Starmer holds 16-minute meeting with Streeting amid leadership crisis

Wes Streeting has held talks with Keir Starmer in Downing Street as an ally of the health secretary renewed calls for the prime minister to resign, saying his authority had “irretrievably ebbed away”. Streeting arrived in No 10 on Wednesday morning amid intense speculation over Labour’s leadership crisis and his own future within the party . He left approximately 16 minutes later without commenting to the media. The health secretary’s allies had sought to portray Wednesday’s meeting as a moment for Streeting to speak candidly about his concerns. But No 10 insiders suggested Streeting was playing down speculation that he was on the brink of declaring his candidacy for the leadership. The meeting came shortly after Dr Zubir Ahmed, who resigned from his junior health minister role on Tuesday, blamed Starmer for Labour’s disastrous local election results and urged the prime minister to set out a timetable for his departure in “an orderly expedient transition”. Ahmed accused Starmer of becoming the “inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government” in Scotland’s parliamentary elections, saying Labour had been unable to challenge the Scottish National party because of “noise created at the centre”. …