Streeting meeting fuels Labour leadership crisis as Starmer fights on

Wes Streeting’s 16-minute face-to-face meeting with Sir Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday has become the sharpest sign yet that Labour’s leadership crisis is no longer just Westminster chatter. Streeting was seen arriving and leaving without speaking to reporters, while allies of the Health Secretary were said to believe he was preparing to resign from the Cabinet and trigger a challenge for the Labour leadership shortly after King Charles III’s State Opening of Parliament.

The immediate issue is not whether Streeting wants the job, but what the speculation says about Starmer’s grip on the party. Nearly 100 Labour MPs are said to have called on the Prime Minister to name a departure date, a rare public display of restlessness that turns an ordinary leadership question into a test of authority. The pressure has built after Labour’s poor local-election results and the fallout from the Peter Mandelson appointment scandal, both of which have fed a sense that discipline inside the party is fraying.

That is why the front pages have treated Streeting less as a lone plotter than as the focal point of a wider contest. The Sun went so far as to cast the row as a Labour Party “civil war”. Other coverage has placed Streeting in a broader field of possible successors, alongside Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham, underlining how quickly one meeting in Westminster can become shorthand for a succession race.

The political backdrop matters because Labour is now being judged on cohesion as much as policy. A government entering the State Opening with its chief ministers under open speculation sends a damaging signal to MPs, donors and activists alike: Starmer may still be in post, but the party is already gaming out what comes next. In that sense, the real story is not the gossip around Streeting, but the scale of the coordination behind it and the speed with which it has exposed Labour’s internal nerves.

The page-one noise was not all politics. Catherine, Princess of Wales, was pictured front and centre in a fitted blue suit with flared trousers, a look that prompted the “My flare lady” headline. Her two-day visit to Italy, which began on Wednesday and marked her first overseas trip following cancer treatment, took her to Reggio Emilia, where crowds greeted her with signs reading “Ciao Kate”. In the shadow of Labour’s turmoil, the royal image offered a softer front-page contrast, but Westminster was left confronting a harder question: whether Starmer can contain the succession talk before it hardens into a real challenge.