Wes Streeting held a 16-minute meeting with Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street on Wednesday morning, as an ally of the health secretary renewed calls for the prime minister to resign. Streeting left without speaking to the media, amid intense speculation over Labour’s leadership crisis and his own future within the party.
Dr Zubir Ahmed, who resigned as a junior health minister on Tuesday, blamed Starmer for Labour’s disastrous local election results and urged him to set out a timetable for his departure. Ahmed accused the prime minister of becoming the “inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government” in Scotland, saying Labour had been unable to challenge the Scottish National party because of “noise created at the centre”.
Ahmed told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Labour’s poor performance was “unsustainable and unstable”, and that his view was widely held among Labour MPs. His intervention risks widening scrutiny around Streeting’s positioning, as several of Streeting’s allies have resigned from government in recent days, openly calling for Starmer to go.
Earlier this week, senior cabinet ministers Yvette Cooper and Shabana Mahmood told Starmer he should oversee an orderly transition. Meanwhile, 11 Labour-affiliated unions, including Unite, Unison and the GMB, were expected to issue a joint statement predicting Starmer would not lead the party into the next general election.
Downing Street insiders sought to project calm before the king’s speech, with Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds dismissing the meeting as a simple “coffee”. He said there was no viable leadership challenge against Starmer, as Labour rebels had failed to unite around an alternative candidate capable of securing the backing of 81 MPs required under party rules.
