It is an old adage of leadership contests that ‘If you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss’ – but no one expected the starting gun to be fired at Charles III. At the exact time on Wednesday when the monarch was reading the King’s Speech to parliament, allies of Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, put a bomb under proceedings by making it clear that he is set to challenge Keir Starmer this week. ‘Yes, it’s inevitable,’ one says.

The timing horrified MPs even on Streeting’s wing of the party. A cabinet minister declared: ‘Having failed with his kamikaze coup, Wes has now undermined every single one of his colleagues and disrespected the King.’ Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, accused Streeting of ‘overshadowing’ the government’s policy platform and ‘playing Westminster games’.

The day before, MPs and ministers supporting the Health Secretary had broken cover to call for Starmer to stand down, but the man himself seemed uncertain whether to take the plunge. Insiders say Streeting’s allies were divided for much of Tuesday. One characterised the division as ‘old Wes people’ who questioned whether he actually had a plan to win the contest, while ‘the factional headbangers’ from the ultra-Blairite thinktank Progress urged him to ‘seize the moment’.

An ally says: ‘The Prime Minister went into cabinet and thought: “You know what, fuck these guys”’

An ally says: ‘The Prime Minister went into cabinet and thought: “You know what, fuck these guys”’

A former No. 10 aide compared him to ‘one of those first world war generals’ who ‘gets his mates to go over the top while he sits in the château’. A cabinet minister says: ‘He’s like the Grand Old Duke of York marching people up the hill and back down again. You’ve got a group of ministers who I assume have resigned on the promise of jobs from him. They might be waiting quite a long time.’

But on Wednesday morning, after Streeting finally saw Starmer one-on-one for a paltry 16 minutes, he resolved to act. ‘Wes could never bear that it wasn’t him who saved the Labour party and won an election, but Keir and his team,’ a senior Labour source says. ‘As soon as we got into government he started plotting, thinking everything would fall into his hands.’

Streeting will not, however, have a clear run at Starmer. A No. 10 source said: ‘Ed is also organising.’ That is Ed Miliband, the former leader and Energy Secretary, who may now have to carry the hopes of the Labour left. And Starmer himself ‘is going nowhere’, a close ally said.

At the start of the week it was far from certain that Starmer would still be around to resist anything. For a few moments on Tuesday morning, in the cabinet room in No. 10, the portrait of Robert Walpole gazed down, waiting for his 57th successor as prime minister to appear. ‘Everyone was sitting around the table, but there was one empty seat, the only seat with arms,’ a minister recalls. When Starmer sat down, few knew what he was going to say. ‘He had what I would describe as a quiet station, a steely determination.’

Starmer gave ‘a pretty brief address’ acknowledging that the local election results were terrible, but warning that, with the price of government borrowing rising, leadership turmoil would have ‘real economic cost for our country and for families’. He quickly moved on to Labour’s leadership rules. ‘The party has a process for challenging a leader and that has not been triggered,’ he said. A minister says: ‘We all knew that was directed at one person in the room.’ Eyes turned to Streeting.

Just before the meeting started, the 81st Labour MP had broken cover to call for Starmer to quit or name the date for his departure. But the rules state that for a contest to begin, 81 MPs must support a single named candidate and that threshold had not been reached.

The PM’s intervention was pure Starmer – a punctilious recourse to process –........

© The Spectator