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Wes Streeting leaves No 10 after planned talks with Keir Starmer last just 17 minutes
Good morning. There are two main events in the diary today. At this point, it is not entirely clear which will turn out to be more consequential.
At 11.15am the king will arrive at parliament for the state opening. The king’s speech sets out the legislative programme for the next year. Kiran Stacey has a preview here.
In normal circumstances, this is one of the big events in the annual political calender – although most of what is in the speech has been well trailed, so it is more a day for ceremony than surprise. We will get plenty of information; alongside the speech, the government publishes a 100-page briefing pack, with outline details of all the bills coming up over the next 12 months.
But Keir Starmer had another appointment first. We learned last night that he would be meeting Wes Streeting, the health secretary who wants to replace him. Yesterday Starmer in effect challenged Streeting to ‘put up or shut up’ and, although some of Streeting’s allies have resigned from ministerial jobs, and others have joined the long list of Labour MPs publicly calling for Starmer’s resignation, by last night Streeting had still not launched a formal leadership challenge. In Downing Street they are starting to believe that Streeting has blinked because he does not have the support he needs to win a contest.
Streeting arrived for the meeting at Downing Street at 8.24am. He was out again 16 minutes later.
Streeting allies have indicated that they don’t intend to brief on what happened until the king’s speech is over, out of respect for Charles. But it does not seem likely that a meeting that swift was cordial. According to one report, Streeting was going to ask Starmer how he planned to “get us out of this mess”. Starmer clearly was not minded to give him a long, considered, collegiate answer. What we don’t know is whether or not Streeting said he would launch a leadership challenge.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.15am: The king arrives at Westminster for the state opening. He delivers his speech at around 11.30am.
2.30pm: MPs started their debate on the speech. After speeches from two government backbenchers proposing and seconding the speech, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, and Starmer deliver speeches.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
UPDATE: Joe Pike from the BBC has checked the timings, and says Wes Streeting was in No 10 for 17 minutes, and so I have gone with his timings, not Sky’s, and amended the headline. See 9.20am.
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SNP says it plans to hold no confidence vote in Starmer via amendment to king's speech debate
The SNP has said that it will table an amendment to the king’s speech proposing no confidence in Keir Starmer. Explaining the party’s tactic, Dave Doogan, the new SNP leader at Westminster, said:
This farce has to end now, so parliament can focus on the issues that really matter.
It’s clear the only way that can happen is for Keir Starmer to go.
He has lost the confidence of voters and his own MPs, and there’s no coming back from that. The Labour party must stop dragging this crisis out and put an end to it now.
If the Labour cabinet ministers don’t have the decency to do the right thing – then parliament must.
Unless they put an end to this chaos now, the SNP will table a motion of no confidence in Keir Starmer to draw things to a close.
There is very little chance of the SNP amendment being passed, assuming it does get put to a vote. Almost 100 Labour MPs have called for Starmer to go, and if all of them were to vote with the opposition for a no confidence motion, it would pass.
But a confidence motion normally brings out party loyalty among MPs. While many Labour MPs would like Starmer to go, almost none of them would like that to happen as part of an SNP/Tory parliamentary stunt.
Rafael Behr has a good column in the Guardian today on what has gone wrong with Keir Starmer’s premiership. Here is an extract.
Generous critics concede that Starmer is a scrupulous public servant, but note that a diligent pragmatist should have developed a fuller programme for government when still in opposition. It was naive, at best, to assume that the mere act of replacing wicked Conservative ministers with noble Labour ones would unblock the sluices that had apparently prevented good policy flowing out of Whitehall.
The harsher judgment is that the Starmer project made a fetish of pragmatism as an electoral tactic to the exclusion of policy; that avoidance of awkward questions – how to raise money for public services, how to repair the damage inflicted by Brexit – amounted to a ban on thinking about answers; that the determination to purge Labour of Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy was pursued with factional monomania that mislabelled dissent of any kind as toxic leftism.
The vast majority of MPs desperately wanted to support their leader. But they have struggled to discern what they are being loyal to when the government’s most familiar manoeuvre is the U-turn, its fiscal mandate was set to parameters chosen by the last Conservative government and its immigration policy sounds like a queasy tribute to Farage.
