A week where everything and nothing seemed to happen in British politics left Sir Keir Starmer hanging on as prime minister, in office but not in power, as one of his predecessors at 10 Downing Street, John Major, was famously taunted back in 1993. While a threatened leadership challenge from Wes Streeting, the ambitious former Health Secretary, never materialised, Starmer remains under intense pressure to set a date for his departure. Less than two years into a premiership that began with a landslide election victory in July 2024, Starmer’s travails illustrate the difficulty of governing in an intensely populist age. From almost the moment he entered No. 10 as the first Labour Prime Minister in 14 years, Starmer has faced one political crisis after another. Many of them have been self-inflicted, such as the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, while others reflect the challenging economic legacy that Starmer inherited from the Conservative Party.There is also the paradox of the 2024 election in which Labour won a 174-seat majority in the House of Commons, almost as large as Tony Blair’s record-breaking 179 majority in 1997, yet did so on the back of just 33.7% of the vote, 10 points lower than the previous general election in 2019 which delivered Boris Johnson’s Conservatives a majority of 80 seats. Starmer’s ponderous style of decision-making and wooden manner of speaking have not helped him connect with a public that is increasingly tired of the two-party system – Labour and the Conservatives – that has dominated politics for 100 years. This shone through in the disastrous results of the local elections in England on May 7 which saw Labour lose control of 38 councils and shed 1,498 councilors. Labour also performed badly in the elections to the Scottish Assembly, held the same day, and finished in a distant third place in the Senedd (Welsh Assembly) vote after having been the largest party in Wales for decades. Across the board, voters made it clear they had tired of Labour as well as the Conservatives. The results of the May 7 elections also suggest that the political landscape in Great Britain has fragmented in ways that make further volatility very likely. Politics in England has moved beyond the traditional two (or three, if you include the Liberal Democrats) party system to become a five-party affair as Reform and the Greens enter the mix. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK were the biggest winners of the local elections even if they finished 4% down on their vote share in the 2025 elections. Reform and the Green Party showed they can outflank Labour and the Conservatives from both the left and the right. Meanwhile, the fact that nationalist parties — Reform in England, the Scottish National Party, and Plaid Cymru — topped the vote in England, Scotland, and Wales, respectively, suggests that the union is fraying as voters in the constituent nations go their own ways. And yet, the Labour inquest into what went wrong and what should be done about it has descended into farce and looks set to dominate headlines for months and leave the UK effectively leaderless over the summer. Starmer’s unpopularity, with the public as well as his own MPs, generated an expectation that he would face a leadership challenge, likely from Streeting, who duly resigned from the Cabinet on May 14. However, Streeting failed to challenge Starmer, likely because he could not get the support of the 81 members of parliament needed to trigger a leadership contest under Labour Party regulations. Andy Burnham, the relatively popular Mayor of Manchester, duly declared his intent to re-enter the House of Commons as Josh Simons, hitherto a Starmer loyalist, resigned his seat to trigger a by-election in the Makerfield constituency that will likely take place in June or July. What happens next is anyone’s guess. While Makerfield has returned a Labour MP ever since the seat was created in 1983, Reform came a strong second in the 2024 election and won every local council seat in the constituency on May 7, finishing 28 points ahead of Labour. It is therefore not a shoo-in for Burnham and previous efforts to parachute figures into parliament have not always gone well. A cautionary tale is that of Patrick Gordon Walker, Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s government who had surprisingly lost his seat in the 1964 general election, whereupon a Labour MP was elevated to the House of Lords to create a vacancy only for the Conservatives to defeat Gordon Walker in what had been a safe seat. Should Burnham win the seat, he would demonstrate that he is capable of taking on and defeating Reform in precisely the northern industrial heartland that Labour will need to retain if they are to have any chance of staying in office after the next general election. The fact that the by-election is essentially a vote on a potential prime minister makes it unique in recent political history. If Burnham does return to the House of Commons, where he sat from 2001 to 2017 and served in Gordon Brown’s cabinet, Starmer will face a choice of contesting a leadership election, which could take months, or stepping down to allow a swift coronation. The two Conservative Party leadership elections of 2022 provide a template for the choices Starmer must make. Nearly two months elapsed between Boris Johnson announcing he would resign as prime minister, on July 7, and Liz Truss winning the leadership election, on September 5. Following Truss’s ignominious exit after 49 days in office, however, the party decided not to hold a protracted second election in a matter of months and coalesced around Rishi Sunak who was elected unopposed just four days after Truss stood down. For Starmer, the tragedy is that there has rarely been a more highly qualified prime minister who was so unsuited to the style of retail politics all successful leaders must practice. • The writer is a leading scholar specialising in Gulf politics and international political economy, and a fellow at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable.
