Keir Starmer expected to announce exit timetable
Good morning. Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the referendum to leave the EU, which means that Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of the day David Cameron announced he was resigning as PM. After Cameron was forced out by the result of his own referendum, another three Tory PMs were forced out by their own MPs (Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss) and another was forced out by the electorate (Rishi Sunak). Keir Starmer has been PM for less than two years, but he is about to become the sixth PM forced out within a decade, being replaced almost certainly by Andy Burnham.
In the past the British used to joke about Italy being a country where prime ministers kept changing all the time. These days Italy looks like a beacon of stability, and Britain has become the place never that far from another bout of political turmoil.
Starmer spent the weekend pondering his future at Chequers. He is back in London now and – although No 10 has not confirmed this – journalists are on standby for an announcement potentially this morning.
Here is our overnight story by Peter Walker and Pippa Crerar.
While a Starmer resignation looks inevitable, we don’t know whether there will be a leadership election or (more likely) an uncontested handover of power to Burnham. And we don’t know whether Starmer will propose staying on until September, or whether the handover will be accelerated. We will find out more as the day goes on.
The crucial event is not in the diary, because it has not been confirmed, but these are the timings we do have.
11.30am: Downing Street is expected to hold a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Andy Burnham is due to take his seat in the Commons as the new MP for Makerfield.
After 3.30pm: Keir Starmer is expected to make a Commons statement about the G7 summit last week.
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Key events
Jacqui Smith, the education minister, was also on the Today programme. When Nick Robinson, the presenter, put it to her that ‘it’s over, isn’t it?’, Smith replied: “No, I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Gus O’Donnell questions whether political turmoil linked to PMs being constrained by manifesto promises
Gus O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, was interviewed on the Today programme this morning. Asked if he was worried about Britain becoming as unstable politically as Italy used to be (see 7.11am), O’Donnell replied:
It will be our seventh [PM] in a decade.
I do think we need to think about, if we’re having a prime minister change in mid-term, what’s the problem?
And it quite possibly could be that they’re elected on a manifesto that doesn’t work given the circumstances have changed.
So we’ve had a Middle East war, we’ve had a spike in infation. Lots of things have changed.
So, maybe, maybe, you need to think some of those things in the manifesto that were perfectly legitimate at the time may not be appropriate given the circumstances we’re in now.
All the national newspapers are splashing on the fate of Keir Starmer. The BBC has a summary including pictures of all the front pages. Two papers, the Times and the Daily Telegraph, have headlines saying Burnham wants to be PM by September.
Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, was on the Today programme this morning putting the Conservative party’s case on Keir Starmer being replaced. He said having a new PM would not make much difference because the government’s problems were down to the views of Labour MPs. He said:
Constitutionally there doesn’t have to be a general election, you can change prime ministers. What matters is whether the prime minister has the support of MPs in parliament.
But I have to say that there, it’s not just Keir Starmer’s legitimacy that is being called into question, it’s Labour’s.
You can change the person at the top, but if the MPs underneath still think and vote the same way, then nothing will change.
Burghart quoted Pat McFadden’s joke about Labour MPs wanting higher taxes to fund more welfare, revealed in the Mandelson files, as evidence to support his case.
Normally, when the governing party replaces the PM with the public being consulted, opposition parties demand an election. But given that the Tories changed their leader four times when they were in power without calling an immediate election, the party cannot credibly make that argument now.
But on BBC Breakfast Burghart did say that a period of instability would be “very bad for the United Kingdom” and that “we can’t be a country that changes PM every few years” – implying that he does accept that the Tories’ record in this respect left something to be desired.
Starmer will put ‘interests of British people’ first in any decision he takes, says education minister Jacqui Smith
Jacqui Smith, the education minister, is doing a broadcast round this morning. Speaking to Times Radio, she said she “would have been happy for [Keir Starmer] to continue” – which sounded like a confirmation that Starmer will announce his resignation, but may just be confirmation that Smith has read the papers.
She also said:
My understanding from those I’ve spoken to who are close to the prime minister yesterday is that the prime minister has spent the weekend thinking really carefully about the future of the country, about what’s the best thing to do for the British people.
He’s also, by the way, been of course engaged in government, responding to the terrible train crash, talking to the chief executive of the East Midlands ambulance service, responding to the attack in Edinburgh.
But he always thinks carefully about the future of this country and the interests of the British people – he puts them, by the way, ahead of the interests of the party – and he will make his own decisions in the light of what obviously everybody can see is a considerable amount of pressure and turbulence.
Peter Kyle, the business secretary, also stressed that Starmer’s priority was acting in the national interest when he gave an interview to the BBC yesterday.
Libby Brooks has written about Keir Starmer’s predicament in her First Edition briefing this morning. Here it is.
And here is an excerpt.
Since then, I’ve reported on people’s anger at successive prime ministers, but none have been so viscerally disliked across the spectrum as Starmer – so I called up Polly [Toynbee], who was busy working on her column, to ask what it is about him that stirs such passion. I’ve heard it myself on the doorsteps during the recent Holyrood election campaign: welfare reforms, Gaza, Mandelson … Weren’t no clothes peg big enough. And still Starmer didn’t take us into an illegal war or party while grieving relatives were kept away from their dying loved ones during Covid lockdowns.
Is it down to that enduring criticism of Starmer’s poor storytelling, or voters’ accumulated disappointments, or simply politics in the social media age?
“I’ve tried to analyse it a bit in the column,” Polly tells me, “which is a kind of warning to Andy Burnham too, that first impressions are so important. First there was Starmer’s very dismal speech in the Downing Street garden, then Rachel Reeves’s very dismal £22m black hole …” Polly’s list goes on: freebies, the winter fuel payment, the farmers’ tax.
“They did a whole string of things behind the scenes that were really important – Great British Energy, the wealth fund – but they’re not the sort of things people notice.
“What’s interesting is that the last four prime ministers have each been the most unpopular ever,” Polly adds. “That’s extraordinary. Maybe we’re in a time of such hatred of politics, after 20 years of stagnation and disappointed expectations.”
Here are some pictures from Downing Street this morning.
Keir Starmer expected to announce exit timetable
Good morning. Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the referendum to leave the EU, which means that Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of the day David Cameron announced he was resigning as PM. After Cameron was forced out by the result of his own referendum, another three Tory PMs were forced out by their own MPs (Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss) and another was forced out by the electorate (Rishi Sunak). Keir Starmer has been PM for less than two years, but he is about to become the sixth PM forced out within a decade, being replaced almost certainly by Andy Burnham.
In the past the British used to joke about Italy being a country where prime ministers kept changing all the time. These days Italy looks like a beacon of stability, and Britain has become the place never that far from another bout of political turmoil.
Starmer spent the weekend pondering his future at Chequers. He is back in London now and – although No 10 has not confirmed this – journalists are on standby for an announcement potentially this morning.
Here is our overnight story by Peter Walker and Pippa Crerar.
While a Starmer resignation looks inevitable, we don’t know whether there will be a leadership election or (more likely) an uncontested handover of power to Burnham. And we don’t know whether Starmer will propose staying on until September, or whether the handover will be accelerated. We will find out more as the day goes on.
The crucial event is not in the diary, because it has not been confirmed, but these are the timings we do have.
11.30am: Downing Street is expected to hold a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Andy Burnham is due to take his seat in the Commons as the new MP for Makerfield.
After 3.30pm: Keir Starmer is expected to make a Commons statement about the G7 summit last week.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
.jpeg?trim=60,0,60,0&auto=webp&quality=75&width=1200 "Revealed: How three Iran-backed ‘terror masterminds plotted multiple attacks’ on London")
