminster colleagues. As Aletha Adu noted in this piece looking at his prospects , just before Labour’s 7 May election disaster, a Compass survey of more than 1,000 members found that given a free choice, 42% would pick Andy Burnham to succeed Starmer – with just 11% opting for Streeting. So far, Rayner – who had more favourable results than Streeting in that survey – has ruled out launching a coup, but has suggested she could enter any leadership contest, saying she wanted to “play my part”. “I don’t think it’s a case of each person for themselves, but I do think it’s a case of people seeing how they can pull the party together and have the vision to take us forward,” she told Pippa Crerar. In the meantime, the work of the government trudges on. Long-promised changes to education, health and the courts were mapped out in the king’s speech. Alexandra Topping sums up the key announcements here . There’s another oft-quoted political truism – “Events, dear boy, events” – attributed to Harold Macmillan. Starmer’s king’s speech, and his entire premiership, seem very like to survive or fall in the next few days on exactly that – events. We’ll be covering all of them.