Sir Keir therefore had a 45-minute warning that his premiership was being formally challenged – by an MP almost no one outside Westminster or her north London constituency has ever heard of.
Ms West told the BBC that she already had 10 backers for her “stalking horse” bid, which is designed to trigger a leadership election that another contender would win.
After all, the impossible does happen, sometimes twice before breakfast.
There’s lots of nonsense talked about needing 80 signatures to trigger a leadership campaign, all an MP has to is inform the NEC of their intentions. The talk about getting signatures is just Westminster bubble trying to generate stories.
The media ought to know better than this but a lot of confusion comes from the candidate herself in interviews, who doesn’t seem to have a clue either: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2026/05/catherine-west-ive-been-inundated-with-support-from-mps-and-could-go-all-the-way (just stop the page loading before the paywall comes up)
As far as I can see she doesn’t actually want 80 signatures, but she wants 80 *promises* of signatures in order to appear credible enough that it will flush a big fish into publicly declaring they are running, at which point she can safely withdraw. If she actually got hard and fast signatures from the more rebellious MPs it might work against her cause, since she wants them to be freely available to a more serious challenger. She has said she wants the cabinet to rally around a unity candidate to replace Starmer with no contest, in an ideal world. But we will see what the chances of that are…
West seems pretty naive in other ways too, like declaring how Labour already have the right platform because they’ve got a really good manifesto they ran on – she really seems to think the only problem is the unpopularity Starmer and they don’t need a wider reset. Then she goes on to say she likes Starmer and thinks he should stay in the cabinet because ” wonderful on foreign affairs and things like that”!! If you have an electoral millstone around your neck of course you don’t keep him in cabinet. What’s most bizarre about her view is that even if you discount the Chagos disaster that Reform are milking, the biggest thing that’s lost urban votes to the Greens and Gaza Independents has been his wishy-washy foreign policy on Israel/Palestine.
The Burnham thing is also funny, very publicly letting it be known that he’s trying to shut down any leadership bid before he gets a Westminster seat back. So being nice and helpful until he can get knife in hand himself. Not exactly going to encourage Starmer to let him run for MP is it? Which cabinet ministers would turn up to campaign in the by-election and would he even win in the current climate?
What is the process for choosing who fights a by-election? Could Burnham become a candidate in the face of opposition from Starmer?
Burnham has to be approved as a candidate by Labours NEC. Starmer controls that so has an effective veto on Burnham.
(By controls I mean most of them are his mates/placemen so will.do his bidding.)
Although hilariously… https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/rachel-reeves-at-war-with-sister-ellie-after-row-to-stop-her-voting-to-let-burnham-return/ar-AA22MZAr
If the wheels keep coming off the clown car, Starmer’s placepeople might stop doing his bidding.
To be honest, she might actually be a better leader than Kier. The problem that Labour party has is that all of the obvious alternatives are just as bad a Kier. Raynor, Streeting, Burnham, all bad. I think it is a question of Labour simply not wanting to confront the reality that most of the country is now right of centre.
Well saying “right of centre” is a bit risky. Certain attitude eg migration, crime, potholes, have solidified so that people demand firm ( and harsh ) action. So that is a bit to the right.
In fact it is anger that is being shown in these elections. Starmer is the apogee of all that us wrong with the political class: human rights lawyer who grew fat on public funds defending terrorists and persecuting soldiers; who got on by brown nosing Blair and being mates with Cherie; who has shown himself to be incompetent in everything he does and is incapable of reading a room ir convincing the public, because he has only ever had to deal with other lawyers.
This whole generation of politicians are cutvfrom similar cloth. Zack and Farage stand out as not being like these people.
The fact that Jocks and Taffs have decided to punish Labour by choosing even worse options is worthy of extensive study.
And now he’s appointed Brown on finance and Harman on protecting girls as special advisers, to which even the Labour Party is asking WTF is going on.
Harman in particular has raised hackles with the public given her past association with PIE.
I can see why you might think appointing Gordon and Harriet is a bad and/or stupid idea. But I just cannot imagine anybody who might think it’s a good idea. What the hell is the fucking point?
