When the leader of your own party's Scottish branch publicly calls for you to resign, you are in serious trouble. That is exactly where Keir Starmer finds himself this weekend. Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour, has broken ranks and said what an increasing number of Labour MPs have been whispering in private for months. The Prime Minister should go.
A Government Losing Its Grip
This isn't a manufactured scandal or a bad news cycle. It is the cumulative weight of failure landing all at once. Downing Street's Director of Communications, Tim Allan, has resigned amid the fallout from the Epstein files release. Matthew Doyle, a former Downing Street communications director, has been suspended by the Parliamentary Labour Party over his links to a convicted sex offender. These are not peripheral figures. These are the people Starmer surrounded himself with.
Voters rightly ask a simple question: if the Prime Minister cannot run his own office, how on earth is he meant to run the country? The answer, borne out by every Reform UK doorstep conversation I have in Preston East, is that he can't.
Sarwar's Intervention Changes Everything
Scottish Labour has its own reasons for panic. The party is staring down the barrel of the Holyrood elections next month and the polling is catastrophic. But Sarwar's intervention isn't just about saving his own seat. It is the first time a serving Labour leader in any part of the UK has publicly said the Prime Minister is the problem.
Once that door is open, it doesn't close. Backbench MPs who have been leaking anonymously can now speak on the record. Cabinet ministers who have been positioning themselves for a leadership contest no longer have to pretend. The quiet coup that failed in February has now become an open revolt.
Labour's Problem Isn't Starmer. It's Labour.
Let me be direct. Removing Starmer will not save this government. The problem with Labour isn't the man at the top. It is a party that promised change and delivered chaos. Taxes up. Waiting lists still broken. Small boats still crossing. Pensioners losing winter fuel payments. Farmers being squeezed by inheritance tax raids. Businesses hit with National Insurance rises that are killing jobs.
Swapping Starmer for Streeting, or Reeves, or whoever Labour's magic circle cooks up next won't change any of that. It would simply be the same Labour failures with a different face.
What Reform UK Would Do
The country needs a proper election, not a Westminster stitch-up. Reform UK is ready. We would cut taxes for working people. We would secure the border. We would restore common sense to policing and planning. And we would run a government where the Prime Minister's team aren't a revolving door of resignations and scandals.
Starmer's days are numbered. But Labour's days are too. The sooner the public get to deliver that verdict at the ballot box, the better.