Rosa Prince, Columnist

Starmer’s Leadership Chaos Is Turning Into a National Crisis

November 12, 2025 at 4:00 PM UTC

Updated on

November 13, 2025 at 8:00 AM UTC

Rosa Prince is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering UK politics and policy. She was formerly an editor and writer at Politico and the Daily Telegraph, and is the author of "Comrade Corbyn" and "Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister."

Et tu, Wes?
Photographer: Leon Neal/Getty Images Europe

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One reason Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the 2024 UK election was his promise to restore calm after a decade of Tory carnage. Speaking outside 10 Downing Street on the morning after victory, he vowed to “deliver change, restore service and respect for politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country.”

Those words sound hollow today. His “Starmtroopers” — the posse of centrist loyalists around the prime minister — have just stamped pretty hard on his health secretary, Wes Streeting, delivering a volley of extraordinary anonymous briefings to the media, including Bloomberg News, designed to kill off an alleged plot by the young pretender to topple their man.