Andy Burnham edges closer to Britain’s premiership as Jones exits race

Darren Jones has refused to challenge Andy Burnham for Labour’s leadership, removing one of the few figures who could have forced a contest over the party’s direction. Keir Starmer, who announced on Monday, June 22, 2026, that he would resign as Labour leader and prime minister, spent Wednesday defending his record as Burnham’s path to Downing Street narrowed further.

At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, June 24, Starmer faced a bruising session from Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who used the chamber to argue that Labour had already moved on from him. Starmer replied that he had worked to reverse years of Conservative austerity and said a prime minister’s test is to leave the country in better shape than he found it. He was then due to travel to Berlin for talks with European allies on Ukraine and the Middle East.

Burnham’s return to Westminster has been unusually fast and unusually engineered. He came back through the Makerfield by-election on June 18, after Labour MP Josh Simons resigned on May 14 to create the vacancy, a step that made it the first UK by-election since Leyton in 1965 to be triggered specifically for someone not already in Parliament. Under Labour’s rules, any challenger must already be an MP and must secure nominations from 20% of Labour MPs to get onto the ballot. The threshold was raised from 10% in 2021, and Jones’s decision not to run removes a plausible continuity candidate.

Starmer’s resignation followed weak local-election results in early May 2026 and growing pressure from within his own party. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Starmer all held office between 2016 and 2026. Labour has never had a sitting prime minister face a leadership challenge in office, and its only in-government leadership contest came in 1976 after Harold Wilson resigned.