WES Streeting has resigned as health secretary, telling Sir Keir Starmer in a public letter yesterday that he has ‘lost confidence’ in the Prime Minister’s leadership and that remaining in office would be ‘dishonourable and unprincipled’.
His departure deepens a fortnight of open revolt inside Labour.
Starmer has spent the week struggling to hold on to the premiership after four ministers walked out and dozens of MPs urged him either to resign or set a timetable for doing so.
Nearly 90 backbenchers have now publicly called for him to go, with around 150 still backing him or wanting to delay any contest.
Streeting opened his letter with a list of departmental achievements before turning to the rupture at the top of government.
‘These are all good reasons for me to remain in post,’ he wrote, ‘but as you know from our conversation earlier this week, having lost confidence in your leadership, I have concluded that it would be dishonourable and unprincipled to do so.’
He cast last week’s local election results as historic and dangerous.
Labour lost more than 1,100 English council seats on 7 May, was ejected from power in Wales after 27 years, and was beaten into a distant joint second in Scotland by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
‘For the first time in our country’s history, nationalists are in power in every corner of the United Kingdom – including a dangerous English nationalism represented by Nigel Farage and Reform UK,’ Streeting wrote.
Progressives, he added, were ‘increasingly losing faith that the Labour Party is capable of rising to our historic responsibility of defeating racism and offering hope that Britain’s best days lie ahead through social democracy.’
He blamed the scale of the defeat on the government’s unpopularity, singling out the cut to the winter fuel allowance and the Prime Minister’s ‘island of strangers’ speech as moments that had left voters ‘not knowing who we are or what we really stand for’.
‘Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift,’ he wrote, accusing Starmer of letting other ministers fall on their swords and of taking a ‘heavy-handed approach to dissenting voices’.
Yesterday, after a seventeen-minute meeting with Starmer in Downing Street, Streeting submitted his letter.
The pressure on Starmer mounted further yesterday as Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister and a widely tipped successor, settled her long-running tax affairs with HMRC.
The Ashton-under-Lyne MP paid £40,000 in outstanding stamp duty and said she had been ‘exonerated’ of the accusation that she had ‘deliberately sought to avoid tax’.
Rayner had stood down as deputy prime minister and housing secretary in September 2025 after admitting she underpaid stamp duty on her £800,000 flat in Hove, and the unresolved investigation had been widely seen as the chief obstacle to any leadership bid.
In an interview with The Guardian, Rayner did not rule out standing in a Labour leadership contest but said she would not ‘trigger’ one.
‘I’ll play my part in doing everything we possibly can to deliver the change, because it’s not a personal ambition, I know the difference it makes,’ she said.
Pressed on whether the Prime Minister should step aside, she replied: ‘Keir will have to reflect on that.’