“Over to you Keir,” says a senior minister, not mincing his words.<\/p>\n
Not everyone in the Labour Party wants there to be a challenge to the leadership, but even Sir Keir Starmer’s most loyal ministers are pushing him to change – and fast.<\/p>\n
The prime minister is nothing if not a determined man. But can he show he can turn it round?<\/p>\n
Millions of voters have told him they aren’t impressed with what he’s been doing in 22 months of government – and, as each hour passes, more of his colleagues are going public to say, neither are they.<\/p>\n
The powerful unions, who still pay the party’s bills, have put the prime minister on notice, too. One of their leaders told me: “It’s been a slow motion car crash \u2013 we need a concrete promise that things will change.”<\/p>\n
Labour has been battered at these elections – and it being expected makes it no less painful.<\/p>\n
At count after count, seat after seat, the party lost to Nigel Farage, a man many in Labour deride as a vaudeville performer who harbours offensive views.<\/p>\n
In other parts of the country, Labour gave ground to another leader, Zack Polanski, who used to be an actual performer, a hypnotist, and a Lib Dem.<\/p>\n
The success of Reform UK under Farage is extraordinary, and the progress of the Greens under Polanski is impressive too.<\/p>\n
But for some in Labour the grating thing about their dismal position now is it’s different to losing to the Conservatives – that feeling is familiar, it’s in their DNA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Over to you Keir,” says a senior minister, not mincing his words. Not everyone in the Labour Party…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-574977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}