Efforts to unseat British Prime Minister Keir Starmer from within his party broke into open rebellion on Thursday (May 15, 2026), with one potential rival resigning from the Cabinet and two others positioning themselves for a future leadership challenge.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting became the first senior Minister to quit on Thursday (May 14, 2026) in what was seen as a precursor to challenging Mr. Starmer’s leadership. He said he had lost confidence in Mr. Starmer, who should not serve out the rest of his term.

“You have shown courage and statesmanship on the world stage — not least in keeping Britain out of the war in Iran,” Mr. Streeting wrote in an excoriating resignation letter. “But where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”

But Mr. Streeting stopped short of saying he was the best candidate to lead the party at the next election due by 2029, suggesting Starmer should step aside to allow a “broad” field of candidates to debate the future of the party.

Mr. Starmer is under growing pressure to step down after disastrous results for his Labour Party last week in local and regional elections.

The election drubbing cemented doubts among many party members about Mr. Starmer’s judgment, vision and leadership ability — a brutal indictment on a leader who returned Labour to power in July 2024 after 14 years in opposition.

Mr. Starmer responded in a generous letter to Mr. Streeting, saying he was “truly sorry” to see him leave the government and praised his stewardship of the state-run National Health Service.

Making no reference to Mr. Streeting’s criticisms, Mr. Starmer laid out his hope the two “can work together to show that Labour in power can address the problems our opponents exploit, can install hope where they want despair, and can bring people together where they want division”.

If Mr. Starmer doesn’t step down, any challenger would need support from a fifth of Labour lawmakers, or 81, to trigger a leadership contest.

For days, Mr. Streeting had been expected to launch a bid on Thursday (May 14), but the wording of his statement has stoked speculation he doesn’t have enough votes yet, or that he is giving Mr. Starmer a chance to announce his resignation on his own terms.

Another likely challenger, former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, said on Thursday (May 14) that she had reached an agreement with authorities to clear up questions about her taxes that forced her to leave the Cabinet last September.

Ms. Rayner told the Guardian newspaper that Starmer should “reflect on” his position, adding that she was ready to “play my part” in any leadership election if Streeting triggered a contest.

A third rival, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, is ineligible for the leadership because he doesn’t have a seat in Parliament, but on Thursday (May 14) afternoon a Labour lawmaker said he would step aside to make room and Burnham said he would seek permission from party to enter a special election. He could then mount a leadership challenge if elected.

“I grew up in this area and have lived here for 25 years,” Mr. Burnham said on X. “I care deeply about it and its people. I know they have been let down by national politics.”

Pressure for Mr. Starmer to step aside has intensified since Labour suffered heavy losses in local and regional elections last week, underscoring voter frustration with a government that has failed to deliver on pledges to boost economic growth and improve living standards for working people.

A stagnant economy and stubbornly high inflation have made it difficult for Mr. Starmer’s government to deliver on the promises it made when winning a landslide election victory less than two years ago.

Mr. Starmer has vowed to remain in office, warning lawmakers that any leadership contest would destabilise the government when it should be focused on issues like the cost of living crisis and war in the Middle East.

The leadership wrangles overshadowed some positive news for the government.

Official figures showed the British economy grew 0.6% in the first three months of the year — more than had been anticipated and larger than the previous quarter, despite the negative impact from the Iran war. More growth means more tax revenues to fund Labour’s priorities and potentially lower borrowing.

Treasury chief Rachel Reeves said the figures showed her policies were working and the party shouldn’t put hard-won economic stability at risk “by plunging the country in chaos at a time when there is conflict in the world”.

Streeting himself hailed figures showing that waiting lines for NHS appointments — one of his signature priorities — fell for the fifth straight month, an achievement he is likely to point to if he runs for leader.

Streeting comes from a faction of the left-leaning Labour Party that sees itself as the modernising wing, as does Starmer. Rayner is a favorite of members who think the party has strayed too far from its working-class roots and those who want the party to do more to boost the minimum wage and raise taxes on the rich.

Unlike the Conservative Party, Labour has never ousted a Prime Minister in midterm.

“They don’t do ruthless on their leader,” said Jonathan Tonge, a professor of politics at the University of Liverpool. “They don’t tend to depose their leader. The Conservatives, they readily do ruthless.”

Even if Mr. Starmer survives this current bout of jitters, he will likely face another challenge in a few months given the level of fragmentation in British politics, he added.

