A British Labour party MP has vowed to launch a leadership campaign unless Keir Starmer is ousted by his Cabinet.
The move by Catherine West follows a disastrous local election for the party, with it losing control of several councils.
West, MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet and a junior foreign office minister until she was sacked in the reshuffle last year, said unless a cabinet minister comes forward to challenge Starmer for the Labour leadership by Monday morning, she will do it herself.
For West to challenge Starmer she would need the backing of 20 per cent of Labour’s 403 MPs – a total of 81. She claimed to have the backing of 10 MPs for her initiative, but her move is believed to be intended to spur one of the potential cabinet leadership hopefuls into action.
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Starmer insisted he would not “walk away” from his job, claiming it would “plunge the country into chaos” if he quit.
“But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to respond, it doesn’t mean we don’t need to rebuild,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t need to set out the path ahead. That’s what I’m going to do in the coming days.”
Andy Burnham, Labour mayor of Manchester, has been widely touted as a candidate to face Starmer in a leadership challenge. He has not yet commented.
In a bid to salvage support, Starmer gave advisory roles to Labour grandees Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman on Saturday. He gave Brown, a former prime minister, a role as special envoy on global finance and made Harman his adviser on women and girls.
Despite this, West said the cabinet needs to lock “itself in a room” and come up with a plan to save Labour.
She said: “What I’d like to see is the cabinet locking itself in a room tonight [Saturday] and coming up with a plan to respond to what was the worst election result for the Labour Party that I can remember, and I’ve been in public life since 2001.
“This is what we would describe as an electoral emergency and sadly, the cabinet have not come out strongly to lead us, to tell us what’s coming next.”
West said she believes Reform UK’s success in the local elections is partly down to how they have taken over “a traditional role of the Labour Party”.
She said: “The only way of beating Reform is for the Labour Party to get itself organised, better funded, we need to do more fundraising, because Nigel Farage clearly has people who will just give him £5 million.
“And also, we need to look at their methods of communication, because they clearly were able to communicate with working people, which is a traditional role of the Labour Party.”
Starmer will use an address on Monday and the King’s Speech on Wednesday to mount a fightback.
He said his administration needed to be better at offering hope to people, and promised to be clearer about “the values and convictions that drive me”.
Starmer has been hammered by the twin threats of Reform UK on the right, with Farage’s party making spectacular gains, and the Green Party on the left making inroads in Labour’s urban strongholds.
In England, councils that had been Labour for generations in the north were lost, while the party’s grip on London has also been severely weakened.
Results on Saturday underlined the challenge facing Labour, with Reform taking control in Barnsley and ending Labour’s hopes of retaining Bradford, while a Green surge saw Starmer’s party losing control in Lambeth for the first time in 20 years.
In Wales, having been in government with half the seats in the Senedd at the last election, the party was reduced to just nine of the 96 seats available in the newly enlarged legislature, with first minister Eluned Morgan the highest-profile casualty.
Starmer said one of the “unnecessary mistakes” made by his government was setting out the financial and international challenges facing the country, but not telling people how their lives would improve. “The hope wasn’t there enough in the first two years of this government.”
Around 30 Labour backbenchers have publicly suggested Starmer should either quit or set a timetable for his departure.
But deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Thinking that setting out some kind of timetable would put to bed the issues of leadership, I think is actually the wrong conclusion here.
“Because all that would do is fire the starting gun of a, quite honestly, very distracting and ongoing debate about leadership.”
While many of Starmer’s critics have been those on the left of the party who were never his natural supporters, the scale of the defeats has prompted more moderate voices to demand change.
Clive Betts, the party’s joint longest-serving MP, also said the cabinet should make it clear to the prime minister he has to go “in the not too distant future”.
Health secretary Wes Streeting, who has continued to attract speculation about his ambitions despite publicly denying plans for a leadership tilt, said the prime minister will “have my support” in setting out how the government will move forward on Monday.
After 132 of 136 English councils had declared results, Labour had a net loss of 34 authorities and 1,117 seats.
Reform had gained 14 councils and 1,320 seats.
The Green Party had gained control of four councils and put on 337 councillors.
The Liberal Democrats had gained three councils and 143 seats, while the Tories had a net loss of eight authorities and 433 councillors. – PA
