Wes Streeting said he would challenge Keir Starmer in any leadership contest and used a conference of Labour modernisers to argue that Britain should seek to rejoin the European Union. Speaking days after stepping down and urging Starmer to set a timetable for his departure, the health secretary said he would stand if a contest was triggered.
"We need a proper contest with the best candidates on the field, and I will be standing," Streeting told the Progress group, adding that Brexit was "a catastrophic mistake." He said Britain needed "a new special relationship with the EU, because Britain’s future lies with Europe, and one day – one day – back in the European Union," a striking pitch from a cabinet minister to a party still led by a prime minister who opposed leaving the bloc but has rejected trying to rejoin it.
The intervention lands at a moment when Labour is still absorbing the damage from last week’s local and regional elections, where it haemorrhaged votes to Reform UK and the Green Party. Starmer has refused calls to step aside, but the pressure on him is now coming from inside the party as well as outside it, with Streeting warning that the future of the UK is at stake in the next general election and that Labour risks becoming "the handmaidens of Nigel Farage" if it ignores the warnings from voters.
That warning is aimed not just at Starmer but at the mechanics of any possible challenge. Labour rules require a challenger to win the backing of 20 per cent of the party’s MPs to force a leadership election, meaning support from 81 of Labour’s 403 members. The prime minister would automatically be entitled to run. Streeting said he already had enough support to trigger a contest, though he also suggested he would lack legitimacy if Andy Burnham were not first able to return to parliament.
Burnham, speaking late on Thursday, said he was standing for election in a newly vacant seat to get back into the Commons, and Labour’s executive body has said he can run in a special election expected within weeks. That matters because Burnham is seen as one of the names that could reshape any contest, alongside Angela Rayner, Al Carns and Ed Miliband, all of whom are said to be considering a run if the leadership opens up.
The pressure is sharpened by the scale of the politics outside Westminster. Tens of thousands of people marched through central London in two separate protests on May 17, 2026, with police deploying 4,000 officers and arresting 43 people. Police said both protests were largely without significant incident, but Starmer seized on the Unite the Kingdom march to accuse organisers of "peddling hate and division, plain and simple."
For now, Starmer remains in place and the challenge to him is still only a possibility. But Streeting has made clear that he is willing to turn the argument over Labour’s direction into an open fight, and if the numbers gather behind him, the party could be forced to choose between continuity in Downing Street and a contest over whether its future lies with Europe again.
