London: Keir Starmer will continue his term as Labour Party member of Parliament for Holborn and St Pancras in London after his tenure as British Prime Minister concludes in the coming weeks, a Downing Street spokesperson said Wednesday.
Starmer is serving in the role of caretaker Prime Minister after he announced his resignation as Labour leader, triggering the process for his colleagues to elect a new party chief who will go on to replace him at 10 Downing Street.
He is 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 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 he would consider taking up a Cabinet role if he was offered one, the spokesperson noted that he had told his 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, addressing his first weekly Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) session in the House of Commons 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, has indicated that he was considering his position and will need to see Burnham’s policies before he can “make a decision to back him”.
Under Starmer’s timetable, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) will open nominations for the party leadership by July 9 and with the momentum behind the former Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham is likely to be elected unopposed by mid-July.