Ministers are descending on Downing Street ahead of Sir Keir Starmer’s doomsday cabinet meeting this morning.

Almost 80 Labour MPs have called for Starmer to go, and it is understood that the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is one of at least three cabinet ministers to suggest that the prime minister needs to consider his options. Senior government sources have claimed that Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has also told Starmer to set out a timetable for departure.

What lies ahead could be a bloodbath leadership contest between Starmer, Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, or a direct challenge by Andy Burnham if he is able to secure a Labour seat. Streeting has been preparing his leadership campaign for months but faces backlash from the prime minister’s supporters, who have accused the health secretary of orchestrating rebellion.

“Starmaggedon” was how Michael Gove splashed The Spectator’s Thursday cover before a vote had been cast in the local elections. Writing political headlines that anticipate a result can be a risky egg-on-face business for an editor.  Back in October 1958, the editor of the Catholic Herald, Michael de la Bodeyere, was faced with the tricky dilemma of having to decide whether to print on his Sunday cover that the dying Pope XII was dead before any actual confirmation on his death. He took the gamble and had a world exclusive with the presses running the story before any Vatican announcement. 

But we all knew that Labour was going to have a blood bath on May 7^th. We also knew that Starmer was likely to wake up on May 8th knowing he was a Dead PM Walking. Gove’s prediction is that following the local election results, along with those in Wales and Scotland, Labour will ‘inevitably and ineluctably’ move to the Left.

But the real “inevitable and ineluctable” result of the elections is the impossibility of Starmer surely surviving as PM. We are now in the Starmer End Game. This will likely be a carve-up behind the scenes with a new leader not anointed until the Autumn conference. As each hour passes, and more results come in, his backbenchers are becoming more vocal and visible about the contempt that the PM seems to have for his own MPs, with his ministers also becoming increasingly withering. 

The plotting to seize the Number 10 crown is already well underway with every possibility that Labour’s results being so grim that Starmer has run out of political leverage to block Andy Burnham getting back into Westminster as an MP. Burnham is a former Blairite but has shifted more to the left since taking over as Manchester mayor.  

The Greens under Zack Polanski look to have been “found out” – not, I think, so much because of their crackpot ideas (including legalising all-drugs including crack cocaine) but because the Polanski personal polling brand (down 14%) has been badly dented by revelations of fibbing over being a spokesperson for the Red Cross and his desperation to resort to sectarian tactics including having at least 30 Anti-Semitic Green candidates, including nine in London. 

The Tories will be hugely relieved that they have done better than last year and much will be (rightly) made of the Tories re-taking Westminster Council after losing control to Labour, under Boris Johnson, since 2022. Before that the council had been under Conservative control since the creation of the current authority in 1965. 

Psychologically, this is a major boost to Kemi Badenoch as it puts clear water between her and Johnson who actually served as a two-time Conservative mayor. Badenoch deserves credit for taking the crown London seat, while the Greens, Reform UK and the Lib Dems failed to take any seats. With Westminster Council including such historic seats of power as Downing Street, Parliament and Buckingham Palace, this is a huge symbolic win for the Tories. The Tories also comfortably won Kensington and Chelsea and Wandsworth.

But as the results come in in Wales and Scotland, with an ever more splintered political landscape, with the three main winners all being populist/nationalist-leaning parties, it’s Reform who have emerged as the runaway winner results. Any talk that last year’s election results were just a protest vote, or a party that hoovers up “disaffected’ voters, has been proven wrong.  What has been confirmed is what we have all known for over a year: the UK political landscape has irreversibly changed with the death of the two-party system and the fragmentation of British politics.

Reform has shown itself to have quickly become a professional party with a hugely effective party campaigning machine. Having been following the likes of Farage, Tice and Jenrick around the country for much of the last six months, the secret of its success, I’d argue, is that it knows how to operate with its power base outside parliament. 

