The Guardian view on Labour’s rebellion: Starmer faces a crisis of legitimacy | Editorial

The clock is ticking on Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour party. He had begun Monday morning with a speech designed to save his premiership after it was routed in local and devolved elections last week. In it he attempted a political synthesis by occupying Reform’s terrain of national pride without the xenophobia, adopting the left’s language of industrial revival without class antagonism and repositioning Labour as culturally pro-European without reopening the Brexit settlement. It did not succeed. By the afternoon, scores of MPs from across the party had publicly demanded that the prime minister leave office in an “orderly transition”. As the hours passed, the rhetoric crossed an important threshold: from criticism of strategy to questioning Sir Keir’s legitimacy as leader.

Labour MPs increasingly say that voters do not trust, or believe, Sir Keir. Nor do they see the change the Labour government promised to deliver. Backbenchers are clearly saying the prime minister’s leadership is the issue. The instinctively loyal MP Catherine McKinnell put it in stark terms. The message from voters, she said, was clear: “The Labour government has to change, or we will change the Labour government.”

Historically, Labour is not a regicidal party – though Jeremy Corbyn faced multiple attempts by Labour MPs to remove him as leader. Perhaps that is why many want to avoid a return to a civil war, or appearing like the Conservatives, who, in the past decade, indulged in bouts of panic, instability and public bloodletting. In calling for a smooth handover of power, the Labour rebels are looking to lower the temperature and make removal seem responsible rather than reckless.

But Sir Keir is in no mood to go quietly and has vowed to fight on. His insistence that the 2024 election gave him a mandate to lead Labour into the next election and perhaps govern for a decade reveals a profound misreading of the electorate that brought him to power. It is true that Labour won a landslide. But the party inherited a temporary anti-Tory coalition, not a ringing endorsement from voters. Labour’s parliamentary majority created the illusion of dominance. Underneath it lay a shallow and brittle voting bloc – one that plainly feels taken for granted by Sir Keir’s leadership.

The Labour party has already moved on to the more interesting question of succession. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, represents the Blairite machine, the former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner the protest of the rank and file, and the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, is the prince across the water. Whether a leadership contest happens quickly or whether it is delayed matters, because timing favours different candidates: notably, Mr Burnham needs to slow politics down long enough to win a parliamentary seat. He would probably already be back in Westminster if Labour’s overriding priority was defeating Reform rather than ensuring Sir Keir was not threatened by his popularity.

Given Labour’s poor showing in the polls, Mr Burnham will find it harder to win a seat – if he is allowed to stand. Greater Manchester, Labour’s showcase region, has revolted against the very political culture it once embodied. That may prove the ultimate price of Starmerism. Political systems rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. Often they wither away as they lose the ability to recognise that the world sustaining them has already disappeared.

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