James Heale

This morning’s cabinet meeting was one for the ages. At 9.30 a.m. Keir Starmer was greeted by his senior ministers, almost all of whom think the game is up. Ahead of entering Downing Street today, they will have seen the list of 80 Labour MPs – the magic number needed for a ballot – calling for him to go. Last night, we had junior aides jumping ship; this morning we have the first minister, Miatta Fahnbulleh. She has quit the government and called on Starmer to ‘do the right thing’.  When you have David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, John Healey and Shabana Mahmood all telling Downing Street that it is over, you know that the Prime Minister has lost the dressing room.

Things are moving very fast in Westminster this evening. More than 60 Labour MPs are publicly calling on the Prime Minister to announce a date for his departure. The stream of these calls has ebbed and flowed in recent days – but the profile of the MPs has strikingly changed. On Friday night, it was the soft left out for Keir Starmer’s head; this evening it is the Labour right. Junior aides are now quitting the government, and resigning from their positions as parliamentary private secretaries (PPS). Three did so in quick succession this evening: Joe Morris, Sally Jameson and Tom Rutland, the respective PPSs for Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and Emma Reynolds.  It is, in the words of one MP, ‘all one-way traffic, heading to the exit.

By inclination, tradition and design, the Labour Party is much less prone to toppling leaders than their Conservative counterparts. There is no equivalent to the 1922, Sir Graham Brady’s grin and the usual excited talk of ‘letters going in’. Perhaps an equivalent shorthand must now been coined for the process which is going on in the government ranks. The steady drip-drip-drip of MPs calling for Keir Starmer to quit has continued unabated for the past 48 hours. Now we are up to 36 names, with the latest perhaps being the most intriguing of all. ‘A sudden rush for a contest, encouraged by the soft left, could, inadvertently, end up putting the Blairite crown prince into No. 10.

In the aftermath of Thursday’s shellacking, a steady stream of Labour MPs have been coming out and calling on Keir Starmer to quit. Their tone has varied: some are much more coded than others. On Cofffee House, we have a rolling list that now stands at more than 30. A key tell is those arguing for ‘an orderly transition' – the subtext for which is ‘enough time until Andy Burnham can get into parliament’. The Mayor of Great Manchester would need months, not weeks, to fight and win a by-election that would allow him to return to parliament and thus claim the leadership. The precarious route by which that would happen has been enough to sew doubts in the minds of much of the Parliamentary Labour party (PLP).

After a century of hegemony, Welsh Labour is set for an historic wipe out tonight. Results for the 96-man Senedd are still coming in but all signs point to the natural party of Welsh government being consigned to a distant third place. Both Plaid Cymru and Reform have been effective in recent weeks in squeezing the Labour vote by framing the Welsh elections as a two-horse race. Much as we saw in the Caerphilly by-election, it looks like Labour has been squeezed out of the contest. That means a very bad evening looms for Eluned Morgan, first minister since 2024. She has lost in Ceredigion Penfro and thus become the first sitting head of government in the United Kingdom in modern times to lose her seat.

In Scotland, a changing of the guard is near. But while Hearts are set to break the duopoly of Celtic and Rangers this season, there is no sign of the SNP yielding its iron grip on power. This, though, is a triumph less of technical brilliance than a series of own goals by Labour’s team captain. Facing a stagnant economy and middling public services, Scots are being asked at next week’s Holyrood elections to answer the oldest question in politics: ‘Who’s to blame?’ The answer, it seems, is ‘not the SNP’. If Starmer is to be felled in the coming weeks, vengeful Scots will be leading the charge The nationalists have governed Scotland for nearly 20 years; Labour has been in power in Westminster for little more than 20 months.