The Coup Against Keir Starmer

And Keir Starmer is all but gone.As of this morning, at least 80 Labour MPs have called for the Prime Minister to resign, with a couple of albeit fairly low -ranking ministerial aides quitting yesterday evening, one government minister going this morning, and several colleagues within the Cabinet telling him that his time is up in a more informal manner.Interestingly, we are recording this just after a meeting of the Cabinet has taken place.cabinet meeting every Tuesday morning at around 9am, and we can only imagine that that must have been one of the most awkward meetings ever.All of Keir Starmer's closest allies, and many of the people who have boosted and boosted his career up until this point, suddenly telling him that in actual fact he is deeply incompetent and all of the country's and the Labour Party's problems are down to him personally.Starmer himself has said that he is going to fight on, but whether he resigns today or whether he does, could decide to continue and fight on as leader of the Labour Party, there is going to be, very shortly, a contest for that role, and by extension, for the Prime Ministership of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

So I wanted to dedicate some time in today's video, and hopefully maybe in videos in the coming days, to who some of the key contenders for that role are going to be.

What are the reasons that some of these figures are seen to be frontrunners?What are some of the key challenges and hurdles they might have to overcome to succeed in getting that role?

And, crucially, do any of them stand a chance of fighting off the Labour Party's current twin existential threats of reform on the right and the Green Party on the left, or is the party simply doomed to be consigned to the history books once and for all?Okay, so we're not going to hang around with too much of an obsession with who has and hasn't resigned.Today, or as likely to be tomorrow,in the coming days.As I said, it's all kind of going on as I record this.And by the time I finish recording this and then we've edited it and got it out, probably everything will change once again.

Perhaps by the time you're watching this, Keir Starmer has resigned and someone else has stepped into the role unopposed.I don't want to predict this.What I do want to do is therefore focus on the key contenders in the contest, which is likely to be ahead of us.

And today we are going to focus on this chap, who is currently looking the most likely to either be the first person to launch a challenge to Keir Starmer's leadership, or who would be likely to be one of the first people to announce that he's running should Keir Starmer resign of his own accord.This is West Streeting.Now, yesterday evening there were a bunch of resignations of very junior government ministers and there was also a particularly key thing which happened was that there was a call for Keir Starmer to resign from a faction of the Labour Party called the Labour Growth Group.This is Chris Curtis?Chris Curtis I think might be his name.

Chris Curtis.This is Chris Curtis from the Labour Growth Group and that group is broadly seen to be allied to the wing of the party which is supportive of West Streeting.And, therefore, these figures going on manoeuvres is very likely a sign that West Streeting is currently drawing up his plans to run for leader.

And, in fact, one useful bit of kind of language to watch out for as you see people calling for Keir Starmer to go is that there are two main ways that people are phrasing that.Some people are calling for an immediate resignation, right, that he goes out in front of 10 Downing Street today, this minute, and immediately announces his departure and therefore a leadership contest happens immediately.Other people are talking about the Prime Minister setting out a timetable for his departure.I think the mostfurthest in advance that I've seen someone suggest is, I think it was John McDonnell, who is formerly the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn, suggesting that Keir Starmer should sort of set out a timetable for his own departure by the time of September, which is when the next Labour Party conference is.And, broadly speaking, these two camps are defined by who someone is likely to be supporting in an upcoming Labour leadership contest.

Anyone who is saying that we'd like a bit of time for Keir Starmer to like say he's gonna go and for there to be everything to move like a little bit slowly and orderly is probably not a West Streeting supporter.They are probably a supporter of Andy Burnham who we will likely talk about in a future video but who needs to become an MP so that he could stand to potentially become the Prime Minister.Anyone who is saying that Keir Starmer should resign immediately is probably likely to be supporting Wes Streeting, because whatever other hurdles and scandals he might have to overcome in order to get that job, it is broadly seen that a speedy, frantic, quick contest would be to his benefit.And this is partly because Wes Streeting is already a high -profile senior figure in the government, with many allies at the top level of the Labour Party too.As things stand, he is the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, which is a particularly powerful role it's worth saying in Britain because we have a nationalised health service, which means that he has a pretty direct amount of power in terms of shaping what healthcare looks like in the UK.Where Streeting is also not there by accident.

