‘A shift has taken place’: Starmer faces the music after weekend of reflection | Keir Starmer

HEAs the dust settled on Andy Burnham’s landslide victory in the Makerfield by-election on Friday, Keir Starmer was in a defiant mood. The Prime Minister said, “I have said many times, I will not walk away,” and added: “Let’s unite as a party and a movement.”

Just 48 hours later, one of his most loyal ministers was sending a very different message on the BBC. “I don’t want to come here and be under any illusions that there is no process, there is no force challenging the prime minister as leader – that is clearly the case,” Business Minister Peter Kyle said.

What has changed in the intervening period will be taken over within months, if not years.

By Sunday afternoon, Starmer’s allies had begun to accept the fact that, despite weeks of denials, the prime minister was about to announce his resignation and that the country was moving towards its seventh prime minister in 10 years.

‘I must serve the public’

Throughout the Makerfield campaign, Starmer insisted he would resist any attempt by the mayor of Greater Manchester to oust him. “I’m not going to walk away,” Starmer said on May 18. “I feel very strongly that I have to serve the people who voted for me.”

Allies said Starmer had challenged his critics before and would do so again. But privately, they acknowledged that a lot depends on the size of Burnham’s majority.

“I suspect Keir’s resilience will quickly fade if Andy wins big enough at the general election to save the jobs of dozens of his colleagues,” a No 10 source said the day before the by-election.

When Burnham won a majority of nearly 10,000 (comfortably more votes combined than Reform UK and Restore Britain combined), even some people close to the prime minister thought she might announce her departure that day.

Instead, Starmer reiterated his commitment to remaining in office before heading to the prime minister’s public holiday resort, Checkers, to spend the weekend with his wife, Victoria.

On Friday, Starmer appeared to give different signals to different people about his intentions. One of the sources told the BBC that he had spent the day talking to cabinet ministers not about whether he could stay in office, but about what arguments he would present in the leadership race.

But the prime minister seemed more cautious, according to Kyle. “He cared very much about the country’s interests,” the Trade Minister told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday.

“He told me this over and over in this conversation and asked for my advice on what I believe the country wants right now under different circumstances.”

Some ministers previously loyal to Starmer had warned him on Friday that they could not stay that way for long; The cabinet was expected to intervene on Tuesday if it did not set a timetable for departure.

And on Saturday, Starmer was so confident he would leave office that he began drafting his resignation statement with the help of his inner circle.

‘No one wants resignations’

Part of the Prime Minister’s disappointment was that he believed Burnham could be defeated in a contest. Starmer’s allies watched the outgoing Greater Manchester mayor during his appearance on Question Time during the campaign and thought he appeared untested and open to detail.

But over the weekend it became increasingly clear to Starmer that the contest was decided before it had even begun.

While Burnham was resting at home with her family, her allies were telling Starmer’s aides that the 200 MP supporters they had signed up with had now grown to 300, almost the entire Labor Party in parliament.

Although seven cabinet ministers (Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, John Healey, Shabana Mahmood, Heidi Alexander, Douglas Alexander and Jonathan Reynolds) had privately told the prime minister to set a date for his departure, there was a risk of a public resignation in the coming days.

A cabinet minister who is ready to resign said on Sunday afternoon: “There was a view that resignations would be necessary if Keir’s public view remained his personal view – that he would meet any challenge – but there seems to have been a change of mind in the last 12 to 14 hours. Nobody wants resignations one after the other.”

Even as all this was happening, almost no one in the government seemed sure of the prime minister’s intentions. Their conversations were held within a very close group of confidants; Among them was Victoria.

A senior government official said on Sunday: “It’s remarkable how little anyone knows for sure, as everything seems so tight around the prime minister. But the expectation is that things are only going in one direction and that’s an orderly timetable.”

On Sunday night, it was still unclear exactly what timeline would be determined or whether his successor would be determined by a coronation or contest. But one thing was clear: even Starmer’s closest allies had stopped talking about the importance of not walking away.