The British Labour Party’s internal succession drama moved into a new phase this week as Wes Streeting, the former Health Secretary who resigned from Cabinet last week, launched what amounts to an open leadership campaign, warning publicly that Keir Starmer risks a “Joe Biden situation” — an analogy to the 2024 Democratic implosion in which an incumbent president remained in place past the point of electoral viability, denying his party the time to recover. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, has confirmed he will contest the Makerfield by-election, a move almost universally interpreted as a staging post for a leadership bid. Angela Rayner remains in her position as Deputy Prime Minister but has been conspicuously quiet. The BBC’s political team reports the existence of an active “shadow contest” — a leadership race being run in plain sight while the official position is that no race exists and the Prime Minister is not going anywhere. UK April borrowing hit its highest level since Covid, lending the political crisis a fiscal underscore that previous Labour internal dramas lacked.
The received wisdom
The progressive case for Starmer holding on is coherent and deserves genuine engagement. He won the 2024 general election with a substantial majority after fourteen years of Conservative misrule. He inherited an economy that was technically in recession and a public sector in what the Institute for Fiscal Studies described as managed decline. The fact that his government has been buffeted by events — war in Europe, the Strait of Hormuz crisis, rising borrowing costs — is not a failure of competence but a demonstration of how relentless global instability has become. The Streeting and Burnham manoeuvres are self-interested — politicians with their own ambitions using a difficult moment to position themselves. Replacing a sitting prime minister mid-term rarely fixes the underlying problems a government faces; more often it creates a new set of transition costs. The Biden analogy is imprecise because Biden was facing a different kind of incapacity — cognitive decline — rather than the political headwinds that every government eventually accumulates.
The received wisdom further suggests that reform-minded left-of-centre governments require patience. Starmer’s public services agenda — particularly the NHS reform plan that Streeting himself was central to — needed time to generate visible results. Changing leaders now, before any of that work bears fruit, would be to repeat exactly the Labour pattern of the 1970s and 1980s: eating its own in the face of difficulty and handing power to the right.
A different read
The Biden analogy, however imperfect, is not unfair — and Streeting deploying it publicly rather than in a private conversation with Starmer is itself a signal that the private interventions have already been made and failed.
What is striking about the current Labour crisis is that it is not primarily a crisis of policy. Streeting’s resignation letter cited “drift” — a vague charge that captures something real. The Starmer government has had no shortage of policy announcements. What it has lacked is a narrative that explains why they are all connected, what vision animates them, and why voters who want the Conservatives out should want Labour in on its own terms rather than by default. That gap — between policy activity and political coherence — is what “drift” means, and it is what the Biden comparison is really pointing at.
The parallel with Joe Biden is most acute in the institutional dynamics, not the personal ones. Biden’s team spent eighteen months insisting the president was fine, that the polling would tighten, that concerns were media confections — until the June 2024 debate made denial impossible. The Guardian’s recent report on Streeting’s active campaign notes that he is explicitly warning the party that the pattern of denial is already established, that the window to reset the government before it becomes electorally irretrievable is closing. Whether or not one agrees with Streeting’s prescription, his diagnosis of the dynamic — a party that knows something is wrong but lacks a mechanism to act on that knowledge — is not obviously wrong.
The fiscal backdrop matters here in a way that is underappreciated. UK government borrowing in April hit £20.2 billion, the highest April figure since the Covid emergency spending of 2020–21. This is not a cyclical blip but a structural signal: the Starmer government has reached a point where it cannot significantly increase spending, cannot obviously cut taxes, and cannot credibly claim that growth is around the corner. The political space available for a mid-term reset is narrowing as the fiscal space narrows. A leadership transition in a period of fiscal contraction is harder than one in a period of expansion — less room to buy goodwill. If the succession is going to happen at all, the argument for happening sooner rather than later is that the fiscal constraints only tighten.
Historically, British Labour has changed leaders mid-parliament twice with reasonably successful outcomes: Wilson-Callaghan in 1976 and Blair-Brown in 2007. Neither transition, it should be noted, ultimately saved the government from losing the subsequent election. The transition itself is not a solution. But it can be, as in Callaghan’s case, a breathing space that extends the government’s viable life. The question the Labour party is now trying to answer — in public, in competing factions, with the media watching — is whether Starmer is more like Wilson or more like Biden. The honest answer is that it is too early to know. The troubling answer is that waiting to find out may foreclose the options.
What to watch
The Makerfield by-election is the near-term test. If Burnham wins decisively, his return to Westminster accelerates the sense that the succession is a matter of when rather than if. If he underperforms — as Reform UK is now competitive in seats Labour should hold comfortably — it complicates his candidacy while also signalling that Labour’s electoral situation is worse than acknowledged.
Watch also whether Rayner breaks her silence. Of the potential successors, she is the one who could most credibly present herself as a continuity candidate while actually representing a meaningful change — a trade union-backed deputy who stayed loyal while Streeting and Burnham manoeuvred. And watch the gilt market. UK gilt yields remain elevated; any further rise will constrain the Autumn Statement in ways that make it impossible to announce anything politically helpful ahead of a leadership change.
— J