11 February 2026

Can Labour stop members choosing the next PM?

No one knows who they really are

There is only one example of Labour holding a contested leadership election while in government. That was half a century ago, in April 1976. This week, the cabinet and the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), as one, pulled away from doing it again. Keir Starmer is safe for a while longer.

Historically minded Labour MPs have been thinking about that spring, 50 years ago, when Harold Wilson suddenly resigned, leading to a six-way contest to replace him and James Callaghan becoming the prime minister. One recently speculated to me that Starmer might try to go the same way as his favourite Labour leader, Wilson, retiring on his own terms in his early sixties after working hard to secure his party a parliamentary majority.

If you want one measure of how long ago it was, note that this was a contest in which the Sun endorsed Roy Jenkins as the next prime minister because he was “a thinking social democrat” who shared the paper’s politics. And here’s another: back then the leader was decided by the parliamentary party alone. It was such a behind-closed-doors affair that the New York Times’s correspondent told American readers the contest was “comparable to the elevation of Gerald R Ford to the presidency when Richard M Nixon left office in 1974”. Callaghan refused to issue a policy programme or participate in interviews. As one contemporary account put it after he won: “James Callaghan had not been to Oxford, and nobody really knew what he believed in.”

Now Labour MPs foresee a contest that is the antithesis to 1976. Prepare for a very public beauty pageant of candidates, an arms race of policy commitments as they manoeuvre to a position in which they think the all-important Labour membership might be located, all to be followed by an unpredictable outcome (Callaghan started and ended that race as the favourite.)

Labour is facing the same challenge as the Tories when they accidentally made Liz Truss PM despite the parliamentary party supporting Rishi Sunak: how to deal with the consequences of the quiet British constitutional revolution that gave small paid-up party memberships the final say on the leadership of parliamentary majorities. This late-20th century era change in both parties – wrapped up with notions of modernisation – has been responsible for many of the sliding doors moments in recent political history. We might be about to witness another one.

Lots of Labour MPs are, frankly, scared of their own members. So was Keir Starmer when he made ten left-wing pledges to them in 2020 and then proceeded to knock down every single one of them once he had won the contest. There has been a precipitous drop-off in numbers since, as Starmer’s dissimulation became obvious to the idealists who had backed him. The numbers were falling so fast last year that the party stopped releasing monthly totals. We will get the next update this autumn in the run-up to conference. Insiders think Labour’s membership has already dropped below Reform’s.

So who has stuck around, to vote in a potential leadership election? No one really knows. The deputy leadership election in the autumn didn’t illuminate much. While the contest was framed successfully by its winner Lucy Powell as the soft-left “heart” of the Labour Party vs the candidate of an unpopular government in Bridget Phillipson, this was only enough to squeak over the line with a very low turnout of 16 per cent (and, unhelpfully for journalists, the party did not give a breakdown of how many of these votes were cast by trade union affiliates).

Mainstream, the pro-democracy movement in the party formed by a coalition of soft-left groups, is encouraging people to sign up for membership so they can back the left candidate in any contest. And so for anyone on the party’s right wanting a real shot at the leadership, the question becomes: how do you solve a problem like the members?

The various wheezes I hear floated, half-plausibly, by figures on Labour’s right, won’t work. Consult the party rulebook and actually look at what the role of an “acting prime minister” – one selected by the cabinet and National Executive Committee (NEC) without a leadership election – entails. This would be a person so constrained by their own party bureaucracy that they would be unable to reshuffle the cabinet or make “significant” policy changes without the agreement of two committees, one of which is entirely external to the government. It just wouldn’t hold.

The other, only slightly more credible option, is for one candidate and their supporters to manage and corral the PLP so deftly that are thrust into the leadership by acclamation. There is a precedent for this. In 2007, Gordon Brown faced a left-wing challenge from the Campaign Group candidate John McDonnell. Brown managed to gather such a crushing tally of support in the PLP (313 out of 355 MPs) that there weren’t enough people left to sign McDonnell’s nomination papers. Brown therefore enjoyed a coronation by the NEC without a ballot of members.

Under new Starmer-era rules, which were intended to make life harder for future candidates of the left, the threshold for nomination was doubled from 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the PLP. With the current state of the party, that would require 81 MPs to support a candidate for them to make it to a ballot of members.

To block out a challenger and become leader by acclamation, the next prime minister would need the nominations of 323 Labour MPs. But – in quite a few different ways – this government does not have a Gordon Brown. No one commands the respect of their parliamentary colleagues as he did in the summer of 2007, no one has the clear lead with the public that he enjoyed (given Andy Burnham has been frozen out of parliament) and nobody has been waiting in the wings as the leader’s obvious successor for 13 years.

The splintered bits of the PLP do not seem in the mood for compromise. Leading members of the soft-left Tribune group have already made clear that they think they have the numbers to nominate a candidate outright. At the moment, there are enough internal disagreements about the future to guarantee a contest for the top job.

If there is to be a change of prime minister before the next election, the membership of the Labour Party will have the final say. The most valuable research any pollster could do now is to find out who the party members and the trade union affiliates are, and what they think.

[Further reading: How Keir Starmer survives]