A significant percentage of the Labour Party has long thought that Sir Keir Starmer is not the right person to lead the Labour Party into the next election. Many more have had significant reservations. Their views have solidified following last week’s disastrous local elections.
That unity of feeling has led to what we are seeing today, as mounting numbers of MPs call for his resignation. It now seems inevitable that sooner or later, Sir Keir will appear behind a lectern announcing what feels inevitable: that he can no longer run the country.
They may all have reached the same conclusion, but they have not got there for the same reasons. The anti-Starmer mood is not driven from a single faction, nor by a single diagnosis of his problems.
There are, I think, three main diagnoses. Many hold a synthesis of these views and many have other critiques as well. These views are perhaps the most commonly expressed in public and private, and the tensions between them may well cause the undoing of the next leader, whoever they may be:
1. The “he just can’t sell it” people.
These are the loyal-but-disappointed. They still basically buy the Starmer argument. They think Labour got the big calls right: seriousness, stability, fiscal discipline, public service reform, grown-up government, no new wars, all of that. They think Starmer is a good man, and perhaps even a better prime minister than he looks. But they know that politics is not conducted in a seminar room.
For this group, the problem is that nothing lands. The government may have a plan, but it has no storyline. It has a direction, but no rhythm. It has things it wants to do, but no very obvious way of making people care about them. It is, fundamentally, Sir Keir’s critique of himself.
As a result, they do not want to junk the project. They want someone who can explain it. They are the Bop It game of political critics; they want someone to “do it the same, but better”. Their ideal successor is someone who can take the Starmer offer and make it sound like it belongs to a living political party. They tend to like Wes Streeting (or historically Shabana Mahmood), although some prefer Andy Burnham, but only because they don’t see a large distinction between his politics and the PLP as a whole.
2. The “he has no politics” people.
These are, in some ways, more serious critics because they are not natural insurgents. They were not waiting for an excuse to denounce moderation. They sit somewhere around the centre of the party. They were broadly comfortable with the direction. They wanted vision, discipline, and grip. They wanted a Labour government that knew what it was doing and had the political instincts to follow it through.
Their complaint is not just that the comms are bad, though they think they are. It is that Starmer has not shown enough political grip. He cannot mediate disputes or foresee where political problems will arise.
To them, he is a Civil Servant (and not a particularly effective one) in the Prime Minister’s office. These are the people who think that Labour died the moment it signed off on cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance, or who are worn down by the numerous U-turns of the Government.
It is perhaps the argument best laid out by The Times’s Patrick Maguire’s excoriating columns.For them, Starmer’s problem is not that he is too moderate or too radical. It is that he has no fixed views at all. He doesn’t have an ideology, he doesn’t like politics or politicking. The result is that his Government is either stuck not making hard decisions or drifting in the wind.
3. The “it was always the politics” people.
They have less patience for all the talk about presentation, operation and mood music. They do not think the problem is that Starmer failed to explain the project or to run it properly. They think the project was too small in the first place.
For them, Starmerism was and is too cautious, too managerial, too respectful of the limits it inherited. It treated credibility as a list of things Labour was not allowed to say. It confused discipline with timidity. It spent so long proving Labour was safe that it never quite said what safety was for.
These are the people who cheered when Andy Burnham said that the country was too “in hock to the bond markets”.
This group wants a different offer: more redistribution, more investment, a more confident state, a positive view of immigration, and less apology for being actually left-wing. They cheered when Labour went after Reform UK for being racist at the 2025 party conference, and are sympathetic to those who have drifted off to the Greens.
And this is where Labour’s problem begins.
“Starmer must go” sounds like a unifying position only until you ask what, exactly, should go with him.
But life after Starmer will be far from peaceful. Getting rid of a leader creates a brief sense of clarity. Everyone can say “well, that had to happen” and pretend they meant the same thing. It is exactly the cover-all that brought Starmer to power in the first place. No one wanted Corbyn any more, but no one agreed on what was wrong with it or had a full programme for what should come next.
But the next question is much harder: was Starmerism a decent project badly sold, a plausible project badly run, or the wrong answer to the moment?
The party can put that off while Starmer remains the focus. It cannot be put off once he has gone. It is also why the Party remains so divided over who will lead them next.
And because each camp thinks the lesson is different, each will find a different kind of successor disappointing. The communicator will irritate the people who want change. The operator will bore the people who want a break. The left candidate will alarm the people who think the problem was delivery, not direction.
So yes, Starmer going may eventually unite Labour. But probably only for an afternoon.
After that, the party will discover that the anti-Starmer coalition was never really a coalition at all, just a brief moment of consensus in a party that delights in internal debate and discussion.
For a country in desperate need of some stability, whoever wins out in the leadership contest, there is a lot of work to do to manage an unruly party.Find out more about our work
