Keir Starmer is to give a speech on Monday responding to Labour’s pasting across large swathes of the country in the local and regional elections.

It is billed as promising to accelerate reconnection with Europe – but without messing with the “red lines” on rejoining the European Union (EU) or even the Customs Union. A youth mobility scheme is the nearest avatar, which is welcome but not really what the outrage at Labour’s failures was about, nor even massively relevant to a huge amount of voters.

The speech is set to offer a mood of new “hope and optimism” – a counter-intuitive tone to strike when Labour has seen a rout in local government: losing control of half of its London councils, squeezed into third place behind Plaid Cymru and Reform in Wales, and trailing a resurgent SNP north of the border.

Sir Keir Starmer is now fighting for his political life, in the knowledge that expectations for his survival are ebbing away. For all the attempts to stabilise the situation tomorrow and the King’s Speech laying out a scrappy legislative programme later this week, it feels like an existential Dover Beach moment, in the Matthew Arnold poem of eloquent lament for a disappearing certainties: “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night”.

But the battle is intensifying around him – and the placid view that it is better to stick with an ailing commander than risk change is evaporating fast in Labour.

Indeed, anything said a couple of weeks ago is now looking out of date. One was that Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s chances of ascendancy had been neutered. Now, however, he is a candidate who retains enough active support on the backbenchers to give it a crack.

Indeed, the opening may also have presented itself, as Catherine West made headlines on........

© iNews