Labour mayor Andy Burnham cleared a path to be able to attempt to oust British Prime Minister Keir Starmer after winning a parliamentary seat in northern England in what could be the UK’s most consequential local election in more than six decades.<\/p>\n
Mr Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor nicknamed the “King of the North”, won the contest in Makerfield in northwest England with 24,927 of the votes, while the candidate for Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party came second with 15,696 votes.<\/p>\n
His victory means he will now be able to trigger or at least take part in a contest to replace Mr Starmer, struggling with some of the worst popularity ratings of any leader.<\/p>\n
However, the key question is when and how Mr Burnham \u200cwill do it.<\/p>\n
“I do say \u2060to my own party, this is a final chance to change,” Mr Burnham said in his victory speech. “There will be no second chance.”<\/p>\n
Mr Burnham, a career politician who has expressed support for the nationalisation of key public services and criticised what he called four decades of failed neoliberal economics, has said he would seek to replace Mr Starmer and change politics.<\/p>\n
Polls show Mr \u200cBurnham, 56, is Labour’s most popular politician who would win a months-long leadership contest decided by party members, while some Labour politicians hope Mr Starmer could \u2060be persuaded to hand over power to avoid a damaging contest.<\/p>\n
Two years after winning a landslide \u200cnational election, Mr Starmer, 63, is one of the least popular British prime ministers since polling \u2060records began \u200cafter scandals, policy U-turns, and accusations of indecision have derailed the delivery of the change he once promised.<\/p>\n
About a quarter of Mr Starmer’s politicians have called for him to quit since his party suffered heavy losses in local electionslast month, while senior \u2060colleagues, including the defence andhealth minister, resigned in recent weeks over his leadership.<\/p>\n
A defiant Mr Starmer said this \u2060week he would stand in any leadership contest and issued a warning to his party about the potential “chaos” of a potentially bitter and divisive leadership election.<\/p>\n
Another of Mr Starmer’s main rivals, former health minister Wes Streeting, said this week he would force a contest soon unless the prime minister announced when he would stand down.<\/p>\n
Under Labour rules, it would take 20% of the parliamentary party, or 81 politicians, to announce \u200cthey were backing a single candidate to trigger a leadership challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour mayor Andy Burnham cleared a path to be able to attempt to oust British Prime Minister Keir…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":507346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-507345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}