Keir and loathing: can Starmer head off a leadership challenge?

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has denied leading a plot to oust Keir Starmer, saying “whoever’s been briefing this has been watching too much Celebrity Traitors”.

Streeting fiercely condemned the Downing Street aides behind the briefings, saying their attacks on him betrayed the “toxic culture” around the prime minister, and those responsible should be sacked.

After ruling out any involvement in a plot to oust the prime minister, the health secretary told Sky News: “Nor did I shoot JFK. I don’t know where Lord Lucan is, had nothing to do with Shergar, and I do think that the US did manage to do the moon landings. I don’t think they were faked.”

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What did the commentators say?

Mounting anxiety about the vulnerability of Starmer’s position exploded into the open last night as Downing Street launched an “extraordinary operation” to protect the prime minister, said The Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar. Senior figures at No. 10 “said they had been told that Streeting had 50 frontbenchers willing to stand down if the Budget landed badly and the prime minister did not go”.

This is not “one wayward briefing“ from a special adviser “after too many pints”, said Andrew McDonald and Bethany Dawson on Politico’s London Playbook. “It all seemed rather co-ordinated”, with “multiple quotes variously attributed to cabinet ministers, senior officials and other allies or friends of the PM”.

The prime minister’s critics, “who are getting louder, you may have noticed”, think “the whole thing is an attempt to flush out Streeting and anyone else they suspect of plotting”. Others thought to be “on manoeuvres” include Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Defence Secretary John Healey and former Labour leader Ed Miliband. “No. 10 has gone into ‘full bunker mode’” and is “turning on their most loyal cabinet members for absolutely no reason”, one source said.

“A challenge against Starmer is not imminent,” said The i Paper’s Kitty Donaldson, although “conversations around his future have stepped up a gear in recent weeks”. There’s a “generational split” in the Parliamentary Labour Party. New MPs elected last year “fret that Starmer’s mistakes will see them booted from office at the next election”, while “the Cabinet and other senior party members consider the long-term”. To those who “experienced the Jeremy Corbyn years in opposition”, the “dangers of changing leader are obvious”.

What next?

Starmer is “alive to the growing threat to his position”, said Patrick Maguire in The Times, and he is already focusing on “outreach to backbenchers”.

But, “rather than shutting down speculation”, these co-ordinated briefings have “fuelled it”, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. Instead of “uniting the party around the PM”, this has risked “only achieving the reverse”.

Whatever the denials from suspected plotters of any plans to move against him, Starmer should be wary, said The i Paper’s Donaldson. “As anyone who watched ‘The Traitors’ knows, it doesn’t matter what they say when you’re in the room.”