Abernathy wrote: ↑Thu Oct 23, 2025 11:21 pm Still hoping Plaid Cymru are going to ride to the rescue and keep the fash out.They did, by 3,000 votes. Labour took a right hiding.
As predicted at the start of the summer, the idea that the Prime Minister might not make it through another year is gaining traction. This is less about the various crises that have hit the government since MPs returned from holidays, or even primarily about the party’s dire poll ratings, but his style of governing.
If MPs felt that there a clear agenda and a grip on delivery they’d be more relaxed about low voter satisfaction and the occasional bad by-election three and half years away from an election. It was never going to be easy dealing with their inheritance and there was a willingness to give Starmer and his team time.
But there is a growing sense that things are not working and aren’t likely to be turned around. Even loyal MPs are describing the situation as terminal. Frustration centres on three things:
Starmer’s lack of clarity about what he wants to achieve: this is something I’ve written about repeatedly since before the election and it continues to be the central problem. Because he isn’t clear on what he wants he prefers to delegate and doesn’t like having to settle disputes between departments, seeing this as something his Ministers should be able to sort out between themselves. But departments inevitably have different priorities and will tend to go off in their own direction without a clear steer from the centre. That’s how you get a government giving off so many mixed messages claiming, for instance, that growth is their number one priority but also loading costs and obligations onto businesses. In every white paper, from immigration to devolution, you can see the compromises that departments have painfully negotiated between themselves, leaving no one satisfied.
Party management: it was apparent during the welfare debacle over the summer that Starmer had little understanding of the strength of feeling about the issue amongst his MPs. Warnings were dismissed until it was too late to fix the problem. It’s not just rebels that were left unhappy but those who remained loyal were then undercut with the u-turn. There is a widespread view that Starmer’s team can be highly factional and petty, alienating senior MPs with whom there is a lot of common ground on policy.
The number 10 operation: Downing Street has been overhauled since I wrote about it earlier this year. This has resolved some of the specific personnel issues that had been causing friction. Something resembling a delivery unit has been set up. But a lot of issues remain. Morgan McSweeney is still in the wrong job – he’s a campaigner not a Chief of Staff. The policy unit is being rebuilt with new staff but is still too peripheral. There’s briefing against Chris Wormald, the Cabinet Secretary. The comms operation still isn’t functioning properly despite another round of staff changes. It’s a source of major consternation across departments.
There’s still time to turn things around. Some more excitable reports suggest there could be a leadership challenge before Christmas but this seems unlikely. I’ve always thought the local, Scottish and Welsh elections in May would be the riskiest moment for him (and Kemi Badenoch) and that still seems right. Indeed May is now being more explicitly mentioned by MPs as being the decisive moment.
Labour’s process for changing leader requires a challenger (there’s not a “no confidence” mechanism). If the challenger get 20% of MPs signed up then it goes to a vote of members, including those affiliated via their trade union. I suspect, though, unlike Jeremy Corbyn, that if enough MPs indicated they’d lost confidence Starmer would probably resign rather than go through a contest.
It helps Starmer that there’s no obvious successor, which Angela Rayner was before her resignation. Her going has, however, led to more jostling and positioning amongst alternative candidates. So who are the possible contenders and who has the best chance of becoming PM if Starmer can’t turn things around? And would it make any difference?
The contenders
With no heir apparent there are a lot of conversations going on across Westminster, with informal campaigns mobilising. The following list of candidates is based on conversations about who might be interested in running. It’s possible others may emerge if there is a contest, especially if it’s still many months away.
Wes Streeting
The Health Secretary has never tried to hide his ambition for the top job. When I met him before he was even an MP it was obvious he had big plans. He has a good backstory and is one of the few cabinet ministers able to give a spontaneous, clippable, monologue on TV. His biggest challenge is that he’s seen as being on the right of the party which means a lot of the membership dislike him. This is not necessarily insurmountable, in part because a lot of the more left-wing members have left for the Greens. In the cabinet minister rankings by Labour members done by pollster Survation his position has been improving.
Streeting also has a strong core base of support. Amongst members who think the party is going in the right direction he’s seen as being the most successful at delivering in government. But the membership election is done by the “alternative vote” method meaning that it’s not enough to come top in round one – the winner needs the preferences of more than half of voters.
Another challenge is that, while the NHS has stabilised since the election, it has not noticeably improved much. It’s not yet evident that Streeting’s reforms are going to solve the underlying problems. Elective waiting list are down a little but long A&E waits aren’t, and the system is still under extreme pressure. A major winter crisis is very plausible. There is also a series of junior (or resident) doctor strikes, with the next due for mid-November, which will have a negative impact on the stats. While the general population is less supportive of strike action this time around, the majority of Labour voters back them.
