Starmer’s party is dying, and hallucinating mad political gambits in its death throes

The existential crisis that recently engulfed the British Labour Party has intensified over the past week, and it is now clear that the party is facing political extinction.

Two weeks ago, British voters showed their contempt for Labour, after enduring two years of scandal-ridden and ineffective government. The party lost almost 1,600 local council seats; ceded control of the Welsh parliament for the first time ever; and performed very poorly in Scotland.

The Labour Party has responded to this unprecedented electoral drubbing by engaging in an unseemly orgy of political infighting that will continue for months to come.

Within days, some 90 MPs announced that they no longer had faith in Keir Starmer as prime minister – and five cabinet members resigned, including Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who had been maneuvering to depose the unpopular Starmer for some time.

Streeting, however, declined to challenge Starmer for the leadership because he could not muster the support of the necessary 81 MPs to do so.

A week later, Streeting delivered an extraordinary speech in which he announced that he would contest the leadership when Starmer was eventually challenged, described Starmer’s ascension to Labour leadership as “dishonest” and astonishingly urged Britain to re-join the European Union – thereby reviving the divisive Brexit issue that has poisoned British politics for over a decade, and had previously split the Labour Party.

Streeting, by injecting Brexit into the Labour leadership contest, has ensured that it will become much more divisive and bitter that it otherwise would have been. One Labour minister has already condemned Streeting for “re-opening the Brexit wars.”

Other potential challengers – Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband – have also declined to challenge Starmer at this stage, and the unpopular Starmer appears determined to remain prime minister for the present.

This strange political impasse then provoked the ambitious mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, to launch a prospective challenge against Starmer. Burnham, however, cannot challenge at present as he is not in parliament – because earlier this year Starmer refused to endorse him as a candidate in a by-election in a safe Labour seat, that was subsequently won by the Greens.