12AUG

Eight resign in two days on Starmer

3 min read

14:07UTC

Four parliamentary private secretaries walked on Monday 11 May; four junior ministers followed on Tuesday. Jess Phillips called Starmer's continuation 'wholly untenable'.

← Back to Reform bleeds councillors, wins by-elections Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsDeveloping

Key takeaway

Eight resignations in 48 hours stripped Starmer's payroll vote before Streeting walked.

Four parliamentary private secretaries (Tom Rutland, Joe Morris, Melanie Ward, Naushabah Khan) resigned on Monday 11 May. Four junior ministers followed on Tuesday 12 May: Alex Davies-Jones at Victims, Zubir Ahmed at Health, Miatta Fahnbulleh at Devolution, and Jess Phillips at Safeguarding. Phillips wrote that Keir Starmer's continuation in office was "wholly untenable"; Fahnbulleh said Starmer had "lost the trust and confidence of the public." ¹

This is the wave that preceded the Streeting Cabinet break, and the staircase that made it operative. The payroll vote, the bloc of ministers and PPSs paid to back the government in any division, gives the Prime Minister a mechanical floor on the Commons benches. Removing eight names from that floor inside 48 hours shrinks the whip's working room before any formal contest paperwork lands. Starmer's vote-count cushion since the 7 May results has thinned.

Zubir Ahmed resigned the junior Health brief on Tuesday; Wes Streeting resigned the Cabinet Health brief two days later. By Thursday evening the Department of Health and Social Care had lost its top two ministers inside one parliamentary week. Replacement-by-promotion runs into the same arithmetic that triggered the resignations: the candidates with standing to take Cabinet seats are mostly already public on one side of the 96-versus-103 split (event 3, .

Phillips and Fahnbulleh have put a date and a portfolio against the verdict, which makes the dissent harder to retract than the anonymous backbench letters Starmer absorbed in April 2026. If Starmer survives, he survives with eight ex-ministers on the backbenches actively organising. If he does not, the contest opens with the resignation letters already in print.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

PPSs (parliamentary private secretaries) are MPs who work as unpaid helpers to senior ministers. Junior ministers sit one level up from PPSs in government. Both are paid or supported by the government and are expected to vote with it in the Commons. Between Monday 11 May and Tuesday 12 May, eight of them handed in their resignations. Two of the most prominent were Jess Phillips at safeguarding and Miatta Fahnbulleh at devolution, who both published statements saying Starmer had lost public trust and that his staying on was untenable. This mattered because it came before Health Secretary Wes Streeting's departure on Thursday. The eight lower-level resignations established that ministers were willing to break ranks publicly, which made the bigger Cabinet departure possible.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The 2024 Labour intake was unusually large (400-plus MPs) and unusually inexperienced, with a significant cohort elected on individual voters' desire for change rather than Labour affinity. The LabourList tracker's 96 public critics include a disproportionate number of first-term MPs whose 2026 local-election results removed their insulation from accountability.

PPS and junior minister departure waves of this kind historically require a common organising point. The 11-12 May sequence crossed party-level portfolios (Victims, Health, Devolution, Safeguarding) and seniority tiers (PPSs and junior ministers) simultaneously, suggesting coordination above the level of individual offices. The Collins review rules (2014) were designed to make leadership challenges hard to organise; the wave is evidence the organisation preceded the paperwork.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Vacancies at Victims, junior Health, Devolution, and Safeguarding forced a reshuffle while Starmer simultaneously faced the Streeting crisis, draining political bandwidth from both problems.
Risk
Eight ex-ministers now sitting on the backbenches as active organisers extends the leadership campaign infrastructure into the parliamentary party, complicating any future whipping operation regardless of who leads.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: In March 2003, 66 Labour MPs voted against their government on the Iraq war, and several junior ministers resigned. Tony Blair absorbed the revolt because no challenger came forward with organised nomination support and the Cabinet held. The 2026 wave is structurally different: the Cabinet did not hold, and a challenger (Burnham) has an infrastructure outside Westminster.

Counter-parallel: In May 2009, Gordon Brown survived a Cabinet walkout including James Purnell, Hazel Blears, and Jacqui Smith resigning in 72 hours. Brown remained in office for eleven months. The difference was that Brown's replacements were available from within the PLP and the mechanism for a formal challenge (requiring the National Executive Committee under the then-rules) did not align. Labour changed the rules after 2010 precisely because the 2009 crisis had shown no exit route.

Consensus view: The Hansard Society's Meg Russell has documented that the payroll vote (ministers, PPSs, and trade envoys obligated to vote with the government) constitutes roughly 130 of Labour's 403 MPs. Losing eight names from that bloc inside 48 hours does not breach the floor arithmetically, but it signals to the remainder that the government cannot guarantee their futures in return for their loyalty.

Counter-view: Lord Norton of Louth (Philip Norton), constitutional scholar at Hull University, has noted that PPSs are not bound by collective responsibility in the same way that Cabinet ministers are; their resignation carries political signal but no constitutional weight. Norton's test is whether the departures accelerate nominations rather than Commons votes. Eight PPSs and junior ministers resigning happened in 2003 over Iraq without triggering a contest.

Key tension: Whether the resignations reflect coordinated pressure from a single faction or scattered individual judgements; coordinated pressure implies a challenger organisation exists, while scattered judgements imply the crisis is real but leaderless.

Sources:Left Foot Forward

Mentions:Joe Morris →Keir Starmer →Jess Phillips →Melanie Ward →Naushabah Khan →Alex Davies-Jones →Zubir Ahmed →Wes Streeting →Iraq →Hansard →Westminster →Andy Burnham →Miatta Fahnbulleh →Tom Rutland →Gordon Brown →

First Reported In

Update #8 · Mutiny in week one

Left Foot Forward· 14 May 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

This Event

Eight resign in two days on Starmer

The pre-Cabinet wave is what makes the Streeting resignation operative; eight named MPs leaving the payroll inside 48 hours is the institutional precondition for a credible challenge.

Led to

Health Sec Streeting walks on Starmer

The wave of eight resignations on 11-12 May created the conditions for Streeting's Cabinet-level departure on 14 May.

Occurred 14 May 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.

Scottish Labour

Michael Marra, Joe Fagan and Monica Lennon declared for the Scottish Labour leadership, but each needs nine endorsements from MSPs, MPs and unions before members vote, with nominations closing 17 August. Lennon, the only woman standing, says the threshold favours a male-run process and could produce an all-male ballot.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru held both Welsh wards Reform challenged in the same set of by-elections, Bro'r Llynnoedd on Anglesey by 48.5% to 39.3% and Hengoed on Caerphilly by 49.9% to 36.4%. The party that leads the Welsh government kept Reform in second in both.

Conservative Party

The Conservatives lost three of ten council by-elections fought on 30 July and 6 August, two wards to Reform in Norfolk and one to the Greens in Surrey, continuing a run of losses since the May sweep. Every seat gone had been Conservative-held going into the contest.

Reform UK

Reform's 56 lost councillors since May came from defection, suspension and resignation, not lost votes, while the party gained three of ten council by-elections and finished second in four more over the same fortnight. That record undercuts reading the churn as electoral retreat.

Democratic Unionist Party

Gavin Robinson rejects Sinn Féin's characterisation of the institutions as precarious, says the DUP is "committed to" delivering for the public, and will not be "goaded" into a dispute he attributes to Treasury funding rather than unionist bad faith.