Where does Labour go from here?

The last couple of weeks have been dominated by law exams, and watching Labour party descend into bitter factionalism. My exams are over, and law school is out for the summer - hooray! But I’m left contemplating the possibility of weeks, or even months, more political infighting on the centre-left of British politics, a thoroughly depressing prospect for anyone who wants the Labour party to succeed.

That said, I think the party is going through something inevitable that isn’t guaranteed to leave it in a better place, but which may possibly do that. It’s true there are some who think Keir Starmer has been treated very unfairly by his party, that he won Labour a stonking majority two years ago, and should be allowed a full five years in Number 10 to see if he can turn things round. Most notably, Starmer himself: his friends have told journalists that he feels betrayed by Cabinet ministers, who he thinks owe him their job.

This speaks to Starmer’s fundamental lack of connection with politics. Labour’s 2024 victory wasn’t his personal win: it was primarily the Conservatives’ loss. There was no public groundswell of enthusiasm for Labour, much less Starmer, as demonstrated by how quickly his personal poll ratings fell off a cliff. The only real mandate Labour secured was a bland one of magicking up growth without making any tough fiscal decisions around raising tax, or cutting public spending. Labour won a big, but sandcastle majority: lots of new seats, but many with wafer-thin majorities, and on a pretty low vote share of 34%. Cabinet ministers don’t owe Starmer anything: their responsibility is to the country at large. And voters have comprehensively fallen out of love with Keir Starmer, to the extent that it would be a kamikaze mission for Labour to go into the next election with him at the helm. The local election results weren’t simply a mid-term blip. Just look at the words voters used to describe him in More in Common polling. There’s no coming back from this.

Luke Tryl@LukeTryl

Asked how they would describe Keir Starmer in a word or two, the top answers were weak and useless, however good, honest and boring also feature in the most commonly used worlds .

7:14 AM · May 18, 2026 · 4.4K Views

7 Replies · 11 Reposts · 30 Likes

Labour had to change leader before the next election. It would be one thing to leave Starmer in place for the sake of stability and accept the electoral cost next time round if he had a plan to deliver something, like once-in-a-generation reform of the social care system. But he doesn’t. For all the dismissive talk I’ve seen in recent days of Britain being ungovernable because a sclerotic public aren’t willing to give anyone a proper chance, or has been manipulated into hating Starmer by the right-wing press, the voters have sussed this out. They’re more discerning than many politicos give them credit for.

It was always going to be horribly messy. I hoped against all odds that instead of the party dissolving into chaos after the local election results, some party grandees might knock heads together, secure an agreement from Starmer for a timetable to go later this year, and develop a plan for an orderly transition to some sort of unity ticket utilising the best talent from the Cabinet and elsewhere. That was obviously very naive of me: this is politics, riven by factionalism, and full of highly-ambitious people who want the top job.

But I still hope Labour will manage to avoid going through a full-blown leadership contest while it is in government. In an ideal world, of course you’d have some sort of competitive process whereby wannabe PMs go up against each other and test their ideas to destruction. Labour does not have that luxury.

It has just three years max left in government. And a leadership contest in which 300,000 or so Labour members get to pick the country’s next prime minister is going to drag every candidate to the left as they pitch for the votes of a tiny, unrepresentative slice of the public who sit far to the left of the median voter. It will incentivise contenders to talk exclusively to members, while the electorate listens in. We have already seen that in Wes Streeting’s bold pledge that if he were Prime Minister, the UK would rejoin the EU. At best, that is designed to win over Labour members, not voters. At its most cynical, Andy Burnham allies have interpreted it as an attempt to scupper his byelection run in Makerfield, a red-wall seat that overwhelmingly voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum.

I wrote for The Times at the weekend that if Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield on 18 June, Starmer and other leadership hopefuls should stand aside for him. This is because I still think Labour needs to avoid a navel-gazing leadership contest at all costs. Andy Burnham’s 2026 politics aren’t really my Labour politics, but the fact remains he is Labour’s most popular politician, he is a decent communicator, he has a good track record of running a large city metro region, and the Makerfield byelection will be a trial run a Burnham v Farage fight, given Reform comprehensively won in all eight wards earlier this month.

Burnham certainly has weaknesses. But so does every single other leadership contender: there really is no perfect candidate. If he wins the by-election, it is pretty much impossible to see any other candidate being able to beat him in the membership vote.

Other contenders need to discover their inner pragmatist and accept that if he is in Parliament by late June, there is no other realistic outcome than Prime Minister Andy Burnham. It would be easier for Burnham to lead a broad-tent Cabinet that includes talented Labour moderates like Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting if other candidates were to stand aside, than if the party spends the summer tearing chunks out of each other in a leadership election that, if the last few days are anything to go by, will be bitter and heated.

If Burnham loses Makerfield, all bets are off as to what might happen. It would suggest Labour is in an even worse place electorally than the local election results implied. In those circumstances, Starmer may very well exercise his right to stand against anyone who launches a leadership bid against him. And if he were on a ballot that did not include Andy Burnham, it is conceivable that he would win it, despite his deep unpopularity with voters more generally. In which case, I think the Labour party would shed votes to the Greens and Reform in a general election in 2029, perhaps not to the same extent as in local elections, but certainly enough to cost it its majority.

None of this is ideal, but ideal and the Labour party parted ways well before the last election. Labour MPs need to focus on the best outcome in the circumstances: a win in the Makerfield by-election, then a government committed to an honest conversation with voters about the tough trade-offs the UK faces in the decade ahead, and a laser focus on growth. It might not work as a plan: unless a new prime minister were able to show voters that they were making progress, a changeover might lead to a honeymoon bounce, followed by another drop in the polls. But it’s surely better than the certainty of plodding on, tin-eared to the very clear signals from voters that they are so far deeply unimpressed.