Streeting is the epitome of a career politician.He's the kind of guy who wrote Become Prime Minister on the back of an exercise book when he was 14, and sort of every decision he has made up until this point, from thepoint, has been in pursuit of that goal.So, his political career started from, effectively, the minute that he arrived at university.

West Streeting went to Cambridge to study history, but very quickly got involved in campus politics.He became president of the University of Cambridge Student Union, and then he set his eyes on something even bigger.shooting stood for and won the presidency of the National Union of Students, which is often seen as a bit of a springboard to a political career, particularly within the Labour Party.

I'm not entirely sure why, to be honest, because actually looking over the list of presidents of the NUS, you see like some familiar names in there.

I think Liam Byrne maybe, I think, was a NUS president.You see some familiar names, but it's certainly not an absolute.But I think in the kind of archetypical art of what it means to be a frontbench Labour Party politician today, the NUS presidency or a senior role within the NUS is often seen as a bit of a springboard to that.And, even here, we start to get the first real glimpse into what Wes Streeting's approach to politics was likely to be.

And, if you are picturing a student radical, it's maybe time to rethink that image.

Because prior to Wes Treating's tenure as president, the NUS had dedicated significant time and energy to opposing the existence of tuition fees here in the UK.These were not very old at this point.I think 2001, I think, the first tuition fees were introduced.We did a whole video on this around then.But the new Labour government under Tony Blair had introduced, first off, tuition fees that were £1 ,000, and the NUS have been opposed to this and had pushed, done a lot of campaigning to try and get them scrapped again.

Whereas Streeting, however, took what he no doubt saw as the pragmatic, sensible decision to stop this principled opposition and to switch it up insteadthe far -lessened stance of trying to stop any increases.According to the Guardian, he said, That was his framing of that decision, which truly inspiring stuff.I'm sure that was a standing ovation in the NUS hall at that speech.And if Streeting's politics had already been beaten into a kind of pragmatic centrism, that was no doubt a result of the broader political soup that he was swimming in.At some point in his early career, and I have not quite been able to work out exactly when as I've been trying to piece together a bit of a biography of Streeting, he did some work for the think tank Progress.

Now, Progress is a campaign group which have been set up to champion the third -way politics of Tony Blair, which is something that it continues to do to this day.It briefly was called Progressive Britain, I think, but there are various groups like this within the Labour Party that try to promote a certain vision of what the Labour Party should be.Historically, what Progress has done is pushed for what they would call the modernisation of the Labour Party, which generally meant shifting the party away from a model of trade unions, nationalisation and class war, and towards a kind of neoliberalism with a human face.

Okay, maybe human face isn't the right way to describe anything involving Tony Blair at this point, but, you know, to do with Thatcherism, but like a little bit more socially liberal.Westreeting's real branching paths moment, however, came in 2010, when he very nearly went to do some real work in the real world outside of politics.

Just as his time as NUS president was coming to an end, he managed to secure himself a job as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

And yet, before his timeas NUS president was even quite up, or at least very soon after—and this was another thing where I couldn't quite align the dates—Streeting also happened to win a by -election for a local council seat in Redbridge in London.

Here, interestingly, is an early day motion tabled in Parliament celebrating that win.

It's not quite on the screenshot, but if you scroll down, Jeremy Corbyn signed this to say well done to worse treating.What a strange time that must have been to be alive.And now, council posts are very rarely full -time, but there was this sort of interesting scenario in which PricewaterhouseCoopers happened to be the external auditor for Redbridge Council's accounts.And to keep auditing independent, you're not allowed to both be a council counsellor and work for the organisation that is doing that auditing.And so, in what is potentially a reflection of a desire either to do some public service or ruthless political aspirations, he turned down that job and stuck with the council role.This got reported on in the Times Higher Education Supplement, who remarked that, quote, Mr Streeting is a man on a political mission.

