Starmer weighs resignation as Burnham win shakes Labour
Andy Burnham's Makerfield landslide has emboldened Labour rivals, and reports suggest Keir Starmer could announce a resignation timetable within days.
Keir Starmer spent the weekend at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat, and gave nothing away in public beyond a Father's Day note. By Sunday evening Westminster was working on the assumption that he might use Monday, the day his rival Andy Burnham is sworn into the Commons, to set out when, not whether, he will go.
Starmer is weighing whether to resign within days under mounting pressure from his own Labour Party, according to British media reports, even as he insists in public that he will fight on. What has changed is the arithmetic inside his party.
Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, took the Makerfield seat in north-west England on Thursday with almost 55% of the 45,510 votes cast, more than 9,000 ahead of the second-placed Reform UK candidate, and nearly double Labour's previous majority there. He is due to be sworn in as an MP on Monday, which for the first time gives him a platform to challenge for the Labour leadership. Because Labour holds a large Commons majority, whoever leads the party leads the country, which is why a single by-election has shaken Downing Street.
Ministers chose their words carefully on Sunday. Business Secretary Peter Kyle said Starmer was making time to reflect on the political realities, challenges and opportunities that he finds himself in
, while dismissing talk of resignation as speculation
. The Observer led its front page with a flat prediction that Starmer was expected to resign
and would set out a timetable for his departure; the Sunday Telegraph reported he was ready
to go, citing allies.
Starmer's own line has not moved. I will run, I will stand
, he said after Burnham's victory, insisting he would not walk away
from a leadership contest. But the support around him is thinning. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is among the senior figures said to want him to step aside, and Charlie Falconer, a Labour peer and former lord chancellor, said the prime minister had absolutely no authority
left. Wes Streeting, who quit as health secretary last month over Starmer's leadership, has said he would run if there is a contest.
How it came to this
The slide has been a year in the making. Starmer led Labour to a landslide in July 2024, then struggled to deliver the growth he promised while the cost-of-living squeeze wore on and public services stayed under strain. A run of missteps followed, among them his appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington, a decision that drew renewed scrutiny when the Epstein files resurfaced. Labour's drubbing in May's local and regional elections, and the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform UK in national polls, hardened the sense of decline. Ministers' recent rejection of a rescue deal for Thames Water added to the picture of an administration firefighting on several fronts.
Even Donald Trump weighed in before any announcement, posting that Keir Starmer will resign
and accusing him of failing on immigration and energy. Downing Street and the White House had not spoken over the weekend, and the two leaders' once-warm relationship has cooled, partly over a war with Iran that Britain declined to join. Should Starmer go, the Associated Press counts him as the sixth prime minister to leave office in a decade, a churn rate that has come to define modern British politics. Whether Burnham inherits the job unopposed or has to win it from Streeting and others may be settled within days.
