Keir Starmer has vowed to prove his doubters wrong in what was widely billed as his “make-or-break” speech.
He acknowledged that Labour’s local election losses were “tough” and that his government has made “mistakes”, but insisted he had got “the big political choices right”.
The initial reaction has been mixed, said ITV’s political editor Robert Peston on X. “Labour MPs tell me they admire Starmer’s performance”: he was “cheerful and resilient”, even as he “showed contrition for his party’s historically terrible performance in last week’s elections”.
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This speech was “better than many” Starmer has given, “and he did show some passion”, said Peter Walker in The Guardian. But for his sceptics “to be mollified”, he needed to have produced “a giant-sized rabbit” from his policy hat – “something to make them sit up and think: oh, maybe this time things are different. But he did not.”
The prime minister said that “incremental change won’t cut it” and yet “his pivotal speech was inherently incrementalist”, said Steven Swinford and Oliver Wright in The Times. “Calls by some of those around him to be more radical appear to have fallen on deaf ears.”
With the King’s Speech and a new legislative agenda to come on Wednesday, Starmer wants his party to be “gripped by a new sense of purpose and energy”, said Nick Eardley, the BBC’s political correspondent. The hope is that they will “forget all about changing leaders and rally behind the man who delivered a landslide general election victory less than two years ago”.
“The next 72 hours or so of hysteria” will be “dangerous,” said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. But it’s “not at all obvious why a change of leader and prime minister would either be easy or even that advantageous to the party”. For all their “fratricidal habits”, Labour MPs “won’t kick Starmer out – not yet”.
But such is “the bearpit of British politics, the most perilous threat for prime ministers so often comes from behind them”, said Nicholas Cecil in The Standard. Hornsey MP Catherine West’s threat to trigger a leadership content “exploded at the weekend from an unexpected quarter” and, with “trusted colleagues withering in numbers by the hour”, Starmer “could be forgiven for jumping at shadows” in Westminster’s “dark and labyrinthine corridors”.
What next?
In Wednesday’s King’s Speech, there’ll be “plenty of Labour-friendly measures on offer”, a source told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. But they “weren’t so sure” that “there be anything dramatic or dazzling to change the conversation”.
West has now stopped short of a leadership challenge but says she will write to her MP colleagues today asking for their support “to call on the prime minister to set a timetable for the election of a new leader in September”. So far, about 40 other Labour MPs have called for Starmer to quit.
The prime minister’s speech “was held in Waterloo,” said ITV’s Peston. “He wants to be Wellington but he may be Napoleon.”
