If Starmer goes it will be five PMs in four years. Unprecedented?! No. The post pandemic, inflationary 1920s saw a new challenger party, and a tousled haired, lecherous, corrupt leader succeeded by a burst of PMs. Five PMs… from three parties …. in two years and a month.

That Starmer is going to allow Mahmoud to stay, and she is prepared to stay, should be one of the strongest indicators that there hasn't been an acknowledgement of why Labour have been doing so badly, such that it would prompt a course correction.

Worth reminding ourselves, when the Labour leadership speculation resumes, that not only will contenders require nomination by 81 MPs but also by at least 5% of CLPs or at least three affiliates (two of which must be trade unions) which represent a minimum of 5% of the affiliated membership.

Nothing says "projecting determination" like walking in a straight line down a street

The minister who does not want their resignation to distract from the King’s Speech, distracts from King’s Speech by letting it be known they may be resigning the day after the King’s Speech.

As we all know, the best way to demonstrate your loyalty to the government and avoid distracting from the Kings Speech is to have anonymous allies brief every lobby journalist that you intend to resign tomorrow.

The Labour govt has been like a shit Scooby Doo where they catch the villains then let them go just before the moment of unmasking to continue their villainy. Farage, Brexit, Leveson 2, political donations, foreign interference in elections. #LBC

Extraordinary and unprecedented joint statement from the 11 affiliated Labour trade unions (main party funders) saying “it is clear” that Keir Starmer won’t lead Labour into the next election. Matters not just for financial reasons, it matters for Starmer’s power on the NEC…

As politicians they pretend to be in it for the ordinary (white) man on the street. As grifters, they couldn’t give a shit about him. Just their own bank accounts, as they rake it in and take the piss out of us, our country and our democracy.

I really don't think a single individual outside politics, Fleet street and his own family, see Wes Streeting as a dazzling politician

It’s the best job in politics and she treated it like it was a punishment for something (when, if it were a punishment, the best response would clearly be to do the job really well)

Labour shouldn't have spent the last two years obsessing over which voters to target, but to make matters worse, they picked literally the silliest group to do it with.

I'm not saying this because I particularly think he should stand for leader but it does feel Quite Interesting that Labour actually has this other mayor who's been successfully running a much bigger city for a longer period of time but for some reason no one's waiting for him to save the party

Nice to hear @mrjamesob.bsky.social going with this today. I wish he'd do it more often as no-one else ever will.

"I Know I’m Clickbait, I Know I’m Being Monetised’ Sadiq Khan talks to me about his ten years in City Hall and how this new era of rising algorithmic online hate is now transforming our politics and putting his own personal safety at risk bylinetimes.com/2026/05/12/s...

I understand where Labour MPs on the “it’s too soon, best thing is for Keir to govern well and go in 2028” train are coming from. I used to think that myself. But the core problem is Keir won’t and can’t govern well.

The most damning resignation letter yet, I think:

Counter: none of them are useless and Miliband in particular has run one of the most successful departmental operations we've seen since in years, with profound consequences for the planet itself.

This letter is devastating. Surgical.

Chris is right, and in addition, these maps actually *understate* how bad the local elections were!

100% - just get the podium out and get it over with - them's the breaks.

Sir Keir Starmer tells his cabinet that he will 'get on with governing' and a leadership contest hasn’t been triggered

Might just play this clip on loop for three hours this morning…

New post: Why has Westminster politics become so dumb? mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/05/why-... How and why the rise in right wing populism led to a deterioration in the level of political debate.

Wes Streeting would be the final nail in Labour's coffin. More neoliberalism, more privatisation, more austerity, more grovelling to economic power, when we desperately want change.

Beyond magically taking us back to an imagined 1953, Starmer gave Blue Labour everything they could have wanted. And still they wanted more. And now they turn on him as he had the gall to make the case for a microscopically closer relationship to the EU.

Hey legacy media, how many times does Trump have to fall asleep in the Oval Office on-camera before y'all start questioning it?

Can I just ask, #r4today, as you seem to be very keen to talk about and investigate Polanski’s council tax issue, why not the same feverish scrutiny over the far more troubling and glaringly corrupt £5M bribe Farage took from that crypto billionaire, Harborne? We can hear your strings being pulled.

The inexplicable excitability of political correspondents, as their nation withers and disintegrates

In the run up to the 10th anniversary of Brexit I think we need to remember what was promised by the Brexiters and what threats they made about what would happen if we didn't leave. Here's Farage 10 years ago this month. www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-p...

Turned on the Today programme for perhaps the first time this year. Instantly presented with three minutes of Chris Mason: glib, inane, uninformative, utterly banal. Turned it off again.

𝟏𝟎𝟎 𝖄𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖘 𝕬𝖌𝖔… The Eye delved into Christopher Harborne's background - his dual identity, his cryptocurrency connections, his enormous political donations - long before his undeclared £5 million personal gift to Nigel Farage. From the Private Eye archive. Issue 1511, December 2019.

This is so 2026

Live footage of Keir Starmer returning to Labour HQ after his speech to see how things are going:

With all due respect to Keir Starmer, him believing what's needed here to save his premiership is a 'reset speech' says a lot about Keir Starmer.

Four days ago the US claimed it was on the verge of signing a fully agreed peace deal. And the markets seem to buy it every time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is the end result of Shabana Mahmood’s nasty immigration policies… more votes for Reform and so, more racism scaring and dividing our communities. Not sure how Labour can justify this, politically or morally. It’s so far from what we’d all hoped. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

It's not possible for Labour to get back voters lost to the Greens while continuing to pander to voters lost to reform. Starmer still doesn't get this. #LBC

So Starmer's big Europe offer is an ambitious youth experience scheme. That's what he wants to be at the heart of the UK's new relationship with the EU. That's it? Is this a joke?

The new direction Keir Starmer is taking in the wake of these catastrophic election results looks an awful lot like the direction it was taking before the election results. None of that was new.

Starmer set himself a hostage to fortune. These make or break speeches can almost never make, unless there is a genuinely surprising proposal. There wasn’t one in there- as is evidenced by fact all the Qs instantly return to leadership process questions.

Welcome to the resistance Jim.

Starmer’s still mentioning Reform and the Greens in the same breath. He’s learned nothing. To beat both he should be focusing his attack on Reform & being honest about their far right antidemocratic agenda. The Green threat would be neutralized if its voters had a Labour Party they could believe in.

And now he's explaining why Labour's been doing a great job, actually, if only we'd all been paying attention. "If you're explaining, you're winning" is the famous political saying, right?

Starmer appears to be doing exactly the same (false) equivalence between Reform and the Green Party that has previously utterly enraged people who have switched their vote from Labour to Green. Spectacularly counterproductive.

Yes. And the reverse is also true.

More thoughts from the GB elections, via Talking to Random People. The hatred towards Starmer, and Reeves too, is just off the charts. Now you may say they're rubbish or okay, but when if ever have such ordinary workaday politicians evoked such epochal personal enmity?

a sentimental speech about Labour values delivered by a man who clearly has no sentimental connection to the Labour party feels like a great way of annoying both the voters and the party all at the same time

The quid pro quo of a Starmer leadership was that - fine - we weren't getting a storyteller or a charisma powerhouse, but we'd at least get serious, competent leadership committed to delivery. In fact we got neither.