The Greens – also standing on an ‘anti-establishment’ ticket – have also tried this strategy but they don’t even have a proper London HQ (Polanski has been seen scouting out Millbank Towers). They disorganised and have nothing like the party machine or discipline that Farage, Tice and Zia Yusef have built in just a year. They are still yet to even announce where they are hosting their autumn party conference on 2-4 October (“Due to the high growth in membership numbers, we have had to find a larger venue.”)

Almost all Reform MPs have cramped, cell-like offices in the Commons, including would-be Tory leader Jenrick, Danny Kruger and all the other defectors. This is because Labour re-allocate offices when MPs defect and they never get an upgrade. Even Farage’s Commons office is hardly statesmanlike.

“Reform has shown itself to have quickly become a professional party with an effective party campaigning machine. The secret of its success is that it knows how to operate with its power base outside parliament”

But this is largely irrelevant as Reform use their expansive and digitally equipped Millbank Towers HQ, 500 yards from Parliament, as their political HQ and political stronghold, backed up by slick US campaign-style press conferences around the country usually twice a week. This is where Farage’s office is more presidential. No other party gets close in terms of operating on “24-hour war mode” and this is one reason why Reform did so well across the country as they have been on general election campaigning overdrive for the last year.

As a result of this smart tactic, Reform do not think in terms any longer about identifying with the Left or Right, as they are going directly in into both the traditional Labour heartlands as well into deep Conservative territory. But if there is one clear message that has emerged from May 7^th results, it’s that the West Midlands will decide the next election. 

The Mace has been saying this for months. That Richard Tice chose to give his first speech as Reform’s ‘Shadow’ Business, Trade and Energy Secretary (and don’t forget the housing) at the UPS Steels factory, near Dudley, in the industrial heartland of the West Midlands ‘Black Country’, was no coincidence. 

Nor is it chance that Reform will be hosting their 2026 conference at the Birmingham NEC, as well as their breakthrough 2025 conference (and 2024). Nor was it any surprise when Nigel Farage decided to host a 2500 strong party ‘rally’ in Birmingham (NEC again) in February to announce his general election candidates list was open, and have his ‘Magnificent Seven’ MPs interviewed ‘live’ by Jeremy Kyle. 

This is because the Midlands has so often decided the course of English history, from the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 to the key battles of the Civil War and the Battle of Worcester in 1651, as well as being the heartland of the industrial revolution which began in Ironbridge, Shropshire, not far from where I was brought up. 

What we have seen are council gains in the West Midlands that make it clear that Richard Tice is correct to say that the Red Wall of the Midlands and North West “is now being re-painted turquoise.”  Should Reform seize control of Birmingham City Council, or even almost take it, it will make Farage the new King of the Midlands, just as Alfred the Great, in the 9^th century, used his hold on west Mercia to rule Anglo-Saxon England on a ‘stop-the-heathen-Danish-invaders’ call to arms. 

I expect we will now increasingly see a ‘Midlands and Red Wall First’ strategy for Farage to get the keys to Downing Street, although the May 7^th results – to date as I write early on Friday morning – do not show to any clear overall majority with the Tories holding up better than expected, especially in London. The results, have indeed, been a “historic” re-aligning of political Britain. 

I was at the steel factory in Dudley for Tice’s maiden speech as Business and Energy Secretary. When I asked Farage about the importance of the Midlands to Reform’s road map to power, he used the word “critical”. 

“Where the West Midlands goes is generally where the country goes and it’s been like that for a very, very long time” said Farage.  “So, yes, it is a key target area and you will see a lot of myself and Richard campaigning across the West Midlands in the weeks to come.” Make that years. With a general election still possibly not until 2029, the Midlands will be seeing a lot more of Farage and Tice, along with Reform’s very own Black Country poster-boy, Robert Jenrick. 

I also suspect we’ll start to see a run of Labour defections. And then, in around the time of Reform’s Business Day (and dinner) on September 3^rd, the Thursday before the Reform’s Birmingham NEC conference, some big-lunch-tie CEO or C-Suite level defections from business leaders of FTSE companies. 

William Cash is editor-in-chief of The Mace