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May 11, 2026

Morning Call: The edge of destruction

Starmer’s fate hinges on one speech and one disgruntled backbench MP

Ethan Croft and The New Statesman

May 11

Good morning. Keir Starmer will try to save his political career this morning by giving a speech in which he will admit mistakes and say “incremental change won’t cut it”. The most immediate consequence of the speech will be whether it makes Catherine West – the backbencher threatening to launch a leadership challenge this morning – think twice.

West has said she might step down her plot if Starmer shows sufficient rhetorical fire in his belly. But that will be quite a difficult metric for outside observers to judge – and so we will have to wait and see how West responds to the speech. As she told me in an interview at the weekend, her decision to challenge Starmer was done on the fly – she had not read the party rules on launching a contest before announcing) and motivated by a visceral reaction to the results in which one of her best friends lost their safe Labour council seat in North London.

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Editor: There is nothing so full of political pathos as manufactured by The New Statesman, that long ago betried Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with significant support from George Bernard Shaw and other Fabian Society members.

Newspaper Reader.

Lindsey German

Good morning.



How bad did the election results have to be before Keir Starmer resigned? Worse than the loss of 44 Labour councillors in Newcastle? Or the wipeout of Labour members in the Welsh Senedd? Or the collapse to Reform in the former mining areas of Barnsley and Wakefield? Or the rout of Labour across much of inner London to the Greens, including the latter winning three boroughs outright and sending several more into no overall control?



Starmer’s response has been to say he ‘will not walk away’ – yet that is clearly what voters want him to do. Everywhere, reports from canvassers are the same: whatever the other issues motivating them, intense dislike of the prime minister was high on the agenda. At present his cabinet are publicly rallying round: he will do a big speech on Monday, promising a reset. Already he has announced the appointment of former prime minister Gordon Brown and former interim leader Harriet Harman as advisers. I can’t imagine what good he thinks this will do him.



The simple truth is this: Labour cannot begin to regain votes until Starmer goes. And the longer he stays the more he will strengthen Reform. It is a mark of the inability of Labour politicians to think clearly outside their own narrow factional interests that this truth has not already forced Starmer out. Instead leading cabinet figures and allies of supposed prince over the water Andy Burnham are putting their own interests before the urgent need to get rid of Starmer and they will pay a price. For this result will mark the end of Labour in many areas once regarded as its heartlands. The history of Scotland in the last decade demonstrates that there is no automatic likelihood of the party bouncing back.



And why should it? Labour, founded to represent the trade unions in the electoral field, has been on a long march away from the working class it is meant to stand for. It has presided over governments of privatisers who have seen a working class fall in living standards and done little to change anything. It has seen students forced to pay higher fees and get into debt and done nothing about it. It has allowed employers and landlords free rein, only acting to make the most minimal changes to protect workers. Its ‘solution’ to the housing crisis is to allow developers to build unaffordable houses while doing virtually no council house building. It has also echoed the far right in scapegoating migrants, waving the flag and promising far more money on ‘defence’.



The result? Reform’s right-wing populism has won in many places especially in the old industrial areas where secure and relatively well-paid jobs have been replaced by the opposite, as workers are forced to accept ever worse conditions in companies owned by billionaires. And those repulsed by Reform’s politics are also alienated by Labour’s mimicking of them, so look for alternatives to the left. The Greens and Plaid Cymru have been the big winners from this trend.



One reason that Labour politicians are so incapable of movement in the face of this is that there needs to be fundamental change in its policies – but that isn’t going to happen, because it would mean dismantling decades of New Labour policies. So the decline of Labour and Labourism will continue, surely accelerated by these results, but with its adherents unable to comprehend how and why it has happened.

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Lindsey German