Sir Keir Starmer fights on after resisting demands to quit

Sir Keir Starmer will attempt to move on from speculation about his future in No 10 after surviving renewed calls for his resignation from members of his party in what a senior minister described as a “moment of peril”.

The Prime Minister will take part in a community visit in an attempt to show he is focused on easing the cost-of-living burden after chairing a routine meeting of his Cabinet, a day after his top ministers rallied round him.

The public display of Cabinet support came after Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar urged him to quit amid the fallout from the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Mr Sarwar became the most senior Labour figure to call for Sir Keir to go, citing concern that the “distraction” from Downing Street would harm his party’s chances of unseating the SNP in May’s Holyrood elections.

But Sir Keir issued a defiant response at Monday night’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), telling a packed room in Westminster: “I’ve won every fight I’ve ever been in.”

The Prime Minister said he was “not prepared to walk away” as he received a warm reception from MPs reluctant to join Mr Sarwar in calling for him to quit.

The lack of a concerted effort by MPs to depose Sir Keir suggests the immediate danger may have passed.

But some discontent remains, with one critic comparing the meeting to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a Wild West massacre also known as Custer’s Last Stand.

The Prime Minister is expected to continue efforts to shake up his No 10 operation, with the country’s top civil servant Sir Chris Wormald rumoured to be on his way out in the coming days.

His chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and communications chief Tim Allan have already departed as Sir Keir seeks to revive his fortunes after a bruising start to 2026.

Speaking to broadcasters on the morning media round, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the Prime Minister had faced a “moment of peril” on Monday and Labour MPs had “looked over the precipice”.

“In a sense, yesterday was a moment of peril for the Prime Minister. I make no bones about that,” he told BBC Breakfast.

“But, as a collective body, the Cabinet, the Labour Party looked at the alternatives of going down this road of a chaotic leadership election, trying to depose a prime minister, and they said ‘no, that’s not for us’.”

He said “the private Keir I know” had felt “slightly constrained” but that last night’s PLP had seen the Prime Minister “passionate” and “clear about his purpose”.

“I think we’re going to see more of that,” the Cabinet minister said.

But Mr Miliband also said the country had not changed “enough” for the better under the Labour Government and that “the job for all of us is to work out how to be bolder”.

“The biggest issue we face as a country – and your viewers will face this – is that for nearly 20 years now, we’ve had a long-standing cost-of-living crisis, not just a few years when Russia invaded Ukraine and bills went through the roof, and people are hurting,” he told Sky News.

“And so I think the job of all of us, and leadership is a collective business, is to show how we can rise to that challenge.”

He dismissed as “absolutely baloney” suggestions that the remarks might be seen as a veiled leadership pitch ahead of a potential future contest, telling Sky News: “I’m not going to run.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, writing in the Daily Telegraph, said Sir Keir should resign as he had “proved incapable of doing the things a prime minister needs to do”.

On Tuesday, she claimed a number of Labour MPs had expressed a willingness to support a motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister, but not enough to pass such a motion.

She declined to tell broadcasters how many Labour MPs had come forward, saying she had not consulted her whips and did not want to “go down the rabbit hole of exactly how many there are”.

With the threat to his position appearing to recede, Sir Keir is expected to travel to Germany at the end of the week to attend the Munich Security Conference, where concern about the future of the transatlantic alliance is likely to be high on the agenda.