Will Keir Starmer survive the May elections?

Loyalists are rallying around the Prime Minister, and he is determined to fight – but his leadership remains in doubt

One of Keir Starmer’s cabinet ministers had a realisation a few weeks ago: their civil servants were barely making plans for them beyond May. There are six weeks until the crucial English local elections, the Scottish Parliament elections, and the Welsh Senedd elections. There are only a few weeks until purdah. “After that, there’s a blank,” their team realised. It dawned on them: the civil servants, like the rest of the country, don’t know what is going to happen at the top of the Labour Party in May. They don’t know if their secretaries of state will be shuffled out by the Prime Minister in an attempt to refresh his ailing premiership, or by a new leader looking to move in a new direction.

The meteor of the May elections is hurtling towards the party. After its devastating defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election, in which Labour finished behind the Greens and Reform, the party is braced for heavy losses. Labour figures are discussing on a loop what might happen in May, and whether Starmer can survive.

The PM’s loyalists are getting ready for a fight. Cabinet ministers are making a more “full-throated” defence of Starmer than ever before, instigating one-to-one meetings with MPs to make their case, urging them not to forget that incumbent governments often do badly in midterm elections. One cabinet minister draws on the example of Barack Obama, who performed poorly in the 2010 midterms, but passed the Affordable Care Act in the same year to win a second term. “The important thing is not to lose our nerve,” they say. “You use a moment like defeats in May to recalibrate slightly, to sharpen the message and continue with the mission, not by descending into chaos.”

The “Praetorian guard” is assembling for action. Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, urged her colleagues at a cabinet meeting several months ago to form a Roman protective shield around their leader. These Starmer loyalists in cabinet argue it is important to put Labour’s performance into context. “It’s not just the legacy of Brexit, Covid and 14 years of Conservative rule,” one senior Starmer ally argues, “the country has barely begun to recover from 2008.” The change people need to see is happening slowly, they believe. Starmer may have promised “change”, but he also spoke of this as a two-term project, “a decade of national renewal” – work that takes time to get right.

These loyalists have adopted a metaphor first used by a former New Statesman political editor, Stephen Bush: the Prime Minister is suffering from being the “fifth plumber”. If you have employed five successive plumbers in the attempt to fix a leak, and the fifth is struggling or doing it slowly, they become the focus not just of your justified anger towards them, but of that which rightly belongs to the four previous plumbers. But the change is happening, the PM’s supporters say, and if Starmer can get through May, people will start to feel the difference. “This is already the most radical government in decades,” one cabinet minister argues, pointing to employment rights and renters’ rights acts that will come into effect later in the year.

The Hillsborough Law, which should prevent cover-ups across public bodies, will represent a more radical change than many have appreciated: “A fundamental rewiring of the accountability of the state to the people,” as Richard Hermer, the Attorney General, described it to colleagues several months ago. Starmer promised to deliver the law as one of his first acts as Prime Minister, in speeches at two Labour Party conferences in Liverpool, in 2022 and 2024, alongside Hillsborough victims. Nearly two years into government, delays and a stand-off over carve-outs for the intelligence services are threatening its swift introduction, dashing the hopes of victims’ families and survivors. The Hillsborough Law is the example that Starmer allies reach for as proof of the change they are delivering, but it’s also emblematic of the disappointment in his premiership: promises stymied by a lack of planning, by interminable process, by internal disagreements that the premier is often reluctant to adjudicate on.

Some loyalists even privately say that the PM’s lack of curiosity regarding domestic policy is notable. But they equally say he is at his best on the international stage, and the conflict in the Middle East has shown him at his best. Addressing Labour MPs on the Monday after the Gorton and Denton by-election, Starmer “seemed almost relieved that he could talk about Iran”, one member of the government recalls. “I think he was thinking: ‘This will save my premiership.’” Certainly, the Prime Minister’s supporters argue there is no one better to handle this delicate geopolitical moment than him, and that a change of leader at a time of war would be irresponsible. Even government figures who criticise Starmer and gleefully talk about their plans to resign say, in the same breath, that he is acquitting himself well over Iran.

For Starmer’s supporters, the stakes are simply too high, and politics too serious, to collapse into a Labour leadership contest. They argue that an introspective, nasty few months of mid-term mud-slinging would be a disaster and make Labour a laughing stock. One loyalist suggests that if the polls still haven’t turned around a year before the general election, Starmer would probably stand down and someone else could lead the party into the election.

