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UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced he will resign as prime minister and leader of the Labour Party.

Getting into it: Speaking outside No 10, Starmer said he had “heard the answer” from his party on whether he was best placed to lead it into the next election and “accepts that answer with good grace,” choking up as he spoke of his children. He will stay on until a handover is complete, with nominations to replace him opening July 9, and his move came after rival Andy Burnham won a by-election that cleared his path to mount a challenge.

The move came less than two years after Starmer’s 2024 landslide, the biggest Labour win in over a decade. Calls for him to quit intensified after May, when the party suffered some of its worst-ever local-election losses as Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK surged.

Starmer had vowed to fight any leadership contest, but he had lost two cabinet ministers in the past few weeks, Wes Streeting and John Healey, and a big chunk of his remaining cabinet had quietly signaled they wanted him gone.

His downfall was fueled by a string of missteps, including unpopular winter-fuel and welfare cuts and a damaging scandal over his appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite Mandelson’s ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and a failed security vetting. Starmer, who had promised to clean up politics, eventually sacked Mandelson but then had to publicly deny he’d lied to MPs about it.

This all comes as Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor nicknamed the “King of the North,” is the overwhelming favorite to succeed him, saying that “the change moment” has come.