KEIR STARMER will remain Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras after his tenure as prime minister ends in the coming weeks, a Downing Street spokesperson said on Wednesday.
Starmer is currently serving as caretaker prime minister after announcing his resignation as Labour leader, triggering the process to elect a successor who will replace him at 10 Downing Street.
He is also said to have held his first meeting with Andy Burnham, the newly elected MP for Makerfield and frontrunner for the top job, after pledging an “orderly handover of power” in his resignation speech on Monday.
“He is going to remain an MP,” Starmer's spokesperson told reporters.
“Keir wants the next prime minister to succeed, he wants the Labour government to succeed, and he will do everything within his power to ensure that,” the spokesperson said.
Asked whether Starmer would consider taking up a Cabinet role if offered one, the spokesperson noted that he had told ministers at their weekly meeting that “this is the end of my journey, but this is not the end of yours”.
“The test for every Prime Minister is handing over the country in a better shape than they found it. I know I can do that,” said Starmer during his first weekly Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) session in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
“I am very proud of every one of our MPs who, with a landslide Labour victory, come from all different backgrounds and different places across the country. We inflicted the biggest loss on the Tories in the history of their party (in the July 2024 general election).
“We have picked up our party, and we turned it around. We had to address what went wrong, we turned it around, and we won a landslide victory,” he said.
Meanwhile, Cabinet minister and one of Starmer’s closest allies, Darren Jones, ruled out contesting the leadership race.
"Andy Burnham is going to be the next prime minister. So, the question for me is, well, what would the benefit be to the country and to the party of a leadership contest,” he told reporters.
Another contender, former armed forces minister Al Carns, indicated that he was considering his position and would need to see Burnham’s policies before he could “make a decision to back him".
Under Starmer’s timetable, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) will open nominations for the party leadership on July 9. With momentum behind Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester is likely to be elected unopposed by mid-July.