“He’s got a huge parliamentary majority, he’s got more than 400 MPs, and yet his prime ministership may be on the brink of disintegration,” Mr. Tonge said.

Published – May 15, 2026 10:15 am IST

A new U.K. political party involving veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn opens its inaugural conference on Saturday (November 29, 2025), seeking to move on from a messy launch and become a viable left-wing challenger to Labour.

As British politics fractures into a multi-party system and Prime Minister Keir Starmer takes Labour rightward on some issues, Mr. Corbyn’s outfit hopes to fill a gap on the left.

But it faces a mammoth task, with polls showing that the Green Party — newly headed by a charismatic leader 30 years younger than Mr. Corbyn — is mopping up most disaffected lefties.

“The people of this country desperately need a real alternative to the rise of the far right,” said lawmaker Shockat Adam, referring to anti-immigrant Reform UK’s lead in opinion polls.

Mr. Adam, elected at last year’s general election on a pro-Palestinian ticket, was one of four independent MPs to sign up for “Your Party”, which Corbyn and fellow ex-Labour lawmaker Zarah Sultana announced they were forming in July.

Infighting

Two have since quit, however, amid open warfare between Mr. Corbyn, 76, and Ms. Sultana, 32, that has included a dispute over a botched membership launch and threats of legal action.

Iqbal Mohamed said last week he had decided to leave Your Party, citing “false allegations and smears against me and others”.

That came after Adnan Hussain announced he was exiting the outfit due to “persistent infighting” and “veiled prejudice” against Muslim men.

“It’s pretty obvious that it has been a disaster so far,” Colm Murphy, an expert on the British left at Queen Mary University of London, told AFP.

Mr. Corbyn and Ms. Sultana will try to put their differences aside when several thousand supporters of the new movement gather in Liverpool, northwest England, for two days.

Members are due to choose the party’s official name and decide whether it should have a single leader or be led by its members.

‘Natural home’

Mr. Corbyn lost two elections as Labour leader between 2015 and 2020 before being suspended for refusing to fully accept a rights watchdog’s findings that antisemitism was rife among activists during his leadership.

He was succeeded by Mr. Starmer, who dragged the party back to the centre and returned it to power in July 2024 after 14 years in opposition.

But Labour has since plummeted in popularity among left-wing voters in particular, due to its crackdown on immigration, perceived failure to redistribute enough wealth and alleged slowness to call out Israel for its conduct of the war in Gaza.

Stuart Hill, a former Labour councillor who quit the party in 2023 after 30 years of membership, said he joined Your Party “with enthusiasm”.

“Labour is completely ineffectual,” he told AFP, accusing it of adopting similar rhetoric to Reform on migrants in order to appeal to their supporters.

‘Real change’

Some 50,000 people have become members of Your Party, Mr. Corbyn announced earlier this month, calling the outfit a “mass democratic movement for real change”.

But a YouGov poll published this week suggested that only 12% of Britons would consider voting for it, compared to 28% for the Greens, led by Zack Polanski, 43.

Your Party is “at risk of being irrelevant very quickly”, said Murphy, noting that Polanski had “taken over” Corbyn’s role as the “populist, radical left voice” in Britain.

U.K. politics has long been dominated by Labour and the Conservatives, but the centre-left Liberal Democrats won 72 seats in the 650-seat parliament last year, while Reform, led by Nigel Farage, won five and the Greens took four.

Labour, under pressure from its own backbenchers, adopted a number of left-wing measures in its budget this week, including raising the minimum wage, boosting child benefits and introducing a new tax on high-value homes.

“We should be doing much more to hold on to our traditional support,” Labour MP Steve Witherden told AFP beforehand, adding that his party can still “remain the natural home of the left”.

Published – November 29, 2025 09:23 am IST

London:

A senior British government minister on Friday criticised Elon Musk’s latest intervention in the country’s politics as “misjudged and certainly misinformed”.

The tech billionaire accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer a day earlier of failing to bring “rape gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions.

In a string of posts on his X platform, Musk also suggested that Jess Phillips, minister for the prevention of violence against women and girls, “deserves to be in prison” for refusing a request for a national public inquiry into a child sexual exploitation scandal in the northern English city of Oldham.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting told ITV News television that Musk’s comments were wide of the mark and that the government took child sexual exploitation “incredibly seriously”.

