‘It’s like a Mexican standoff but no one has any guns’: inside the farcical coup against Keir Starmer
It is an old adage of leadership contests that ‘If you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss’ – but no one expected the starting gun to be fired at Charles III. At the exact time on Wednesday when the monarch was reading the King’s Speech to parliament, allies of Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, put a bomb under proceedings by making it clear that he is set to challenge Keir Starmer this week. ‘Yes, it’s inevitable,’ one says. The timing horrified MPs even on Streeting’s wing of the party. A cabinet minister declared: ‘Having failed with his kamikaze coup, Wes has now undermined every single one of his colleagues and disrespected the King.