I s’pose it’s because they’ve run out of other people they could appoint.
Maybe they’ve been appointed on the Peter Principle i.e. that Peter has no principles.
Very well put, Otto.
I’m not sure that the public are right of centre. Most of the public, in polling, support the UK hosting the Olympics again. Which is pretty far from the necessary functions of government.
Most of the public just want jam for themselves today, and don’t think too hard about the consequences later. You could create a party of responsible government and you would lose. Zack and Farage are mostly the same. “Put British Businesses First” say Reform. Sounds Great. But now government procurement costs rise, which raises taxes. They say “Stop the Boriswave”. OK, so also we cut the care system because we don’t have the staff? I’m fine with that, but are the women that now have to look after Grandad? Most of Zack’s ideas are just a different pile of colossal debt to Labour.
The voters look at Labour not working and never say “well, we voted for them, we built this, maybe we need to think about what government we should vote for and their policies” and vote Libertarian. Maybe don’t host the Olympics. They say that it’s Rishi’s fault, or Keir’s fault, so let’s get the daffodil shaggers in. Even though any examination of PC tells you they’re actually worse than Labour.
Polling suggests the public is not right of centre. Average GE polling over April gives us Reform + Tories at 45%, Labour + Greens + LibDems at 47% and others at 8%. I assume that most of the others are the various Celtic nationalist socialist parties.
I think Reform can get more votes off Labour and maybe the nationalists and there might be a few LibDems who switch to the Tories but it’s hard to see a situation where ‘right of centre’ parties get more than 50% of the vote.
The current Tories “right of centre”?
ONly if you take the PRC as “centre”. For Labour/Greens you need to move the stake towards Kim-Jung-[something]ea…
Anything that’s not Reform is of the “Burgers for me, Dly Lice fol You!” variety.
With only a slight redefinition of what a burger should consist of between the “different” parties.
The woman is a cretin.
…
And black and brown ones, too.
Pretty low bar. Larry the Downing ST cat would make a better PM than Starmer!
Be a hoot if she won.
My sides!
No, not at all. Most people are centre or centre-right. Labour chooses to pretend that “left-of-centre” is “centre” and centre-left is “centre-right” so that they can denounce anyone who is genuinely right-of-centre as “extreme right”.
*It is a mathematical impossibility that most people are right of centre*. Centre is where as many people are left of is as are right of it. In practice lines are fuzzy because some people are further left/right on some issues than others and you get a blob who get called “centre” with roughly equal numbers to the left and to the right.
Labour and their journalist friends are lying through their teeth trying to tell us that Labour is “centrist”.
This silly cow is my MP.
Commiserations
350 days after Sir Anthony Meyer, Thatcher fell.
Whenever I see a picture of Starmer wearing his judge’s wig I can’t help being reminded of this.
https://youtu.be/nVt1EY896cY?is=a6qgdtPqMxPet3-C
know nothing about her
but…
out of all the possible candidates we do know about shes got a good shot at being a better option.
Nope. She’s an utterly brainless progressive middle-class woman.
Let’s not forget that as big a twat as Starmer is, as much as he deserves the public opprobrium that comes to him personally, the country is fucked for reasons which go well beyond him, and the Labour party is despised for reasons which go some way beyond him.
From Labour’s PoV, replacing the dishonest, greasy shit will achieve nothing but re-arranging the deck chairs.
What interests me is the perspective of the rest of us, by which I mean me. I want the fabian-communist-progressive project to be driven off a cliff as soon as possible and with the biggest possible bang. I don’t see any way of getting rid of it, otherwise.
So – cling to the greasy lawyer bandit, or embrace that ginger minger from Manchester? I think I’d go for the latter, if only by a hair’s breadth. But when? Now, or let the little Surrey/Leeds spic cling on for a bit before Angie from the Block brings her cor-blimey-guvnor vaudeville to Downing Street for two weeks’ worth of hilarious beery piss-ups?