Of course Streeting is aware of all this and is a canny enough politician to tack in a different direction when necessary. He has been more focused on messages that appeal to the membership recently, including a blistering attack on Reform’s Sarah Pochin for her rant about black and Asian people in adverts.
Andy Burnham
The Manchester mayor has made even less secret of his ambitions than Streeting, which is probably why he’s the betting favourite to be next Labour leader. His stint as mayor is seen as being largely successful, and made him one of the most popular politicians in the country (albeit that’s not a high bar at the moment). Burnham is very good at leaning into the northern man of the people archetype, though he’s no more working class than Starmer, and is a career politician. His close ally Lucy Powell just won the deputy leadership election.
His biggest problem is that he’s not in Parliament and doesn’t have an obvious route to getting there quickly. The possible candidates that could vacate their seats to cause a by-election have said they’re not going to, so unless someone changes their mind, resigns or dies, he doesn’t really have a way in. And not many seats would be safe for even a relatively popular Labour candidate at the moment. Even if a seat did become available he could be blocked from running by the NEC (National Executive Committee) which is still controlled by Starmer’s team.
So there are some major practical barriers. It’s also the case that a lot of MPs were not impressed by his manoeuvring pre-conference, both because it was so destabilising but also because his platform was largely vague membership-pleasing hand-waving. His dismissal of bond markets – which he later said was misinterpreted – was jumped on by opponents as indicative of a lack of seriousness. If he could get into Parliament by the time of a contest he would be a major contender but certainly not a shoe-in.
Bridget Phillipson
The Education Secretary just lost the deputy leadership election but did surprisingly well given she was tagged as Starmer’s candidate (again indicating the membership isn’t as left-wing or anti-government as is often claimed now that a lot of people have left). She was seen as running an effective operation, albeit in a low-key contest.
Like Streeting she has a good backstory: the first person to run the Department for Education having been to a comprehensive school while on free school meals. She’s also a reasonably strong media performer, though lacks the Health Secretary’s ability to go off on an (apparently) spontaneous riff.
She hasn’t, yet, delivered much in terms of school reform – an oft-promised white paper has been delayed, again, to January – indicative of a lack of preparation in opposition. But she has launched a bunch of membership-pleasing policies focused on financial support for poorer families, including expanding free school meals eligibility and free breakfast clubs in primary schools. She’s also successfully implemented the expansion of free places in nurseries, initially promised under the last government. If the two-child limit is abolished Phillipson would be able to take some credit for that too, having co-chaired the Child Poverty Taskforce.
One big challenge is that the schools white paper, when it appears, is likely to focus heavily on reform of the special needs system, which is needed but is also a political minefield. Campaigns have already been set up to push back against anything that reduces parents’ legal rights but the rising cost of provision is not covered by her department’s budget. Something has to give.
Another issue for her is she is quite introverted which may be a barrier for members looking for someone more charismatic after Starmer. But, especially given the desire for a woman leader, she’d be a serious candidate.
Shabana Mahmood
The Home Secretary got the biggest promotion in the reshuffle. She was seen to have been effective at managing the very difficult prisons crisis Labour inherited (though it hasn’t gone away – more on that next week). As a result she’s got one of the hardest jobs around: bringing the number of small boat arrivals down.
Mahmood has received a lot of positive press since she moved. But her challenge is that being Home Secretary, especially while focused on immigration, is not particularly compatible with winning over Labour’s membership – even if it’s not as left-wing as it used to be. Her way of writing and speaking about her task is “Blue Labour-ish” – she is close to McSweeney – which has appeal to those who think the government has to grip this issue to win a second term, but less so with liberals who make up most of those who’ll be voting.
Another issue is that her seat is vulnerable – one of the Gaza independents slashed her majority in a nasty campaign last year. This is also true for Streeting, whose majority was cut to just 528. But frankly nearly all Labour seats are vulnerable at the moment, and the leader can always move seats if necessary, so this shouldn’t be a decisive factor.
Ed Miliband
As per the chart above Miliband is comfortably the most popular cabinet minister with the membership and is also seen as delivering most effectively in government. He was one of very few ministers to arrive with experience – he’d done the same job under Gordon Brown, and moved faster than others to get key people into position and start delivering manifesto pledges. (Whether you agree these are the right policies is a different question). There are rumours he’ll get a rare budget win if VAT on energy is scrapped. He’s also one of the few ministers to have embraced the modern media age, with a fairly adept TikTok account – albeit with far fewer followers than Nigel Farage or Zarah Sultana.
If he’d never been party leader before he’d be one of the favourites. Unfortunately for him he has been leader and it didn’t go well. That doesn’t mean he isn’t considering another go – or that the membership would necessarily hold it against him. But one suspects that if he did try and run the negative public and press reaction would put members off. If you do think he can win you can get him for 50/1 on some betting sites which for a long shot bet seems decent odds.