And here is the full article.
This is from Paul Scully, a former Tory MP, on the Starmer/Streeting meeting.
A meeting without coffee’ was a common name for a summons by the Chief Whip for a bollocking. Not sure that was the look Wes Streeting was going for.
One of the state opening traditions involves a government MP being sent to the Palace when the king attends parliament to serve as a hostage. It’s a tradition that dates from the time when relations between parliament and the monarchy were more hostile (indeed, at times murderous), and it is intended to give the king a guarantee that he will be allowed to return home safely.
Nic Dakin, a whip, is on hostage duty today.
Here are two MPs commenting on Keir Starmer’s meeting with Wes Streeting.
From James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary
I’m not sure that publicly humiliating a senior cabinet minister and possible leadership rival is a good tactic by Starmer.
From Karl Turner, who was elected as a Labour MP but who is currently suspended
Doc: NEXT
Wes: Morning Doctor.
Doc: Morning, now what’s the problem?
Wes: it’s the party doc, it just doesn’t feel like it’s working. It doesn’t feel like a party anymore.
Doc: I have some tablets for that, try to pretend it’s not happening the others are.
Doc: NEX
No 10 rejects Scottish government's claim independence will be on agenda when Starmer meets Swinney
Libby Brooks
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.
An odd dispute of interpretation has emerged overnight between the Scottish and UK governments. Yesterday evening a Scottish government spokesperson announced that, during a call between first minister John Swinney and prime minister Kier Starmer, both parties agreed to meet face to face next month to discuss a referendum on independence.
Given Starmer’s consistently negative stance on independence this came as something of a surprise.
But immediately after Downing Street poured cold water on the notion, saying that the pair had agreed to discussed “shared issues” not the constitution.
The first minister’s spokesperson said:
It is particularly welcome that the prime minister agreed to meet next month to discuss a referendum on independence.
But a Downing Street spokesperson countered:
The PM committed to meeting to discussed shared issues including the cost of living.
As the PM told the first minister, the manifesto this government was elected on was unambiguous that ‘Labour does not support independence or another referendum’. Our position remains unchanged.
This morning both parties are sticking to their interpretation of the call.
Yesterday Zubir Ahmed, a health minister known to be a supporter of Wes Streeting, resigned from government. In an interview on the Today programme, Ahmed said he held Keir Starmer responsible for Labour’s defeat in Scotland, where Ahmed is MP for Glasgow South West. He told the programme:
We, in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, had a devastating set of election results and we were simply unable to articulate our offering, or indeed critique, of the SNP government because of the noise created at the centre.
Therefore, we became, and the prime minister became, the inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government. And that scenario you saw then, people waiting for a speech to try and articulate his new direction, a strategy, and it simply was not forthcoming.
You saw thereafter a spontaneous outpouring of frustration by colleagues in the PLP.
Asked if the response was really “spontaneous”, Ahmed replied:
This is not one faction of the Labour party. This is about the Labour party articulating, I think, now a commonly held view that this is unsustainable and unstable.
Here are pictures of Wes Streeting leaving No 10. Ali Fortescue from Sky News says he “looked pretty stony-faced”.
From Kitty Donaldson at the i
If No 10 hoped not to overshadow the King’s Speech, a sub-20 minute meeting between Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting ain’t gonna cut it.
Here is some comment from journalists on the Starmer/Streeting meeting.
From Anne McElvoy at Politico
Starmer rigorously follow a bureaucratic control playbook in the handling of the Streeting encounter
- set meetings only on your terms
- put the meeting on a day when there is something bigger going (King’s speech) on to diminish the significance of the meeting
- keep meeting markedly short, thus being seem to be open to having “heard” what the irked colleague has to say : but not long enough to engage
- expect more of this because Prime Minister has the way he is going to handle the challenge
From Tom Harwood from GB News
Wes Streeting was in and out of Downing Street this morning in 20 minutes flat. Not a word to the media, but a long confident walk up and down the street before and after. Projecting determination.
From the BBC’s Joe Pike
Streeting went through the door of Number 10 at 08:24 and left at 08:41. So that is actually 17 minutes.
Brief.
Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister, was on the morning broadcast round this morning. He had to give interviews before the meeting between Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting took place, or before he knew its outcome. He sought to play down the significance of it.
