Starmer will not be PM by next election, member of influential Labour think-tank says

Professor Rob Ford, who works as part of the Labour Together group, told LBC's Tonight with Andrew Marr that he did not believe Starmer would be able to see out his full five-year term.

After the group were revealed to be polling about potential Starmer successors, Professor Ford told Andrew: "My gut instinct, frankly, which is a polling based gut instinct, as is appropriate for someone in my kind of work, is that he won't be [Prime Minister by the next election]."

Professor Ford told Andrew that Starmer's election win in 2024 delivered many MPs with small majorities, which Labour's poor polling fortunes look set to wipe out.

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He added: "I don't see how a Prime Minister with such poor ratings so early on, presiding over a Parliamentary party where so many Labour MPs have really small majorities. I just don't really see any way in which it gets turned around."

Professor Ford concluded: "I don't really see any way in which he gets through that without a sufficient minority of Labour MPs saying, let's give somebody else a go. That's my gut instinct, but I've been wrong before."

When asked about the polling his organisation had done about replacements, Professor Ford was more guarded.

He told Andrew: "I'm going to do a very academic thing and argue either side of the case on this one for you. So, on the one hand, I think there is a logical research based case for this kind of thing, which is the Labour membership is... in a state of constant flux.

"We've been hearing, for example, a lot about Labour members going off and joining the Greens and so on and so forth.

"When they did the research, which was also by Labour Together, in 2020 they were quite surprised at how much change there had been in the membership. This isn't a constant group of people, and one of the ways you can get at what sort of people are in the Labour Party now, and what they think about people, is exactly this kind of survey.

"Now the reporting is going very heavily on the leadership questions, but there are also lots of questions in there about the ideological orientation of members, about their views on the issues and stuff like this. So the case for it is you want to understand your membership.

"The case against it is, it doesn't take a genius to work out that at a point like this, if you ask a question about potential successors to Starmer and people find out about that, it's going to be a bit of a story."