https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/starmer-stricken
Tom Hazeldine
12 May 2026 Politics

Local and devolved elections last Thursday offered a barometer of the political pressures in unhappy Britain. These were the worst midterm results for a governing party in living memory. They have tightened the net around Labour’s flailing Prime Minister, less than two years after the Party returned to power at Westminster on a vacuous platform of ‘Change’. Starmer is almost certainly on his way out, whether within the next few days, weeks or months; though barring major mishaps, Labour with its huge Commons majority is ‘going nowhere’, in both senses of the phrase, until the general election in 2029.

The opposition Conservatives also posted losses. In English council elections, Britain’s two parties of government tied for third place on 17 per cent of the BBC’s projected national vote share, as disgruntled voters decamped to upstart rivals. It’s seemingly another way-marker on the road to five (or six, or seven) party politics, contorted into a Westminster system designed for just two. So far a reconstituted right is making the most of the political flux, in Britain as elsewhere, but the uncertainty gives anyone a puncher’s chance. On the ground and in voter intentions, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK are surging (26 per cent); so too, at a lower level, are Zach Polanski’s left-populist Greens (18 per cent), eclipsing Corbyn’s struggling Your Party; while in Scotland and Wales, civic nationalists have delivered the coup de grâce to Celtic Labourism.

Some 5,000 seats were on the ballot across 136 of England’s 317 councils. Most big urban areas were up – all of London, the West Midlands, much of the near-North between Merseyside and west Yorkshire, and Tyneside and Wearside in the North East – plus county councils in rural East Anglia and on the south coast. Overall, Labour lost 1,500 of the 2,500 seats they were defending and control of 38 councils, including bankrupt Birmingham, the largest municipality by population in Europe, where Reform is now the leading party, though there were wins also for the Greens and pro-Gaza independents. The fact that only a third of seats were on the ballot in many areas spared Labour worse rebuffs. In Greater Manchester, mayoral fiefdom of Labour leadership aspirant Andy Burnham, Reform won 24 of the 25 seats available in Wigan, and the Greens 18 seats of 32 in Manchester City, but Labour still has (reduced) majorities in both boroughs.

Labour strategists will be most worried about London, the Party’s real heartland these days. Ahead of the vote, the capital’s electoral map was coated in Labour red, with an isolated Conservative enclave in Kensington and Chelsea, splashes of Tory blue and Lib Dem orange in the suburbs and the irritant of a breakaway party in Tower Hamlets, London’s poorest borough. But on Thursday over half of Labour councils were greyed out to ‘no overall control’, largely through Green gains. Campaigning on the housing crisis, the Greens took Hackney, Waltham Forest and Lewisham outright and also won two local mayoral contests. Polanski’s solidarity with Gaza attracted a media onslaught of allegations of antisemitism, though he is the only Jewish leader of a major British political party and has suffered antisemitic abuse himself. After the vote, he pronounced the two-party system ‘dead’ and that ‘the new politics is the Green Party versus Reform’.

Reform won just under 1,500 seats and 14 councils. Ahead of the vote, Home Affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said a Reform government would build new detention centres – in Green-voting areas – to house up to 24,000 undocumented migrants at a time. Like Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ Conservatives in 2019, they performed strongly in areas that had voted to leave the European Union a decade ago: Labour’s old ‘Red Wall’ working-class regional heartlands as well as Tory counties in eastern England.

A midterm protest vote? Yes, but opinion polling for the next Westminster election tells the same story. Electoral Calculus’s latest constituency-level MRP poll has Reform on 188 seats (up from 5 in 2024), the Conservatives on 159 (+38), Labour on 86 (-326), the Greens on 71 (+67) and the centrist Liberal Democrats on 61 (-11). It would be an extraordinary reversal for Labour, plummeting from a lucky landslide in 2024 to its worst result since the Great Depression. The London seats of Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, as well as Shabana Mahmood’s in Birmingham, would be lost to the Greens. Several other Cabinet ministers, including Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper in west Yorkshire, would fall to Reform.

A result like this would obviously also represent a seismic shakeup of the British right. Reform would be 138 short of a Commons majority, so would need to enter a coalition with the Conservatives. The Greens would join the Lib Dems and Scottish Nationalists as a ‘third force’ in Parliament, but it looks like the next Parliament belongs to a reconstituted right. Still, Reform has slipped back in the polls since last autumn, when it looked set to win a Commons majority by reducing the Tories to just a couple of dozen seats. Reform’s projected vote share has dipped from the mid-30s to 24 per cent, against the Conservatives on 21 per cent, Labour on 17 per cent, the Greens on 15 per cent and the Liberals on 13 per cent, the SNP on 3 per cent and Plaid on 1 per cent. That’s 45 per cent for the Reform-Tory right and 49 per cent for the rest – fairly tight margins, three years out from a general election, especially given the vagaries of tactical voting in a winner-takes-all, First Past the Post system.