Quite.

Rather than PwC, then, Streeting supplemented his councillor's allowance with working at Stonewall, which then, as now, is Britain's biggest LGBT charity.And while there, he served as the head of education, leading particularly on anti -bullying campaigns in schools, which is, you know, really, really solid stuff.

Although ever one to blow with the political winds of change, Wes Streeting has since said that he regrets that he didn't, whilst he was at Stonewall, speak up during that time to stop people, both at Stonewall I guess and outside of it, from being mean to transphobes.So he had a time where he did some good stuff and now he seems to kind of regret that a little bit.Presumably he could have suggested that Stonewall follow up itsinfamous, or famous, sorry, Some People Are Gay, Get Over It campaign, where they kind of, some people are trans, but if you don't like that, I'm more than happy to throw them under the bus if it will help my courage to do so.Maybe less snappy, but probably would have fit on a billboard with small enough font.During all this time, however, his political career kind of just chugged along.

By 2014, at 31 years of age, if my math is correct, he'd become deputy leader Redbridge Council.

I believe he also had the portfolio for health and social care at the council too which, I guess, kind of tips towards greater things in the future.And then came 2015.Those of you who are my age will likely remember the 2015 election reasonably well.After five years of Conservative -Liberal -Democrat coalition government, the UK goes to the polls and, so the narrative goes, it looked like the Labour Party under Ed Miliband had a really strong chance of reclaiming 10 Downing Street.

Until they then very much didn't.You know the story by now.Ed eats the bacon sandwich, there are shy Tories behind every door, and the Conservatives manage to form a coalition - a non -coalition government, sorry, which eventually leads to Brexit.

The Labour Party actually lose 20 -something seats rather than gain them, and then the Liberal Democrats lose a bunch of seats to the Conservatives as well.Upending this trend, however, in a night where the Labour Party lost a bunch of seats, West Streeting managed to pinch a spot as the Member of Parliament from a Conservative in the seat of Ilford North in the North East of London, and entered Parliament.

Of course, this was a bit of a mixed bag for Wes, because not long is Wes Streeting in Parliament, then Ed Miliband resigned as leader and Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party instead.And Jeremy Corbyn is from precisely the opposite tradition, front of the Labour Party from Streeting, right?If Streeting was thekind of progress guy who's against the trade unionism and the nationalisation etc etc, Jeremy Corbyn sort of embodies all of that stuff.

In the first leadership election which Jeremy Corbyn won, Streeting had actually backed Liz Kendall in her leadership campaign.She managed to secure 4 .5 % of the vote of the membership, which is potentially signs of things to come in terms of how popular the kind of politics that Wes Streeting represents is not even in the wider country but amongst the Labour membership, even if it is more popular amongst MPs within the Labour Party.Streeting would be a consistent critic of Corbyn's throughout his leadership.Even after Corbyn had been dropped by the Labour Party—I think this was while he was suspended, not expelled—Streeting got in trouble for calling him senile in the house of commons and had to apologize because I guess because that's rude um and like mean to old people um but then Keir Starmer took over and we're treating pretty swiftly rose through the ranks of the Shadow Cabinet.I think originally he did a job as a Minister for Child Poverty, I think I'm right in saying, but eventually landed in the Shadow Cabinet as the Shadow Health Secretary.And then, following the 2024 general election, he became the Health Secretary.

And there are a few key moves which maybe frame his time in these roles and maybe express something about his politics.The first was a structural change.In March 2025, was actually Keir Starmer that announced it but West Streeting would have overseen it), that the government would be abolishing NHS England.NHS England was effectively a sort of non -departmental public body which sat underneath the Department of Health and sort of did the day -to -day running and management of the NHS and, effectively, what West Streeting did was drew the rugof the NHS back into the direct control of the Department of Health, viewing that as more efficient.

