Keir Starmer Won’t Survive This

Photograph by Toby Melville / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Local elections in England—to town and city and rural councils across the country—are usually low-turnout affairs, in which the national government of the day takes a bit of a shellacking, apologizes, reassures voters that it is paying attention to the stuff that they actually care about (usually garbage collection, or the state of the roads), and then moves on without a second thought. That didn’t happen this year. The results on May 7th, which coincided with elections for the national assemblies in Scotland and Wales, proved to be a catastrophe for the Labour Party and a personal crisis for Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister.

Starmer, who is sixty-three, has been a national figure in Britain for the past six years—as the leader first of the Labour Party, then of the country as a whole. For most of this time, he has been tolerated but unloved, a walking synonym for “wooden,” “stolid,” and “middle-aged haircut.” On Monday night, three days after the local election results came in, his Cabinet showed signs of abandoning him. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary and one of Labour’s more convincing politicians, was one of several ministers who asked the Prime Minister to set a timetable for his departure. Around eighty members of the parliamentary party publicly made clear that they agreed, enough to set in motion a formal leadership challenge to Starmer, if they coalesce around a rival candidate.

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