205
Starmer announces resignation as prime minister and leader of the Labour party
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
205 points (99.5% liked)
UK Politics
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Well I respect that he's had the grace to not make it messy
What are you talking about? It's been messy for ages by now.
To not make more of a mess of it, then
Fair enough, agreed.
He’s trying to make it messy. By the time the next leader sees a day in Parliament, the media will have had a month to anticipate worst cases.
What would not making it messy look like in your view? He can't run a contest for his successor in secret
He has set the nomination process to end coinciding with the summer break. Do we really need to wait two and a half weeks before nominations open? With Streeting captured by Burnham it looks like there could be only one candidate anyway.
If he’d opened nominations tomorrow, thats two weeks of parliament the new PM would have had to make an impression before silly season.
If you want to have a meaningful contest, you have to allow a bit of time for contestants to get themselves arranged, don't you? And if you don't do that then it harms Burnham's legitimacy as a successor
They’ve had time. Half the cabinet registered domain names for possible campaigns months ago. They’ve been gauging support for a long time and will know if they are viable. Streeting certainly knew he wasn’t.
The nomination period is 1 week. I’d argue that’s plenty of time. Remember the maximum number of candidates is 5, but Burnham will have more than 81 signatures so it will be at most 4.
Waiting until 9th July to open nominations means it’s likely that the others will drop out beforehand and it will be a coronation in slow motion, which isn’t great either.
If the others have an honest chance to compete and choose not to, that's totally fine.
I don't think that rushing to get the successor in before the summer break is a good idea either. That means that the new guy basically just assembles a cabinet, gets in, and then is not seen to do anything for a month and a half