Starmer holds brief meeting with Streeting amid leadership crisis

Wes Streeting has held talks with Keir Starmer in Downing Street as an ally of the health secretary renewed calls for the prime minister to resign, saying his authority had “irretrievably ebbed away”.

Streeting arrived in No 10 on Wednesday morning amid intense speculation over Labour’s leadership crisis and his own future within the party, before leaving approximately 16 minutes later without commenting to the media.

The health secretary’s allies had sought to portray Wednesday’s meeting as a moment for Streeting to speak candidly about his concerns. But No 10 insiders suggested Streeting was playing down speculation that he was on the brink of declaring his candidacy for the leadership.

The meeting came shortly after Dr Zubir Ahmed, who resigned his junior health minister role on Tuesday, blamed Starmer for Labour’s disastrous local election results and urged the prime minister to set out a timetable for his departure in “an orderly expedient transition”.

Ahmed accused Starmer of becoming the “inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government” in Scotland’s parliamentary elections, saying Labour had been unable to challenge the Scottish National party because of “noise created at the centre”.

The NHS transplant surgeon told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme: “We, in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, had a devastating set of election results and we were simply unable to articulate our offering, or indeed critique, of the SNP government because of the noise created at the centre.

“Therefore, we became, and the prime minister became, the inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government. And that scenario you saw then, people waiting for a speech to try and articulate his new direction, a strategy, and it simply was not forthcoming.

“And you saw thereafter, a spontaneous outpouring of frustration by colleagues in the PLP [parliamentary Labour party].”

When asked if the reaction among Labour MPs had been “spontaneous”, Ahmed said: “This is not one faction of the Labour party. This is about the Labour party articulating, I think, now a commonly held view that this is unsustainable and unstable.”

Ahmed’s intervention risked widening scrutiny around Streeting’s own positioning after days of speculation over whether he could emerge as a potential leadership contender for MPs seeking a post-Starmer future.

While Streeting has remained publicly loyal since the local elections, several of his allies have resigned from government in recent days, including four junior ministers, openly calling for Starmer to go.