Labour lost almost 1,500 councillors in local elections across England amid a surge for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, with the Greens also eating into the party’s support in London and other urban areas.<\/p>\n
It was also kicked out of power in Wales, where it has enjoyed political dominance for a century, and returned just 17 of the 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament, its worst ever result at a Holyrood election.<\/p>\n
Sir Keir now faces another key hurdle on Monday, when backbench MP Catherine West says she will seek to trigger a leadership contest against him if she is “still dissatisfied” after his reset speech.<\/p>\n
West, a former junior minister, is not bidding to be the next Labour leader herself, but by triggering a leadership she could flush out heavyweight contenders she thinks could do a better job than Sir Keir.<\/p>\n
More than 30 Labour MPs have publicly called for the prime minister to resign or to set out a timetable for his departure.<\/p>\n
However, Burnham cannot enter a contest without first becoming an MP, under the party’s rules for leadership contests. The mayor’s supporters are hoping a leadership contest can be delayed until he is able to return to Parliament. <\/p>\n
Rayner resigned as Sir Keir’s deputy prime minister last September after it emerged she had failed to pay the correct amount of stamp duty on a \u00a3800,000 flat in Hove.<\/p>\n
It has been widely reported that she is still waiting for the result of an HMRC investigation into the purchase, which could complicate any immediate leadership campaign. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour lost almost 1,500 councillors in local elections across England amid a surge for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-576754","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\/576754","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=576754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}