After a disastrous set of local elections last week, which saw Labour lose over 1,000 council seats, it looks like Keir Starmer’s time could finally be up. Around 94 MPs have called on him to step down, and, while he’s yet to formally announce it, Wes Streeting is reportedly preparing a leadership bid (he resigned from his role as health secretary, citing a lack of confidence in Starmer, at lunchtime today). Rather than bowing out with whatever shred of dignity he has left, Starmer has vowed to fight any challenge to his leadership (like Jeremy Corbyn did, successfully, in 2016).

As someone who hates Keir Starmer perhaps more than any other living individual, I would be delighted to see his career end in humiliating failure. But it’s hard to get excited about the alternative candidates, who range from just as bad (if not worse) to kind of OK. If you’re curious about who our next prime minister could be, here is a ranking of the potential challengers, from most to least terrible. 

MOST TERRIBLE: WES STREETING

Wes Streeting is perhaps the only person in Britain less likeable than Keir Starmer. He has a particularly terrible record on trans rights (introducing, as health secretary, several devastating policies, including effectively banning puberty blockers for anyone under the age of 18), and he is in favour of more privatisation of the NHS.

He is also committed to working with cartoonishly evil tech US company Palantir; is a long-time supporter of Israel; is a member of Labour Friends of Israel, and, according to an investigation by Declassified UK, he had received £30,000 in donations from pro-Israel lobbying groups as of 2024. Streeting recently released a private text exchange with Peter Mandelson (the disgraced Epstein associate) in which he accused Israel of committing “war crimes” in Gaza, which many critics interpreted as a cynical bid to appeal to the Labour membership. Even if it wasn’t, though, you don’t deserve kudos for criticising Israel in private while continuing to serve in a government which continues to enable those war crimes through military, economic and diplomatic support. 

TERRIBLE: ED MILIBAND

While Ed Miliband seems like a nice guy, we already tried this in the early 2010s and it didn’t work out. He’s one of the less objectionable people on the list, for sure, but it seems like a crazy idea to give it another ago when he's already been rejected by the electorate. He appears to have realised this himself, though, and has ruled out entering the race (for now).

STILL QUITE TERRIBLE: ANGELA RAYNER

“Likeability” is a subjective criterion, but Angela Rayner seems like someone you could have a kiki with. Unfortunately, I do think she is a sell-out hack who, serving as deputy prime minister under Keir Starmer until he sacked her last year, is more or less equally complicit in Israel’s genocide as he is. She also opposes the BDS movement, abstained on a vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and failed to sign parliamentary letters calling for suspending arms sales to Israel, imposing economic sanctions on it, and upholding ICC arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals.

Coming from the soft left of the party (as opposed to Streeting, who has always been associated with the right), she is better on trans rights and would probably be better on economic policy: even if just at the level of rhetoric, she has always centred working-class people in her political vision, and has supported policies like nationalisation, increasing the minimum wage and allowing local governments more economic power. That’s all good on paper, but is she trustworthy?

NOT AS TERRIBLE: ANDY BURNHAM

It’s a testament to how much we’ve been broken and defeated by British politics over the last decade that the notion of Andy Burnham being Prime Minister seems so appealing. While he was from the soft left of the party, he still seemed like the Blairite establishment choice when he lost the 2015 leadership election to Jeremy Corbyn. Now, however, he’s quite clearly the best of a bad bunch. There may be problems with the “Manchesterism” model he has been credited with pioneering, which he has described as a “business-friendly socialism” — in other words, a mixture of public ownership and private sector investment. But his tenure as the mayor of Manchester has, in some ways, been highly successful; he has overseen a period of sustained economic growth, new jobs and a construction boom (with the attendant problems of gentrification and spiralling rents).

“Likeable” may be subjective, but Burnham polls favourably both in Manchester and across the country (according to YouGov, he’s the most popular political figure in the country), and he is probably the best chance Labour has at beating Reform. For a lot of people, he passes the “kind of guy you’d go for a pint with” test, in contrast to Streeting’s “kind of guy who’d call you into a meeting to tell you you’re being made redundant” vibe. 

There is one major problem, though: he is not in parliament (thanks in part to Labour blocking his attempt to stand in a by-election earlier this year) and therefore not eligible to run. According to reports, he and his supporters are trying to figure this problem out, but there’s no guarantee it will be possible to do this before any leadership contests begin. British politics is so clapped that even having a vaguely competent, vaguely likeable centre-left guy in charge of the Labour Party is a distant dream.