For that matter, I quite fancy Miliband for PM. Just in terms of, in a different way, wrecking the commies.
As an alternative, an utterly brainless progressive middle-class woman? As Cankles would say, at this point, what possible difference could it make?
P.S. wild card: they call an election the day after tomorrow with a view to an establishment (Lab-LD-Green) stitch-up of Reform.
West admits she’s a stalking horse. She’s set this up to open the door for Bender Wes, as he admits with his talk of “preparing a case”, before Growler or The Third Gallagher Brother can get their shit together. Or even, for Millibrain, god help us.
None of which precludes her from being an utterly brainless progressive middle-class woman.
Wild card: I don’t see it. Too many Labour MPs will lose their sinecures. They want the next three year’s salaries and to prepare their next taxpayer-supported moves.
My prediction: it works; Wes moves in with Millibrain as Chancellor. God help us. Starmer joins the Blair Foundation. Reeves makes the tea.
Streeting has had two years to improve the NHS (I was gonna write fix, but that was never possible) and has not done so. If he can’t do that he obviously can’t do the higher office. Maybe we should look for a minister who has managed his portfolio well. Hmmm.
He’s Continuity Blairite. If the Trilateral Commission can’t have an actual Human Rights lawyer as PM, Streeting is the next best thing, given what’s on offer. Milliband is a dickhead, Lammy is preposterous, Growler and the Gallagher Brother are non-U.
West is amusingly full of herself….
https://order-order.com/2026/05/10/catherine-west-we-have-a-problem-we-have-to-move-quickly/
She has also stuffed things up for a lot of the plotters who obviously prefer to follow their own timetable than have one imposed on them by a non-entity who hasn’t even read the rule book to work out the effects of her actions.
I did say she’s an utterly brainless progressive middle-class woman… unless she’s been set up by Streeting, who’s obviously ready to rock and has been for some time.
This week’s result has been obvious for weeks but even then it’s not quite as conclusively good for the Greens as a DT poll was predicting a fortnight ago. I reckon Streeting is simply executing his plan. He obviously knows this is his window of opportunity whilst Growler and Gallagher Brother are indisposed.
Or she’s fronting for Milliband, but he says he’d prefer to be Chancellor, and I can see why. Streeting would make a good glove puppet for him.
“Streeting would make a good glove puppet for him.”
Ooh Norman
That’s imagery I’d rather not have presented to me. Thanks.
I can feel the surge, David.
Ewwwww…
And, right on cue, she’s demonstrated just how brainless:
https://order-order.com/2026/05/11/stalking-horse-catherine-west-says-she-accidentally-called-for-september-leadership-contest/
Qualified social worker married to Colin Sutherland, Professor of Parasitology, and former co-director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Malaria Centre, a notable purveyor of bent modelling and cheerleader for harder, faster, longer lockdowns.
Fabian. It turns out she wants the Gallagher Brother but went for it before he’s in a position to bid for the leadership. Conclusively shot her bolt.
She’s the consummate swimming, cycling, liberal woman midwit.
What I want the Cabinet to do is to close themselves into a room today and come up with somebody who they can all get behind, which would mean we wouldn’t have to have a leadership election.
And if that can happen, then we can have a very quiet transition without upsetting anybody, without having to go to all of the members.
Once I’ve listened carefully to what he says, I will be demanding a timetable for an orderly transition.
For some strange and inexplicable reason, when I read this my mind turns it into a Kenneth Williams monologue.
P.S. wild card: they call an election the day after tomorrow with a view to an establishment (Lab-LD-Green) stitch-up of Reform.
It’s an amusing idea, but how many of the current sitting MPs would feel confident enough in holding their seats to call a GE?
Is there any other sort in the Labour Party? Or LibDems? Or Greens
West. Quaker. Fabian. God knows what the silly cow is thinking. Opening the door for Blairite Streeting? Or Milliband, who proclaims he doesn’t want the leadership? She’s fucked it for Burnham and Reeves.
Reeves? Surely no-one is looking at the current shitshow and thinking “I know, what we need is more Rachel Reeves”.