Starmer Faces His Final PMQs as His Premiership Ends
Sir Keir Starmer holds his last Cabinet in Downing Street this morning and takes his final Prime Minister’s Questions at the despatch box at noon, before the Commons rises for the summer recess. It is his farewell Commons appearance as Prime Minister, drawing a line under a premiership ended not by the country but by his own MPs’ loss of confidence. He is expected to leave No 10 early next week, handing over to Andy Burnham after one of the swiftest transfers of power in modern British history.
A valedictory PMQs is usually a gentle affair, and this one will be doubly strange: a Prime Minister taking his leave not after an election defeat but after his own benches withdrew their confidence, handing the office to a man who was outside Parliament weeks ago. The speed of it is without modern precedent — a leadership emptied and refilled inside a month, with the Commons rising for recess almost as the keys change hands. Starmer’s legacy will be argued over for years: a landslide majority squandered to internal revolt, or a leader undone by forces — migration, the cost of living, a restive left — that would have broken anyone. For now the practical business is the handover, and the country will get its third Prime Minister of the Parliament without having voted for the change. Watch the tone of Starmer’s farewell, whether he offers any reflection on what went wrong, and how smoothly the machinery of government passes to his successor.