Misryoum Politics News | MP Karl Turner says Starmer is past “point of no return”
Keir Starmer’s grip on Labour has been taking hits from within, and this week it got louder from an unlikely place: an MP who says the party is already past the stage where quiet corrections will work.
Labour unity frays as Turner urges change
Turner insisted he’s not trying to force Starmer out in the immediate sense.
“If I get the whip back, I’m not going to be nominating anybody else either,” he said, explaining that he was once a supporter of Starmer and remains one.
Still, he also argued that voters are fed up and that the Parliamentary Labour Party may end up concluding Turner is making it harder to keep going, especially if results in Scotland, Wales and English councils next month are as bad as feared.
He spoke in the context of a Labour party that’s been openly arguing with itself for weeks, and it showed.
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Labour suspended the whip from Turner last month after weeks of public criticism of the Starmer operation and government policy—particularly the plan to reduce the use of jury trials.
Turner framed the current moment as one where damage is no longer reversible, and he sounded almost exasperated when he laid out his logic.
“Regrettably, I think we’re now beyond the point of no return in terms of Keir’s leadership,” he said.
He went further, saying the Labour Party “has got to look at itself and find out what we do to mend things,” and if it can’t be mended, then a change of leadership is on the table.
Misryoum newsroom also picked up Turner’s more blunt image: watching the polling as if “your P45 is on its way to you.” It’s the sort of line that’s supposed to make colleagues think, and apparently it did.
There was also the Burnham thread.
Turner said Labour made a “big mistake” by blocking Burnham’s initial attempt to stand as the party’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election earlier this year.
Misryoum editorial desk noted that Green candidate Hannah Spencer won the by-election in Greater Manchester, with Labour finishing third in a seat it had previously controlled for over a century.
Turner said he’d been pleading with Starmer—phone calls, texts, conversations—urging that Labour should not block Burnham.
He also joked that “people buy with their eyes,” calling the Manchester mayor “charismatic,” “charming,” and “actually quite a good looking fella” with nice eyelashes.
There was a small real-world moment in how he described it: he said he often questions his wife because their daughter’s eyelashes are beautiful, and he joked that Burnham “might have had something to do with it”—and then quickly added, “Thank goodness!”
Burnham is not currently a Labour MP, but he’s viewed as a leading candidate to succeed Starmer.
Misryoum analysis indicates that his operation began reaching out to Labour MPs, senior officials and trade unions about a second attempt to return to the House of Commons after the blocked bid earlier this year.
And that’s where Turner’s comments circle back: if the party can’t stop the bleeding soon, he thinks Burnham becomes less a theoretical option and more a practical one—even if the path there might be messy, and even if some people still insist it’s not about naming successors yet.
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