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British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is increasingly likely to be forced from office by his own party. Not because the opposition has defeated him in Parliament, but because Labour MPs are beginning to conclude that he cannot survive another election.

That fear exploded after last week’s local elections in England, where the right-wing populist Reform UK hoovered up seats across the country, mainly at Labour’s expense. These were not national parliamentary elections, but they were vast in scale.

More than 5 000 council seats were contested across 136 English local authorities, including London boroughs, metropolitan councils, county councils, district councils, unitary authorities, and six mayoral contests, as well as elections for the Welsh regional assembly, known as the Senedd, and the Scottish Parliament.

The result was brutal for Keir Starmer’s party. Labour went into the English council elections holding 2 566 of the seats being contested. It came out with 1 068. That means Labour lost 1 498 councillors, wiping out about 58.4% of its local representation in the seats up for election. It also lost control of 38 councils.

Reform UK went into the elections with two councillors and gained 1 451 councillors and took control of 14 councils. The Greens and Liberal Democrats also advanced, leaving Labour squeezed from several directions at once.

The damage was not confined to England. In Wales, Labour suffered a defeat of even greater symbolic force. Wales has its own devolved Parliament, the Senedd, which controls areas such as health, education, transport, and local government. Welsh Labour had dominated that system since devolution began in 1999 and had long been treated as the natural party of government in Cardiff. That dominance has now broken.

Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, won 43 of the Senedd’s 96 seats. Reform UK won 34. Labour was pushed into third place with just nine. It had 30 seats before the election, meaning its Welsh parliamentary strength fell by 70%. Eluned Morgan, Wales’ First Minister since 2024, lost her own seat in Ceredigion Penfro and resigned as Welsh Labour leader. Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth is now positioned to become First Minister, while Reform UK has established itself as the main centre-right force in the Welsh Parliament.

Scotland completed the pattern from a different angle. Scotland also has its own devolved Parliament, based at Holyrood in Edinburgh. Labour was not the governing party there, but it once dominated Scottish politics before the rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the independence movement. Starmer’s Labour had hoped to show that it was recovering in Scotland after winning power at Westminster. Instead, the SNP still won Scotland, but with a reduced position. It fell from 64 seats at the previous Scottish Parliament election to 58, out of 129.

Labour’s result was worse. It fell to 17 seats, down from 22, recording its worst performance in an election to the Scottish Parliament. Reform UK, meanwhile, was tied in second place with Labour with 17 seats after not being able to secure a single seat in the previous Scottish election.

Inside Westminster, the elections were read as a verdict on Starmer himself. MPs who had spent months defending poor polling could no longer pretend the Starmer problem was not serious. Voters had been given a chance to punish Labour, and they had done so across the UK.

At the time of writing, the number of Labour MPs publicly calling for Starmer to go was moving close to 80.

Labour’s rules require a challenger to be backed by 20% of Labour MPs to trigger a formal leadership contest. That currently means 81 MPs. At close to 80 names, Starmer is therefore approaching the point where his critics could turn public pressure into a formal attempt to remove him.

In the UK, MPs from the governing party often exert enormous informal power when a prime minister begins to look like an electoral liability. They can make governing impossible by withdrawing public support, resigning from government posts, leaking secrets to the media, and forcing the question of leadership into every political conversation.

But, who is likely to succeed Starmer if Labour decides he has to go?

Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, represents Labour’s more centrist and Blairite wing. He is the most obvious candidate for those who want a quick contest because he is already an MP and can move immediately.

Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, sits closer to Labour’s soft-left and regional working-class tradition. He cannot run immediately because he is not currently in Parliament. Only MPs can become Labour leader. His supporters therefore need time for him to return to the Commons through a by-election.

Angela Rayner, a former Deputy Prime Minister, who had to resign from that role due to a tax scandal, is closer to Labour’s trade union and working-class activist base. She remains popular with sections of the party, but her own position is complicated by scrutiny around her tax and property affairs. For now, she looks less like the central challenger and more like a powerful figure in the wider anti-Starmer alignment.

The deeper problem for Starmer is that his political purpose has collapsed. He was elected to restore competence, stability, and professionalism after years of Conservative chaos under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He was supposed to be the sober lawyer after the circus.

Instead, Labour MPs now see a government consumed by donor controversies, ministerial scandals, factional warfare, and policy drift. Starmer was meant to close the age of British chaos. He now looks like its next chapter.

His attempted recovery speech this week appears to have made matters worse. It was supposed to save his premiership. Instead, it convinced many MPs that he still does not understand the scale of the danger.

Starmer’s answer to a voter revolt against the political class was to sound more like the political class!

A prime minister begins dying politically when he stops speaking as the leader of the country and starts pleading as the manager of his own party. That is the turn Starmer now appears to have made.

It is now probably a question of when, not if, Starmer would resign. That means that Starmer’s replacement could soon be the UK’s seventh prime minister in less than 10 years.