And this, I guess, is probably the most we see in Streeting, a kind of push for structural change towards democratising stuff.I wanted to pick this out sort of as the example that maybe runs against some of the broader narrative of his politics.But he has also, to counteract that, been repeatedly opposed to strikes by doctors, going on quite spicy media rounds, I would say, criticising doctors looking for higher pay.

At one point, I think he blamed doctors for the rise of Nigel Farage, that they were helping that sort of broadly.I think the Telegraph asked him a bunch of questions about whether doctors should be banned from striking and shouldn't be allowed, and he refused to say that they shouldn't be.And finally, he has continued the ban on puberty blockers introduced by the former Conservative government.There was then a trial launched into the use of puberty blockers for trans kids, but Streeting has since paused that trial.This has very much been something that he has lent to the right in the UK on.One of his other slightly more controversial positions, maybe, is that he voted against assisted dying in the recent parliament vote on that.

That, I think, was more linked to the fact he is, I think, a particularly high Anglican, I guess, which is someone in the Church of England but kind of likes the sort of slightly popey stuff of incense and such.And so, yeah, so he has also taken some slightly more controversial, socially illiberal positions on top of that as well.Where he's treating, then, is a controversial thing.For someone who isn't particularly, like, a presence as a human being—I wouldn't particularly describe him as, like, being a big character—he is quite a controversial figure, particularly on the left, and this is going to be his first big challenge in trying to become leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister.Wes Treating is the kind of guy who Labour MPs tend to think is a winner.He was, after all, if we look at his career, effectively, like, bred in captivity for this role.

Like, he was sort of hatched out of an egg that says, kind of, new Labour -approved Prime Minister.

But even among the wider Labour Party, and even among a wider Labour Party which has shed most of its left -wing members at this point, he isn't particularly popular.

There was recently some polling done by Compass, which is a kind of centre -left grouping with, or like pressure group, think tank, aligned to the Labour Party, a bit like progressives on the kind of right, which did some polling about which of the potential contenders Labour Party members preferred.West Streeting got just 11 % of that, which is not particularly promising numbers for someone who needs to win quite a lot more than that to become the leader.Worse still, Wes Streeting was friends with Peter Mandelson.Labour Party right -wing grandee.The Mandelson scandal has already done a huge amount of damage to Keir Starmer, and so many Labour MPs, even those who otherwise might have been quite supportive of Wes Streeting, will now be looking at this and going, does it just immediately blow up for him as well?But the biggest challenge is probably just his overall vibe and politics.

right?What has become apparent to some people in the Labour Party now is that the phenomenon which has turned the party's future prospects terminal is that it is losing young progressive voters by the shedload to the Green Party.And they have lost votes to reform too, they have been losing votes to reform for over a decade at this point, or to UKIP before it, the Brexit Party before it, and yet that it's losing Green voters, losing voters to the Greens, sorry, which has really risked properly killing the Labour Party off more broadly.If the diagnosis is that Keir Starmer has not been radical enough, it seems unlikely that the guy who once celebrated student realism is going to be able to fix that.He's not even notably more charismatic than Starmer, I wouldn't say, although that is maybe be a low bar.Any Labour MP who thinks where's cheating is the answer is asking some questions that no one else is really asking.

And yeah, is that going to stop him running?his desire to be Prime Minister up until this point would suggest probably not.And is it going to stop politicians on the right of the party who want to hold on to the Labour Party even if that means, potentially, it diminishing in its power and popularity more broadly?Is it going to stop them from backing him?Probably not either.What Streeting does have on his side is time.

As I said earlier, a speedy contest would absolutely be in his favour against any other candidates.

Interestingly, West Streeting is perhaps the only candidate which some polling suggests Starmer would actually have the chance of beating in a leadership contest.He is the choice of many MPs within the Labour Party, but it's unclear that West Streeting is a particularly popular choice for Labour Party members or voters more broadly.

But look, if you want to hear a little update on another aspect of British transphobia, then you can check out a video that I made recently for Slow News Day

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