“Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer is sounding out his future with his Cabinet after Andy Burnham’s win in the Makerfield by-election put the two Labour politicians on a collision course,” Politico reports.
“The assessments he’s received back have been grim.”
Polmarket says there’s a 95 percent chance that Starmer will be out by the end of the year. In fact, per the same source, there’s an 82 percent chance he’ll be gone by July 31.
The 62-year-old British prime minister is under sustained political pressure even though a general election is not due until 2029.
Senior Labour figures publicly insist he will still be PM at the end of this year and even into 2027, which is itself a signal that his position is being actively questioned.
He has been dealing with poor approval ratings and persistent leadership speculation, including talk of a possible internal Labour coup rather than an early general election.
A late‑2025YouGov poll for Sky News found about half of voters expected him to be replaced as PM by the end of 2026, reflecting significant public skepticism about his survival. But Starmer told his Cabinet on Tuesday that he has no plans to resign, even as internal Labour demands for him to step down intensified following the party’s heavy losses in last week’s British elections.
Lack of a consensus successor
There is still no definitive challenger. And the Labour Party has no history of deposing a sitting Labour prime minister mid‑term; even Tony Blair left on a timetable rather than being formally removed, which makes many MPs wary of being the first to topple one of their own.
Both the soft left and the right worry that moving too soon could install someone they like even less, or simply lose to Starmer and emerge weaker. As long as MPs are split on “who next?”, many may conclude that sticking with Starmer is the lesser of two evils.