Angela Rayner
Until she resigned Rayner was the favourite but now she’s below Burnham, Streeting and Mahmood in the betting lists – languishing at 16/1. When she was still in the cabinet she rated as well as Miliband with members, and far ahead of any of her other colleagues. In a separate poll looking at a hypothetical leadership election she was just behind Burnham.
She had carefully positioned herself, should anything happen to Starmer, by being scrupulously loyal in public but offering an alternative fiscal approach in a memo, written before the Spring statement, that was helpfully leaked to the press in full.
Being forced to resign after not paying enough stamp duty on a new flat certainly damaged Rayner. But she has handled the aftermath with typical astuteness, staying quiet, doing nothing disloyal and biding her time. My view from the morning after her resignation was that it wouldn’t stop a fairly rapid return:
“[It came with] a statement from the Prime Minister’s Ethics Adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, that she ‘acted with integrity, and with a dedicated and exemplary commitment to public service’. As such she is well set up for a return in 12-18 months’ time, and can spend the interim building relationships with backbench MPs that ministers don’t have time for. She is a savvy operator and I’d be very surprised if this was the end of her involvement at the top level of politics.”
A few months down the line this seems almost certain. Members are largely sympathetic to her plight and there is not much in the way of ongoing public anger. If Starmer stays she’s very likely to be back in the cabinet at some point in 2026.
Her major challenge is that while she’s always been popular with members, she’s not taken seriously by a large chunk of the public, including a minority of Labour voters. Polling done by YouGov well before her resignation found that fewer people thought she’d be a good PM than Burnham, Farage or any of the other choices, and in a one-to-one match up against Farage she did worse than Starmer.
These hypothetical polls aren’t very good predictors of how people will actually think should an event happen but they could put off those voting in a leadership election should other candidates look like they’d be more successful. Defeating Farage will be the priority and finding a candidate who can do that would be a defining question of any contest.
Other possible candidates
Even before her latest troubles with house renting Rachel Reeves wasn’t a likely candidate. She’s too associated with Starmer and the performance of the government to date. Darren Jones is thought of highly: hence his recent appointment to the key role of right-hand man to the PM in Downing Street, but he doesn’t yet have much profile and is a bit too similar to Starmer in manner. Lucy Powell won the deputy leadership election but I suspect that’s the summit of her ambitions, though she will have a chance to position herself in that role. There is zero chance of the remaining Corbynite left getting a challenger onto the ballot given the 20% threshold, though one would no doubt run for form’s sake.
Who would win?
There’s no outstanding favourite, and all of the candidates have some obvious flaws, which is probably Starmer’s best hope of survival. But if there were a contest some time next summer I’d put a bet on Rayner given her currently long odds (I haven’t because I never bet on things I’m writing about to avoid perverse incentives.)
She is well positioned with the membership, despite the resignation, and would offer something very different to Starmer. She’s also a consistently underestimated politician who I suspect would run an effective campaign if she went for it. Burnham certainly would have a good chance if in Parliament but that’s a major barrier for him if the contest is in the next six-to-nine months. Miliband is going to struggle to escape from his first go at the leadership. Streeting and Mahmood are going to find it harder to win over members – even if it’s a different membership to the one that elected Starmer, let alone Corbyn.
Would it make any difference?
One of Team Starmer’s arguments against those considering a change is that – for all his limitations – the reason Labour is struggling is not primarily about who’s in the top job. A new PM is not going to be able to magically resolve our fiscal problems, or get the economy growing at 3% overnight. There are no levers to pull that will suddenly make the small boats issue go away, produce a million houses, or fix the NHS and criminal justice system. A contest would take up months that the government could be spending on these issues, and a new leader would put in a different top team, requiring a whole load of new briefs to be learned, leading to further delays. The Tories tried changing leader in the last Parliament, twice, and it didn’t work out well for them.
The alternative argument, though, is that all the other candidates are more political than Starmer – they’ve all been doing this for most or all of their careers – and have a clearer sense of what they want to do and what they want to communicate. It’s entirely possible that none of them would be able to find a strategy that works given the state of things – and, of course, the wrong strategy could make things worse – but at least they would try to find one. Without that it’s hard to see how the government recovers.
There is no great desire amongst Labour MPs to get rid of Starmer. He’s not hated or seen as a public embarrassment as Boris Johnson was in his final few months. But the prospect of a Farage-led government is such an existential risk that they’re prepared to consider anything to avoid it. A difficult budget and a dire set of elections next May seem almost inevitable now. Unless Starmer can convince his colleagues he has a plan to do things differently after May, many will conclude they haven’t got much to lose by trying someone else.
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