Since David Cameron stepped down on 13 July 2016, Britain has had five prime ministers. Only one was directly installed by a general election. The other four came to power through internal party contests, elected by MPs and members, not the public.

Now, less than two years after the landslide that catapulted him to power, Keir Starmer faces the same fate. Almost 100 Labour MPs have publicly called on him to resign. Four cabinet ministers have now quit, including Labour stalwart Jess Phillips. So how did we get here?

To understand where Labour is heading, it helps to draw parallels to the Conservatives’ own political crises. Almost four years ago, a cabinet revolt brought down Boris Johnson. His successor, Liz Truss, only lasted 49 days thanks to her mini-budget. Rishi Sunak inherited a parliamentary party so factionalized that governing proved impossible. As a consequence, the Tories received the worst political drubbing in modern British history.

For the better part of a century, the Conservative Party liked to call itself a “broad church”: capacious enough to house Euroskeptics and Europhiles, Thatcherites and One Nation paternalists. Labour came round to the principle under Blair, gathering Tribune socialists, Fabian technocrats, trade unionists and Islington progressives under one leader. The factions loathed one another, but they loathed losing elections even more. First-past-the-post arranged party politics, both rational and necessary, and for decades, it worked.

But now, that machinery is broken.

Look at what is gathered under the Labour whip. On the Right, Wes Streeting is the figurehead of the pro-market Blairites and speaks openly about the need to return to fiscal discipline. It is expected that he will declare his candidacy in the coming days. But this news is not welcomed by everyone, with one cabinet minister briefing that Streeting would be “lucky to outlast a lettuce”.

On the Left, there is the duo of Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham. On Sunday, the former Deputy Prime Minister Rayner went public, declaring that “what we are doing isn’t working” and demanding the National Executive Committee reverse its decision to block Andy Burnham from standing in a byelection. Rayner has said that she does not want the leadership herself, but it has been suggested that she will stand if Streeting moves.

The parallels between the downfall of Johnson and this current moment are striking. The defenestration of Boris Johnson in 2022 began when his cabinet rebelled. Sajid Javid resigned, and Rishi Sunak followed just a few minutes later; within 48 hours, more than 50 ministers had walked out.

Though the Prime Minister is refusing to step down, it is difficult to see how the same process is not playing out for Labour. Four ministers have resigned in the past 24 hours, and more could be on the way. The bond markets, which ultimately brought down Liz Truss, have also seen the writing on the wall, spiking with news that Starmer could go. Even Buckingham Palace has questioned whether the King’s Speech should go ahead.

This morning, the King will read out a legislative program written by a government that may not survive the week. The speech is expected to include a Public Office (Accountability) of candor on public officials, the extremely unpopular judge-only trials for certain offenses under a new Courts and Tribunals Bill, and a sweeping restriction on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in asylum cases, championed by Shabana Mahmood and certain to bring the soft-Left out in open revolt. Labour members will rise to applaud the speech Starmer sent the King to deliver, and then resume their plotting.

The efficient constitution, meanwhile, is collapsing. Labour’s broad church, like the Tories’ before it, was built to win elections in a two-party system. For most of the last century, Labour and Conservative leaders survived their factions because the factions had nowhere else to go. That is no longer true. The country’s politics have fractured into five distinct parties; there is now somewhere for that pressure to go. The Tories discovered this in 2024. By attempting to remove Starmer, Labour is about to do the same.

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Loïc Frémond advises venture capital firms on government relations.

Fremond_

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