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There's one good reason Starmer still thinks he has what it takes
As the prime minister prepares to cling to office, Anne McElvoy assesses his chances of survival – and reveals the individual who will determine his fate (…and it's not Andy Burnham).
Saturday 16 May 2026 06:06 BST
Andy Burnham moves to take on Starmer - but Labour should be careful what they wish for. As Keir Starmer spoke to party supporters in London after the rude rout of local elections, I watched him exude a mixture of defiance and irritation – that he should be pleading for his job less than two years into power. Damn the pesky voters turning the Red Wall a Reform-hued turquoise.
Never mind trailing the SNP, only a few seats ahead of Reform at Holyrood, and being blasted off the map in Wales. The prime minister has the look of a man who firmly believes he is in the right place, and yet many colleagues tell him the game is up.
The main effect of Starmer's latest “reset” on Monday was to bring to a head a conflict over his leadership that has become a virus in the Labour body politic. It prompted health secretary Wes Streeting to leave cabinet, and Andy Burnham to set out on his rocky path from Manchester via a by-election hastily facilitated to grant his route into the contest.
And yet, somehow, Starmer ends the week in No 10, while the gales howl outside. As such, he exhibits a phenomenon which is underrated in understanding how politicians tick – a belief in defying the odds. It's the one reason why Starmer still has some conviction that he can tough it out.
More likely, this will be one of the long goodbyes of politics, of the sort that saw Joe Biden hang on despite an evident long tail of failure, and Justin Trudeau's once-shiny Liberal Party leadership collapse into incoherence. Canada's most recent former prime minister ended up out of office after his finance minister resigned, sending a signal of no confidence.
Starmer will say his chancellor is still on board – but the tone and body language of colleagues obliged to support him is more one of fear and anxiety than confidence, let alone affinity.
This belief is often the product of a lifetime of defining oneself as someone who has come through the race of life underrated. Starmer, however, was a late entrant to politics, and believes he has shown more resilience than most of his contemporaries – from a hard-scrabble background, via a grammar school where he underperformed in his A-levels, only to go onto a first-class law degree at Leeds, which got him to Oxford as a postgraduate.
A successful career at the Bar followed and made his way through the bureaucratic quagmire to become Director of Public Prosecutions. Winning the Labour contest by being more adaptable to the Corbyn wing of the party, but just about acceptable to everyone else, set him on course for a 2024 election win.
After such upward-mobility and the sheer determination that it requires, we can understand that Starmer reckons that he has beaten a lot of other folks to positions for which they were deemed better suited. You can see it in the set of his jaw, and the ice of anger in his voice when he threatens chaos and a “dark path” for Britain, if he is ousted from the job.
Alas, the reason the Starmer project has so often faltered in office is that he has not been able to acquire the other skills of convening power, or widening his circle of influence beyond some affably technocratic supporting ministers.
Now, Starmer looks set to face two competitors who also believe they, too, are great odds-beaters. When he resigned from the cabinet on Thursday, Wes Streeting did not “have the cards”, as Donald Trump would bracingly put it, falling short of the 81 MPs' outright support needed to launch a leadership bid. For now, he sees no advantage to himself or Labour in ploughing on. So his gamble is that by resigning and supporting the return of Andy Burnham to Westminster, he gets another roll of the dice, were Burnham to fail in his by-election bid.
But, guess what? The “King of the North” also believes that he is the gifted outsider, one who has the benefit of not being tainted by the mud of the Lord Mandelson fallout, and who can represent an infuriated North authentically.
Unfortunately for Starmer, both of his opponents are as convinced as he is that this is the moment for their unique abilities.
One man will ultimately determine Burnham's by-election fate, as well as what happens to Labour at the end of all this – and that is the figure that Starmer once disparaged as a “chancer”, Nigel Farage.
Reform's disruptive outsider can lay claim to having bumped a Conservative government into an EU referendum it didn't want (and didn't win), and who, for all the countervailing post-Brexit hostility, has successfully siphoned off voters from successive prime ministers' heartlands.
Sometimes, the trouble with thinking you are the Special One is that someone else may be seen to be more special than you.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico, and co-host of the podcast Politics at Sam and Anne's
