It’s not often a politician’s resignation makes the one that came before it look like a footnote, but Wes Streeting managed it on Thursday, and now Andy Burnham is circling.
Streeting quit as Health Secretary, saying he’d lost confidence in Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, a statement that landed like a grenade in a government already lurching from one crisis to the next. Within hours, reports emerged that Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, is considering a return to Westminster and a tilt at the Labour leadership itself.
It’s a remarkable turn of events for a party that won a landslide just over a year ago with 412 seats and a majority of 174. That kind of majority is supposed to insulate a government from exactly this sort of internal chaos.
Burnham served as Health Secretary himself under Gordon Brown and ran two creditable Labour leadership campaigns, in 2010 and 2015. He’s built a genuine reputation in Greater Manchester, championing the so-called “Devo Manc” agenda and consistently polling well with the kind of working-class northern voters Labour has been haemorrhaging. He knows how to talk to a room that doesn’t live in SW1.
“Greater Manchester has shown what real Labour values look like in practice,” Burnham said in a speech last spring, before any of this began. It reads rather differently now.
Streeting’s resignation is the more immediately destabilising of the two stories. He was one of Starmer’s closest allies and a serious figure in the party’s modernising wing. If he’s gone, the question isn’t just who replaces him at Health; it’s whether the political floor has fallen away beneath the Prime Minister altogether.
Labour MPs are reportedly furious, though “reportedly furious” has become something of a permanent state of affairs since the winter fuel payment debacle last autumn. The difference now is that resignation letters are being written, not just WhatsApp messages.
Burnham hasn’t confirmed anything officially, and his team is staying tight-lipped. But the timing of the briefings is no accident. In politics, these things rarely are.
The real question is whether Starmer can steady the ship before the next by-election gives voters a chance to say what they think, or whether this is the week the dam actually broke.