“Some of the criticisms that Elon Musk has made, I think are misjudged and certainly misinformed, but we’re willing to work with Elon Musk, who I think has got a big role to play with his social media platform to help us and other countries to tackle this serious issue,” he said.

“So if he wants to work with us and roll his sleeves up, we’d welcome that,” he added.

The widespread abuse of girls in a number of English towns and cities including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, which emerged more than a decade ago, has long stirred controversy.

A series of court cases eventually led to the convictions of dozens of men, mostly of South Asian Muslim origin. The victims were vulnerable, mostly white, girls.

A series of official inquiries into how police and social workers failed to halt the abuse found that officials in some cases turned a blind eye to avoid appearing racist.

The scandals have been seized upon by far-right figures, in particular Tommy Robinson, a prominent extremist agitator.

Accused of helping fuel anti-immigration riots last summer, Robinson was imprisoned in October after he admitted committing contempt of court over a long-running libel case involving a Syrian refugee.

In one of his X posts on Thursday, Musk claimed that Robinson was in prison “for telling the truth” and that “he should be freed”.

– Swipe at Starmer –

Most of Musk’s messages focused on Robinson’s long-time highlighting of historical scandals involving alleged paedophile grooming gangs in some English cities.

Sharing various other accounts’ claims around the child sex crimes spanning decades, Musk noted that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decides whether to charge suspects.

“Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008-2013,” he posted.

Starmer was the head of the CPS in that period, but none of the probes into the scandals singled him out for blame or found that he tried to block prosecutions due to concerns over alleged Islamophobia.

Later, in response to another post calling for King Charles III to dissolve parliament, Musk replied: “Yes!”

He later took another swipe at Starmer, suggesting that his government had turned down the requested inquiry “because he is guilty of complicity”.

Weighing in on the row, later on Friday Nigel Farage, a lawmaker and leader of the anti-immigration Reform UK party, disagreed with Musk about Robinson.

“He sees Robinson as one of these people that fought against the grooming gangs. But of course the truth is Tommy Robinson’s in prison not for that, but for contempt of court,” he told right-wing channel GB News.

Robinson himself had encouraged a narrative that he was a “political prisoner… but it isn’t quite true”, he said.

Farage added that Musk, with whom he has had talks about the US billionaire donating to his hard-right party, was “very supportive of me, he’s very supportive of the party”.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

London:

Britain’s Indian First Lady, Akshata Murty, made a surprise debut on the political stage on Wednesday when she stepped out to introduce “best friend” Rishi Sunak for his maiden speech as UK Prime Minister to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester. Ms Murty, during her light-hearted and personal speech, claimed her husband was unaware of her “gate-crashing” as the warm-up act to the centrepiece of the annual conference and that her decision had also surprised their daughters, Krishna and Anoushka.

The 43-year-old daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayan Murthy went on to share her pride in Mr Sunak’s many achievements and how it was his “honesty and integrity” that had first attracted her to him when they met as students at Stanford University in their 20s.

“Rishi and I are each other’s best friends; we are one team and I could not imagine being anywhere else than here today to show my support to him and to the party,” said Ms Murty.

“Rishi and I met when we were 24 when we were both studying abroad in America. Right from the very beginning, I was struck by two things about him… his deep love for his home, the United Kingdom, and his sincere desire to ensure as many people as possible have a chance to have the opportunities he was lucky enough to have had. It completely energised him. Being with Rishi was the easiest decision of my life,” she said.

According to Ms Murty, the one word that encapsulates her husband is “aspiration”, which drives him to work for a better future for the UK.

“Sometimes when the going gets tough, I remind Rishi that he’s fighting for his values. That he’s fighting for this party’s values, knowing that it’s a hard road ahead. That success is hard one,” she said.

During the lighter moments in her speech, Ms Murty confirmed media reports about Mr Sunak’s preference for romcoms and described him as “fun, thoughtful and compassionate”.

“He has an incredible zest for life. What drew me to him most was his strength of character, his honesty, his integrity, with a firm understanding of right from wrong. It’s what I’m still drawn to, even today, after 14 years of being married,” she said.

“Rishi, you know this, you know that doing the right thing for the long term even when it is hard is the right thing to do. I hope you also know how proud you make our girls and me every single day,” concluded Ms Murty, to sustained applause from the Tory gathering as a visibly moved Mr Sunak stepped out onto the stage.

During his much-anticipated address, Mr Sunak opened with the central theme of the Tory conference to say that Ms Murty was the “best long-term decision for a brighter future” he had made.