But Starmer’s many critics despair at this analysis. “It’s the wrong diagnosis,” one says. “If you think our problem is that Keir can’t win the next election, then maybe that’s fine. But if you think our problem is that we aren’t governing well, which we aren’t, and we’re wasting our opportunity, then we need to act soon.”

Will anyone act soon? When Anas Sarwar called on Starmer to resign several weeks ago, at least one cabinet minister took a moment with their team to discuss if this could or should be the moment they challenged for the leadership, before ultimately (and swiftly) tweeting a supportive message, as the whole cabinet did. Labour looked over the precipice and decided not to jump.

What held them back was an unwillingness to dive into a leadership contest without a plan. “We were meant to use these weeks before May to decide on what to do. More than a month on, we’re no further forward,” one insider says. “The camps are more divided than ever,” a minister observes.

Angela Rayner is one figure MPs could coalesce around, after her rallying speech on 17 March, but some of those who should fall naturally into her camp have doubts. “My heart says Angela but my head isn’t sure,” one senior Labour MP says. Some of Rayner’s paid speaking engagements in recent weeks – including to City investors about her instincts on fiscal policy – have raised eyebrows too. Meanwhile Wes Streeting’s supporters are privately expressing worries: that he wouldn’t win if he stood, and then he would find himself in a worse position – out of a cabinet job and unable to influence anything. At least one ally has warned him to rein in his positioning.

There is no shortage of Labour politicians now “on manoeuvres”, of course. “It’s like that Tory leadership contest where they had 15 contenders,” one unimpressed Labour aide remarks. “They think a contest is coming so they think they may as well start positioning.”

But if no one fires the starting gun, the contest they are all preparing for will never happen. “I don’t think Wes would ever mount a challenge against Keir,” a friend says. A Rayner ally says the same of her: “She’s not going to be the agitator or the instigator. If people asked her she’d have to decide if she would.” She is confident her tax affairs will be resolved by May, but will weigh up her options if a vacancy arises. She isn’t set on a return to cabinet either: “It would depend on what role she was being offered, and the direction of travel,” an ally says. It is as Streeting told Morgan McSweeney months ago: everyone is “planning, not plotting”, with no one showing willingness to wield the knife.

Leadership hopefuls and restive MPs are reaching the conclusion that they can’t rely on the cabinet to do anything after a bad result in May. Praetorian guards often turned on their emperor, but Starmer’s appears more faithful. “He’s got most of the cabinet behind him,” confirms one member of the guard, listing Starmer’s cabinet loyalists. “I say to anyone I meet in the PLP that the cabinet is not going to save you,” another insider says. Starmer’s critics are beginning to target their ire at the cabinet ministers, who they say are “more attached to their ministerial cars and the trappings of office” than on doing “what needs to be done” to remove a failing prime minister.

If the majority of the cabinet rallies around Starmer, and no one is willing to initiate a contest, leadership hopefuls are indulging in speculation about how else a contest could emerge. “Does someone pull a letter together – a PLP letter to start a challenge, or to get a stalking horse together?” one senior figure wonders. “Are there outriders?”

“The PLP will decide. They might decide they aren’t ready,” a Rayner ally observes.

Starmer is determined to fight any challenge against him, and his political team is organised and ready, fresh from navigating the Anas Sarwar moment. He will go into the May elections underlining what is at stake, arguing that Nigel Farage and Reform UK pose a risk to British values. Starmer’s allies argue that the situation in the country and abroad is too serious to remove a Prime Minister now. For his many critics, it is too serious not to.

Labour hasn’t yet launched its campaign for the locals, but there is little divergence in expectations among party figures about how the party will perform. What is less clear is what psychological impact severe losses to Reform and the Greens across England, Scotland and Wales will have on the party. Some senior figures confidently say a poor result is “priced in”. Others are less sure. “I know I am set to have a Reform council in my patch after May,” one minister says. “I know what I think about that. But I don’t know how I’ll feel about it.”

Even Keir Starmer can’t predict what will follow the elections. He doesn’t know – and nor does Streeting, or Rayner – how the Labour Party will feel about the results in May when they come. His decision not to appoint a permanent Downing Street chief of staff or director of communications until after the elections says it all. Starmer doesn’t know if he will have a job to guarantee them after May, because he doesn’t know if he’ll still be in the job himself.

[Further reading: John Healey: Labour needs the “broadest group” in government]