Wes Streeting resigned as UK Health Secretary on Thursday morning, becoming the first cabinet minister to quit amid the mounting pressure on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. The meeting at Downing Street lasted less than twenty minutes. Streeting’s resignation letter stated he had “lost confidence” in Starmer’s leadership and called for a “battle of ideas, not of personalities or petty factionalism.” He did not formally trigger a leadership challenge. Later the same day, Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, confirmed he would seek to return to Parliament via a by-election in Makerfield — the first step toward a potential leadership bid, since any Labour challenger must hold a Commons seat. Meanwhile, eleven trade unions affiliated with Labour, representing four million workers, declared publicly that Starmer “will not lead the Labour Party into the next election.” The unions, including Unite, Unison, and GMB, stopped short of demanding an immediate departure but called for a “plan” to elect a new leader.
The received wisdom
The sympathetic reading of events is straightforward: a government elected less than two years ago on a massive parliamentary majority is being destroyed by a combination of bad luck, ungovernable expectations, and the structural peculiarity of a Westminster system where backbenchers can end a premiership without the public being consulted. Streeting’s departure and the unions’ statement are — on this view — the predictable consequence of the brutal local election losses last week, which saw Reform UK make sweeping gains and Labour haemorrhage support in its traditional heartlands. The received wisdom among Labour modernisers is that Starmer is a transitional figure: serious, competent, but unable to communicate a compelling political vision to an electorate that is disengaged, angry, and spoiled for alternatives. What Labour needs, on this reading, is not a change of direction but a change of face — someone who can put a human voice to the technocratic programme Starmer has been implementing. Burnham is the obvious candidate: popular, working-class in register, with a strong record in Greater Manchester. Let the best candidate win.
A different read
There is a great deal that is right in that account, and yet it misses something important. Streeting’s resignation letter contained a line that should be more read than it has been: “Leaders take responsibility, but too often that has meant other people falling on their swords.” This is not merely a personal grievance. It is an indictment of a governing style — top-down, managerial, reliant on process and consultation to substitute for political conviction — that has characterised the Starmer project from the beginning.
The deeper problem Labour faces is not Keir Starmer specifically. It is what any Labour leader would face: a party that made contradictory promises to contradictory constituencies in 2024, won an enormous majority on a historically low vote share, and now finds that governing a fiscally constrained, post-Brexit, post-pandemic Britain requires making choices that disappoint almost everyone. The unions are demanding a “fundamental change of direction on economic policy.” The Reform-sympathising working class wants immigration control and traditional community values. The progressive wing wants climate ambition and human rights abroad. These things do not add up.
The historical parallel that comes to mind is not Blair’s third-term weariness or Brown’s stumbling inheritance — it is something older and more structural. Harold Wilson in 1969 faced a similar configuration: union hostility over the In Place of Strife white paper, backbench revolt, a Cabinet he could not fully trust, and a Reform-equivalent (the Liberals under Thorpe, then the Nationalists) siphoning off protest votes. Wilson survived — just — but the wounds never healed, and the 1970 election was lost despite polls suggesting otherwise.
What Burnham would actually offer is genuinely unclear. He is a more natural communicator than Starmer. But the by-election he now needs to win in Makerfield has a Labour majority of only 5,399 over Reform — and Nigel Farage has already promised to “throw absolutely everything” at the seat. Burnham winning a by-election against a fully mobilised Reform campaign would be genuinely impressive. Losing it would end his leadership prospects entirely and gift Farage the best possible narrative. The very act of entering the race is a high-stakes gamble, and one whose outcome will be determined not by Burnham’s political talent but by the current mood of working-class northern England — which, after years of being taken for granted, has reasons of its own to be sceptical.
Angela Rayner has settled her disputed tax affairs with HMRC — £40,000 in unpaid stamp duty — and declared herself “exonerated.” That is legally credible; the HMRC settlement is not an admission of deliberate wrongdoing. But the episode illustrates Labour’s enduring problem with the optics of entitlement: a party that campaigns on fairness and “working people” whose senior figures are quietly settling tax disputes with the revenue authority. Rayner is a powerful figure and a genuine working-class voice. She is also politically complicated in ways that would not vanish in a leadership campaign.
The deeper question facing Labour is one that no leadership contest can resolve: whether there is, in fact, a coherent political programme capable of simultaneously holding the party’s progressive base, its traditional union movement, and the post-industrial towns that Reform has been winning. The Conservatives faced a similar reckoning from 2016 onwards and never solved it — they just kept changing leaders. Labour may be about to find out whether the same fate is contagious.
What to watch
Watch whether Streeting formally crosses the threshold of 81 MP nominations in the coming days — his allies claim he has them, Starmer’s camp disputes this. Watch the Makerfield by-election date and campaign intensity; it will function as a proxy leadership referendum. Watch whether Starmer attempts to pre-empt a formal challenge by voluntarily announcing a departure timetable — which would be an extraordinary concession but might be preferable, from his perspective, to being removed. And watch Angela Rayner’s next move: her refusal to “trigger” a contest while refusing to rule out running is the most politically sophisticated positioning in the field.
— J