Mr Sunak said since he became Prime Minister in October last year the government has “done good things in that time”. He went on to highlight that the political system over the last 30 years had incentivised easy decisions short-term rather than the right ones.

“It doesn’t have to be this way, I won’t be this way,” he declared.

Confirming an expected decision to axe the High Speed-2 (HS2) railway project, Mr Sunak claimed it was the “ultimate example of the old consensus” and the economic case for the project has “massively been weakened”.

“I say to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed and the right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction. And so I am ending this long-running saga. I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project and in its place we will reinvest every single penny, GBP 36 billion in hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the Midlands, across the country,” he said.

Taking a shot at his predecessor at 10 Downing Street, Liz Truss, who had again called for tax cuts during a fringe event at the conference earlier this week, something Mr Sunak has repeatedly said would be inflationary.

“I will tell it as it is, I will lead in a different way because that is the only way to create the sort of the change in our politics and our country that we all desperately want to see,” he said, laying out his stall for the governing party activists ahead of an expected general election next year.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty arrive at the Conservative Party annual conference at Manchester Central convention complex in Manchester, England on October 4, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP

Britain’s Indian First Lady, Akshata Murty, made a surprise debut on the political stage on October 4 when she stepped out to introduce “best friend” Rishi Sunak for his maiden speech as U.K. Prime Minister to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester.

Ms. Murty, during her light-hearted and personal speech, claimed her husband was unaware of her “gate-crashing” as the warm-up act to the centrepiece of the annual conference and that her decision had also surprised their daughters, Krishna and Anoushka.

The 43-year-old daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayan Murthy went on to share her pride in Mr. Sunak’s many achievements and how it was his “honesty and integrity” that had first attracted her to him when they met as students at Stanford University in their 20s.

“Rishi and I are each other’s best friends; we are one team and I could not imagine being anywhere else than here today to show my support to him and to the party,” said Ms. Murty.

“Rishi and I met when we were 24 when we were both studying abroad in America. Right from the very beginning, I was struck by two things about him…his deep love for his home, the United Kingdom, and his sincere desire to ensure as many people as possible have a chance to have the opportunities he was lucky enough to have had. It completely energised him. Being with Rishi was the easiest decision of my life,” she said.

According to Ms. Murty, the one word that encapsulates her husband is “aspiration”, which drives him to work for a better future for the U.K.

“Sometimes when the going gets tough, I remind Rishi that he’s fighting for his values. That he’s fighting for this party’s values, knowing that it’s a hard road ahead. That success is hard one,” she said.

During the lighter moments in her speech, Ms. Murty confirmed media reports about Mr. Sunak’s preference for romcoms and described him as “fun, thoughtful and compassionate”.

“He has an incredible zest for life. What drew me to him most was his strength of character, his honesty, his integrity, with a firm understanding of right from wrong. It’s what I’m still drawn to, even today, after 14 years of being married,” she said.

“Rishi, you know this, you know that doing the right thing for the long term even when it is hard is the right thing to do. I hope you also know how proud you make our girls and me every single day,” concluded Ms. Murty, to sustained applause from the Tory gathering as a visibly moved Mr. Sunak stepped out onto the stage.

During his much-anticipated address, Mr. Sunak opened with the central theme of the Tory conference to say that Ms. Murty was the “best long-term decision for a brighter future” he had made.

Mr. Sunak said since he became Prime Minister in October last year the government has “done good things in that time”. He went on to highlight that the political system over the last 30 years had incentivised easy decisions short-term rather than the right ones.

“It doesn’t have to be this way, I won’t be this way,” he declared.

Confirming an expected decision to axe the High Speed-2 (HS2) railway project, Mr. Sunak claimed it was the “ultimate example of the old consensus” and the economic case for the project has “massively been weakened”.

“I say to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed and the right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction. And so I am ending this long-running saga. I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project and in its place we will reinvest every single penny, GBP 36 billion in hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the Midlands, across the country,” he said.

Taking a shot at his predecessor at 10 Downing Street, Liz Truss, who had again called for tax cuts during a fringe event at the conference earlier this week, something Mr. Sunak has repeatedly said would be inflationary.

“I will tell it as it is, I will lead in a different way because that is the only way to create the sort of change in our politics and our country that we all desperately want to see,” he said, laying out his stall for the governing party activists ahead of an expected general election next year.