Wes Streeting has held talks with Keir Starmer in Downing Street as an ally of the health secretary renewed calls for the prime minister to resign, saying his authority had “irretrievably ebbed away”. Streeting arrived in No 10 on Wednesday morning amid intense speculation over Labour’s leadership crisis and his own future within the party. He left approximately 16 minutes later without commenting to the media.
The health secretary’s allies had sought to portray Wednesday’s meeting as a moment for Streeting to speak candidly about his concerns. But No 10 insiders suggested Streeting was playing down speculation that he was on the brink of declaring his candidacy for the leadership. The meeting came shortly after Dr Zubir Ahmed, who resigned from his junior health minister role on Tuesday, blamed Starmer for Labour’s disastrous local election results and urged the prime minister to set out a timetable for his departure in “an orderly expedient transition”.
Ahmed accused Starmer of becoming the “inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government” in Scotland’s parliamentary elections, saying Labour had been unable to challenge the Scottish National party because of “noise created at the centre”. The NHS transplant surgeon told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We, in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, had a devastating set of election results and we were simply unable to articulate our offering, or indeed critique, of the SNP government because of the noise created at the centre.”
Ahmed’s intervention risked widening scrutiny around Streeting’s positioning after days of speculation over whether he could emerge as a potential leadership contender for MPs seeking a post-Starmer future. While Streeting has remained publicly loyal to Starmer since the local elections, several of his allies have resigned from the government in recent days, including four junior ministers, openly calling for Starmer to go. Earlier this week two senior cabinet ministers Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, and Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, told Starmer he should oversee an orderly transition.
Sources close to Ed Miliband denied reports that he had told cabinet ministers he was prepared to run for the leadership if Streeting triggered a contest before Andy Burnham, hoped to be the soft-left candidate, could return to Westminster and stand. Starmer’s allies sought to portray the prime minister as having survived the most immediate threat to his leadership, after a Streeting-led challenge failed to materialise before the king’s speech on Wednesday. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister and a longstanding ally of Starmer, described the meeting as a simple “coffee”, mocking the speculation around it.
With Downing Street insiders desperately seeking to project calm before the arrival of King Charles in the House of Lords for the king’s speech, pressure on Starmer continued to build elsewhere. The Guardian revealed on Tuesday night that 11 Labour-affiliated unions were predicting Starmer would not lead the party into the next general election. The unions, which include Unite, Unison and the usually loyal GMB, were expected to issue a joint statement on Wednesday saying that “at some stage” the party would have to put a plan in place to elect a new leader.
