“Good man, not good enough”: Jess Phillips quits on Starmer
Jess Phillips has walked, and she has done it with a letter designed to leave bruises.
The Safeguarding Minister resigned on Tuesday (12 May) with a public swipe at Keir Starmer that managed to be polite, devastating and quotable in roughly equal measure.
“I think you are a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things,” she wrote, “however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough.” Translation: nice guy, wrong job.
Phillips is the second minister to quit Starmer’s government in a single morning, after communities minister Miatta Fahnbulleh called on the prime minister to set out “a timetable for an orderly transition”. Two resignations before lunch. The week is not improving.
Why this one stings:
- Phillips is a Labour heavyweight in her own right, with a profile, a following and a reputation for saying out loud what colleagues only mutter
- She is a close ally of health secretary Wes Streeting, widely tipped as the most plausible successor
- Her resignation letter does not read like a strop. It reads like a charge sheet
The charge sheet bit matters. Phillips used her departure to publicly accuse Starmer of dithering on online child safety, citing the statistic that 91% of online child sex abuse is now self-generated by children “groomed, tricked and exploited” into producing it. She said she had spent over a year pushing the government to act, and had managed only to get Starmer to threaten to legislate. “Not legislate, just threaten,” she wrote. “This is the definition of incremental change.”
That is the kind of line that follows a prime minister around.
Starmer, for his part, is digging in. He told cabinet on Tuesday morning that the threshold for a leadership challenge had not been met and that he intends to fight on.
His Chief Secretary Darren Jones spent the morning on the broadcast round insisting the prime minister was “listening to colleagues” but would make his own decisions, and warning the would-be replacements that the job is “gruelling” and not a messiah gig.
The numbers tell a different story:
- More than 80 Labour MPs have publicly called for Starmer to stand down
- Four senior cabinet ministers (home secretary Shabana Mahmood, foreign secretary Yvette Cooper, defence secretary John Healey and deputy prime minister David Lammy) reportedly spoke to Starmer on Monday, with some pushing for an orderly transition
- Local election results last week were dire across England, Wales and Scotland
- The King’s Speech is, awkwardly, tomorrow
Phillips’ resignation does something specific to that arithmetic. It moves the story from backbench grumbling to ministers leaving the building, and it gives every wavering MP cover to follow.
Streeting has not said a word in public. He does not need to. His most prominent ally just handed him the cleanest possible pitch: not a coup, not a manoeuvre, just a respected minister saying out loud that the prime minister is decent but not decisive, and walking out the door.
Starmer can survive one resignation. He can probably survive two.
What he may not survive is the suggestion, now in writing on official letterhead, that being a good man is not the same as being a good Prime Minister.
