The U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has resigned—a day after Donald Trump pre-announced it for him.
Starmer, 63, who, as prime minister, is also the leader of the ruling Labour Party, confirmed his departure in an emotional statement outside the prime minister’s official Downing Street residence on Monday morning.
He told reporters he would quit as Labour leader after concluding he was no longer the man to take it into the next election. He will remain prime minister until a successor is chosen over the summer.
Starmer was Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade—a measure of the chaos that has gripped the country since the 2016 Brexit vote, which Trump had cheered on.
Trump also broke the news of Starmer’s exit a day earlier on his own social media platform, before Starmer had breathed a word.
“Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of The United Kingdom,” Trump, 80, had posted to Truth Social on Sunday, before twisting the knife. “He failed badly on two very important subjects — IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA OIL!). I wish him well! President DJT.”
Trump made his prediction without speaking with Starmer. Downing Street told The Washington Post that Starmer and Trump had not been in contact over the weekend, raising the obvious question of how the president could have made such a definitive call.
The pre-emptive strike stunned even those long inured to Trump’s norm-trampling. ITV journalist Robert Peston wrote on X that pre-announcing the resignation of the prime minister of America’s supposedly closest ally was extreme even by Trump’s standards. He added there was “no boundary this American president will not bulldoze through.”
Piers Morgan, 61, a friend of Trump, called it “the final humiliation.”
Trump’s intervention came at a low point in a relationship once close enough that Starmer was dubbed the “Trump whisperer.” Earlier this year, Trump branded the British leader “no Winston Churchill” amid a dispute over U.K. support for U.S. strikes on Iran, and the pair pointedly did not hold a bilateral meeting at last week’s G7 summit in France.
He had also been locked in a long-running feud with Trump ally Elon Musk, who accused Starmer of turning Britain into a “police state” with his crackdown on social media.
Starmer’s troubles had been building for months, not least over his disastrous decision to make Peter Mandelson his ambassador in Washington—a job Starmer fired Mandelson from in September after emails laid bare the depth of Mandelson’s friendship with pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking in Downing Street on Monday, Starmer struck a defiant-then-tender note, saying that walking into No. 10 two years earlier had been the proudest moment of his life, and that he had inherited a party that was “politically, financially and morally bankrupt.”
He fought back tears as he turned to his family, vowing to be the best husband he could to his wife, Victoria ”who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad,” before embracing her on the street.
Starmer told the BBC he had spoken to King Charles by phone that morning to inform him of the decision.
He has asked the National Executive Committee, the governing body of the U.K. Labour Party, to open leadership nominations on July 9 and wrap the contest by the summer recess, installing a new leader before parliament returns in September.
Starmer’s authority drained away after May’s local elections, when Labour shed more than 1,100 council seats to Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK. The threat sharpened on Friday when his chief rival, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, 56, won a by-election that handed him a route to a formal leadership challenge.
Burnham, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, and others are expected to enter the race to replace him.
The Daily Beast has contacted Downing Street and the White House for comment.
