Phillipson defends Starmer as West sets Monday deadline for Cabinet

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson defended Keir Starmer’s leadership on Sunday, hours after Labour MP Catherine West set the Cabinet a Monday morning deadline to force the prime minister from office or face a leadership contest.

West, a former Foreign Office minister and MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet, told the BBC she would ask every member of the Parliamentary Labour Party to put a name against hers on Monday if no Cabinet challenger had emerged by then. She said 10 MPs had so far backed her move, well below the 81 names required to trigger a contest.

Starmer rejected calls to step aside. Speaking in London, the prime minister said he would not “walk away” from his job and warned that quitting would “plunge the country into chaos,” according to the Irish Times. Downing Street has not signalled any change of posture since the local-election results came in.

Phillipson, in a Sunday morning interview, said the party should not turn inward when voters wanted action. “I think the last thing that people will want is the Labour Party turning in on ourselves, having a contest and discussing the Labour Party at a point at which people want to see change in their communities,” she told LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr. The Education Secretary said she had believed Starmer could win the next general election in July 2024 “and I believe it now,” adding that a leadership change would create “huge further uncertainty.”

Lucy Powell, the deputy Labour leader, told the BBC that setting a timetable for Starmer’s departure would be “the wrong conclusion” to draw from Thursday’s vote.

What the vote did

Labour suffered losses on a scale not seen in the party’s recent local-election history. With 132 of 136 English councils declared, the party had a net loss of 34 councils and 1,117 councillors, according to figures collated by the Irish Times. Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, gained 14 councils and 1,320 seats, the party’s largest local-election haul on record.

The Greens added 4 councils and 337 councillors. The Liberal Democrats picked up 3 councils and 143 seats. The Conservatives, themselves squeezed by Reform’s surge, lost a net 8 councils and 433 seats.

In Wales, Labour was projected to hold 9 of 96 Senedd seats, down from roughly half of the smaller chamber it dominated before this election. The 96-seat assembly and its closed-list voting system were used for the first time on Thursday.

Where the MPs stand

LabourList was tracking close to 40 Labour MPs who had publicly demanded Starmer’s resignation since polls closed. Among them was Josh Simons, the Makerfield MP, who wrote that “putting the people I represent and the country I love first, I do not believe the prime minister can rise to this moment.”

Simons, a 2024 intake MP and former Labour Together director, called on Starmer to “set out an orderly timetable for his departure,” warning that the party faced an extended period of internal damage if it failed to act. “Senior figures across factions should come together to decide the best way forward,” he wrote on Facebook in comments tracked by LabourList. “The public expects nothing less.”

In a separate post, Simons said he had heard the message voters sent at the elections. “Labour has drifted from working-class people. Our actions do not meet the challenges facing our country. We constantly talk big and act small,” he wrote.

How a contest is triggered

Under Labour Party rules, a challenger to a sitting leader needs the backing of 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party (81 of its 403 MPs) to force a leadership election. West acknowledged she did not have that level of support. She told the BBC her preferred outcome would be for “the Cabinet’s best communicator” to replace Starmer without a contest, casting her own bid as a stalking horse intended to flush out a more senior challenger.

“I am putting people on notice. If I do not hear by Monday morning of some leadership hopefuls, I will be asking everybody in the Parliamentary Labour Party to put a name against my name, because we need to get this ball rolling,” West told the broadcaster.

She described herself as both a “lone wolf” and a stalking horse, saying she was prepared to take the contest “all the way” if no Cabinet member stepped forward.

What happens next

Starmer is due to address the Parliamentary Labour Party at its weekly Monday evening meeting in Westminster. Cabinet ministers including Phillipson, Powell, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper have given no public indication of plans to challenge.

The Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has been named in British press reports as a potential successor in the event of a contest, but he sits outside the parliamentary party and would need a sitting MP to clear the way.

If no Cabinet figure has declared by Monday morning, West has said she will begin collecting signatures the same day. Whether the 81-MP threshold can be reached without a senior front-bench candidate is now the open question that will decide whether Starmer’s premiership survives the week.