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Defiant Sir Keir Starmer today pledged ‘I’m not going to walk away’ after Andy Burnham finally admitted openly on Question Time that he has Labour leadership ambitions.
The Prime Minister turned to his go-to list of crises – the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – as he urged the Manchester Mayor not to trigger a contest. After the obligatory description of Burnham as ‘talented’, the Prime Minister, speaking to LBC in Swindon, got straight to it:
I’ve said over and over again I’m not going to walk away. We won an election victory in 2024 with a five-year mandate. We’re only two years into that and so I’m not going to walk away from that… we should be getting on with the job that we were elected to do in 2024, which is taking the decisions that are priority decisions for our country, not plunging into an internal fight in the Labour party, which will distract us from the job that we are elected to do.
At the very least, Sir Keir acknowledged the reality of a chaotic road ahead for his party. He also declared his next course of action: to stay on and fight. Compare that with the Labour ministers who appear to take the public for fools when they insist, on television and radio, that there is no battle for the leadership, and that everyone should get behind Sir Keir while campaigning for Burnham in Makerfield. David Lammy attempted just that on this morning’s round. He claimed there is no formal leadership contest against the Prime Minister and said he was looking forward to heading north to campaign for Burnham.
