The Keir hunters: who will challenge Starmer's reign?

Just 16 months after Keir Starmer romped home with a majority of 174, the talk in Westminster isn’t about whether he can do it all again, but how long he will last as prime minister.

- SONIA SODHA

Will he be toppled before the May elections, or will he hang on until then? The working assumption has brutally shifted from a case of if to a question of when. It’s a symptom of the extent to which Labour’s victory was a product not of voter enthusiasm for a Starmer premiership, but of utter disillusionment with the Conservatives.

Second only to the question of when Starmer might go is the matter of who will succeed him. Labour’s internal politics have long been a story of competing factions with no love lost: the Corbynite hard left, the soft left, the socially conservative Blue Labour wing, the Blairite modernisers and the old right. But any contest to succeed Starmer is likely to boil down to a fight between the soft left and a candidate from the right.

In the former cohort, there are two standouts. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, dubbed Labour’s “King of the North”, topped polls of party members earlier this year as the most popular candidate to succeed Starmer. He can point to the fact that he is seen as the best candidate by the general public, too. But since he so overtly challenged Starmer in the run-up to Labour’s autumn conference, his favourability ratings with members have taken a bit of a dip, reflecting the fact that some believe he has overplayed his hand.