In Scotland and Wales, Labour’s travails have been a boon for civic-nationalist parties. The pro-independence Scottish National Party won a fifth term at Holyrood, while Plaid Cymru broke Labour’s long hegemony in Wales. Plaid finished first with 43 Senedd seats and Reform second on 34, under a new system of proportional representation. Labour was reduced to single figures. First Minister Eluned Morgan, toppled in Ceredigion Penfro in the far west, said the Party needed to ‘go back to being the party of the working class’. In Scotland, the SNP won 58 seats and Labour and Reform 17 each. Seeing how things were going, the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, called for Starmer’s head weeks before the vote, when the Mandelson row reignited.

The appointment of Mandelson, Blair’s old New Labour fixer, as UK ambassador to Washington unravelled earlier this year following fresh revelations of his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson is under police investigation over allegations he leaked market-sensitive government information to Epstein while serving as Business Secretary under Gordon Brown. Mandelson’s close ally, Morgan McSweeney, was forced out as Starmer’s Chief of Staff on 8 February. Then on 16 April, the Guardian reported that Mandelson failed his security vetting but had been waved through by the Foreign Office. Starmer, a former state prosecutor with an inflated sense of his own rectitude, had earlier insisted that due process was followed. He responded to evidence to the contrary by sacking the top civil servant in the Foreign Office, who then came out swinging in a televised appearance before a parliamentary committee, alleging pressure from Number Ten. Starmer’s actions have angered the Whitehall chiefs, the same people that set Johnson’s departure in motion in 2022.

Hapless and sanctimonious, Starmer has the worst approval ratings of any prime minister since records began in the seventies. Labour is adrift in a country where the economy is stagnating under Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s grim-faced orthodoxy, wages are chronically depressed, housing is dizzyingly expensive, and inflation is once more on the rise because of the US-Israeli assault on Iran. (Labour cleared American heavy bombers to use RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and the joint US-UK base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean for what Starmer described as a ‘specific and limited defensive purpose’.) Prices are up sharply at the pumps and in the supermarkets, and airlines have cancelled hundreds of flights to ration jet fuel. Pollster Ipsos say voters are gloomier about the economy than during the 2008 financial crisis or the 2022-23 inflation surge.

Starmer’s response to the election drubbing was a short to-camera statement that ‘days like this don’t weaken my resolve to deliver the change that I promised’ and an interview with the Observer in which he said he would lead the country for 10 years. On Saturday his team staged photoshoots with two New Labour veterans, now recruited to advisory roles. Gordon Brown, architect of Labour’s ‘light touch’ regulation of the City, led the Party to defeat in the humbling aftermath of the financial crisis. Ex-caretaker leader Harriet Harman whipped Labour MPs not to oppose Conservative-Liberal Democrat welfare cuts in 2015, to show voters the Party was ‘listening’. Starmer insisted their appointments were ‘very forward-looking’. In a speech on Monday he then threw the sop of closer European Union ties to his Europhile party, promising ‘a big leap forward’ in relations even while ruling out renewed membership of the single market or customs union. On Tuesday he tartly advised the Cabinet that no leadership contest had been triggered, so he would carry on.

Rule-book impediments, not to mention a dearth of ideas, have so far deterred a major leadership challenge, but a stalking-horse candidate emerged over the weekend, and more than 80 Labour MPs including a junior minister have called on Starmer to go. What next? Unlike the Tories, whose backbenchers traditionally operate like a gentlemen’s club and can trigger a vote of no confidence and knock an incumbent off the ballot that goes out to party members, Labour’s bureaucratic ramparts are designed to hold off potential challengers. In 2021 Starmer and the Labour right pushed through a rule change doubling the threshold of MP nominations that a would-be contender must amass, from 10 to 20 per cent of the parliamentary party – one of a package of measures to prevent any recrudescence of Corbynism. Allies of former Deputy Leader Angela Rayner and the Blairite Health Secretary Wes Streeting have been anonymously briefing the media that their candidate has the necessary 81 MPs to launch a contest, but no one has yet seen the colour of their money. Rayner still has to settle an outstanding tax bill with the authorities and may be falling in behind Burnham, an ex-New Labour Cabinet minister who lost out to Corbyn in 2015. He needs MPs to play for time after he was blocked by the Party’s ruling NEC from attempting to return to Parliament via a recent Manchester byelection. Meanwhile Streeting is damaged by association with Mandelson.

Mudoch’s Sunday Times, a mouthpiece for neoliberal centrism, has cautioned against a Labour leadership contest. Starmer has been a ‘desperate disappointment’, it concedes, but the alternatives would be worse. Yet there seems to be no future for the sea-grey Incorruptible, even while the Labour Cabinet and backbenchers wait for the other to make the first move. Labour in government has never removed a leader against his will, and no one wants to get their hands dirty. But they will find some way to ease Starmer out.