Sir Keir Starmer is walking away from Parliament altogether, abandoning the Holborn and St Pancras seat he’s held since 2015 and lumping British taxpayers with the bill for a by-election, barely two months after promising he’d see out his term.
Tory chairman Kevin Hollinrake didn’t hold back, branding the resignation “yet another U-turn, having pledged to stay on,” and pointing out it comes just as Andy Burnham and Chancellor John Healey are “plotting tax rises on hardworking families across the country.”
Kemi Badenoch was equally pointed, saying she understood why Starmer wouldn’t want to “spend time with the Labour MPs who treated him so badly” after delivering them a landslide in 2024, only to be knifed by his own party two years later.
It’s a pattern by now. Starmer’s premiership was defined by reversal after reversal — on winter fuel payments, the two-child benefit cap, and more — and this looks like one more broken promise for the pile. As recently as 3 July, asked directly whether he’d stay on as an MP, his answer was a flat “Yes.” Two months later, he’s out the door.
Starmer himself offered a softer story, telling the Camden New Journal it was simply “the right time” to hand over to a successor so he can focus on international affairs and his long-standing work on violence against women and girls. Whether that squares with a promise made weeks earlier is a question voters in Holborn and St Pancras, and beyond, may well ask themselves.
The seat is no longer the safe Labour banker it once was. Electoral Calculus gives Labour just a 59% chance of holding it, with the resurgent Greens, who’ve tripled their local membership under Zack Polanski, on 40%. Camden’s local elections in May already saw Labour shed 17 council seats to the Greens’ gain of 10, and a Green spokesperson has floated Polanski himself standing.
Starmer, meanwhile, is said to have his eye on the Nato secretary-general job once Mark Rutte’s term ends, raising the question of whether “international affairs” was the real plan all along.