On the Today programme he said the two were “having a coffee” and dismissed claims it was a showdown. He said:
Anyone would think we were talking about the final scene at a Casino Royale or something, looking at some of the coverage that we’ve had.
And, on BBC Breakfast, he stressed that a leadership contest was not taking place.
There is no contest for the leadership of the Labour party.
There’s a very clear way to do that under our rules of 81 people nominating an alternative candidate. That hasn’t happened.
The contest hasn’t been triggered. We are moving on. I’m not saying yesterday wasn’t turbulent. It evidently was, but we are moving, getting on with delivery.
Labour-supporting unions predict Starmer will not lead party into next election
Keir Starmer will not lead his party into the next general election, Labour-supporting unions have predicted, in an intervention that threatens to further destabilise the prime minister after a damaging few days, Pippa Crerar reports.
Here is the joint statement issued by the 11 Labour-affiliated unions.
Labour’s affiliated unions have been clear that Labour cannot continue on its current path.
Whilst we recognise progress has been made, such as aspects of the Employment Rights Act and the increase in the minimum wage, the results at the election last week were devastating.
Labour is not doing enough to deliver the change that working people voted for at the general election.
Our focus is on the fundamental change of direction on economic policy and political strategy that unions have been clear is needed, and not on the personalities and unfolding political drama in Westminster.
It’s clear that the prime minister will not lead Labour into the next election, and at some stage a plan will have to be put in place for the election of a new leader.
This is a point where the future of the party we founded will be debated and determined – and we are working closely as unions to shape a shared vision on policy, political strategy and economic policy that will re-orient Labour back to working people, so Labour do what it was elected to do: govern in the interests of workers.
As Wes Streeting left No 10, reporters shouted questions at him, asking if he had resigned. He did not reply.
It is possible that he did, or that he was sacked. But on the BBC Henry Zeffman, the BBC’s chief political correspondent, says Streeting left in a ministerial car – implying he is still health secretary.
Zeffman says Streeting was in there for 17 minutes. Beth Rigby from Sky says it was 16 minutes.
Either way, that implies Starmer’s message to Streeting was simple and blunt.
Wes Streeting leaves No 10 after planned talks with Keir Starmer last just 17 minutes
Good morning. There are two main events in the diary today. At this point, it is not entirely clear which will turn out to be more consequential.
At 11.15am the king will arrive at parliament for the state opening. The king’s speech sets out the legislative programme for the next year. Kiran Stacey has a preview here.
In normal circumstances, this is one of the big events in the annual political calender – although most of what is in the speech has been well trailed, so it is more a day for ceremony than surprise. We will get plenty of information; alongside the speech, the government publishes a 100-page briefing pack, with outline details of all the bills coming up over the next 12 months.
But Keir Starmer had another appointment first. We learned last night that he would be meeting Wes Streeting, the health secretary who wants to replace him. Yesterday Starmer in effect challenged Streeting to ‘put up or shut up’ and, although some of Streeting’s allies have resigned from ministerial jobs, and others have joined the long list of Labour MPs publicly calling for Starmer’s resignation, by last night Streeting had still not launched a formal leadership challenge. In Downing Street they are starting to believe that Streeting has blinked because he does not have the support he needs to win a contest.
Streeting arrived for the meeting at Downing Street at 8.24am. He was out again 16 minutes later.
Streeting allies have indicated that they don’t intend to brief on what happened until the king’s speech is over, out of respect for Charles. But it does not seem likely that a meeting that swift was cordial. According to one report, Streeting was going to ask Starmer how he planned to “get us out of this mess”. Starmer clearly was not minded to give him a long, considered, collegiate answer. What we don’t know is whether or not Streeting said he would launch a leadership challenge.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.15am: The king arrives at Westminster for the state opening. He delivers his speech at around 11.30am.
2.30pm: MPs started their debate on the speech. After speeches from two government backbenchers proposing and seconding the speech, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, and Starmer deliver speeches.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
UPDATE: Joe Pike from the BBC has checked the timings, and says Wes Streeting was in No 10 for 17 minutes, and so I have gone with his timings, not Sky’s, and amended the headline. See 9.20am.
