Keir Starmer was on the brink last night as his rivals for the top job prepared to strike.

In an explosive intervention, Angela Rayner broke cover with an extraordinary statement eviscerating the Prime Minister’s record in office.

She also unveiled her hard-Left prospectus for power and signalled an alliance with Andy Burnham by demanding that he be allowed to come back to Westminster.

Allies of Health Secretary Wes Streeting said he was ‘ready to go’ with a leadership bid should Sir Keir be brought down in the coming hours. 

They believe the Labour rebellion over last week’s local elections disaster will soon engulf the PM and trigger a contest in which Ed Miliband could also decide to run.

Sir Keir will make his last stand today with a speech that’s widely seen as his final chance to convince his party to let him continue. He will say: ‘People need hope. We will face up to the big challenges and we will make the big arguments.’

But he faces the prospect of an immediate leadership battle if the surprise ‘stalking horse’ candidate Catherine West gets the required 81 backers – a fifth of Labour MPs – needed to ignite one. 

Ms West has indicated she will formally challenge the PM if she is still ‘dissatisfied’ after hearing his latest ‘reset’ speech.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) was on the brink last night as his rivals for the top job prepared to strike

Last night, prominent Left-wingers warned there must not be a ‘palace coup’ whereby the Cabinet anoints a successor for Sir Keir without a proper contest.

Leading Corbynites also urged against a rushed leadership election that they fear will turn into a ‘coronation’ for Mr Streeting, since Left-wing frontrunner Mr Burnham cannot stand unless he first wins a by-election.

On another day of turmoil in the wake of Labour’s local elections drubbing last week:

• A close ally of Sir Keir, former minister Josh Simons, turned against him, claiming he had ‘lost the country’;

• The number of Labour MPs calling for the PM to quit reached 40;

• Sir Keir said he wanted to stay in No 10 for eight more years and vowed to fight any challenges; 

• Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson admitted the public felt ‘bitterly let down’ by the Labour Government.

In the aftermath of Thursday’s elections – during which Labour lost almost 1,500 councillors and control of Wales for the first time – Sir Keir said he took responsibility but vowed to fight on.

Many MPs said he was incapable of turning round Labour’s fortunes as he is so unpopular with voters, and he caused more anger with his unexpected decision to bring back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as advisers.

Cabinet ministers had appeared to be remaining loyal although some pointedly failed to support Sir Keir in their statements on the election results.

Yesterday, it emerged that Mr Streeting was preparing a leadership bid, with his allies believing that a swift contest represents his best chance. Then at 5pm, Ms Rayner issued a dramatic 1,000-word statement, unleashing a ferocious attack on Sir Keir’s record in office while demanding a lurch to the hard-Left on policy.

She also demanded that Sir Keir allow Mr Burnham become an MP again, but did not make clear if she wanted to stand in any contest.

Instead, she put Sir Keir on notice, telling him: ‘The Prime Minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.’

She also condemned the ‘toxic culture of cronyism’ illustrated by the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Allies of Mr Streeting said that while he would not bring Sir Keir down himself, he believed the rebellion will only grow and grow, that the ‘dam will burst’ – and things could soon fall apart.

‘When it does, he is ready,’ said one. ‘He is ready to move.’

The Health Secretary’s supporters were also privately critical of Downing Street’s response to Thursday’s disaster, including the decision to bring back Mr Brown and Baroness Harman.

‘No 10 have got every single part of their response wrong,’ one said.

And members of Mr Streeting’s camp were scathing about Ms Rayner. One source told the Daily Mail: ‘Everyone in Labour admires her story and what she’s achieved. But that doesn’t mean you want her being the person making the big decisions at three in the morning.’

Westminster has long expected that in a leadership contest, Blairite Mr Streeting would go up against a more Left-wing candidate such as Ms Rayner or Mr Burnham.

But Ms Rayner is still awaiting the results of a potentially damaging HMRC investigation into the tax due on her seaside home, while Mr Burnham must first be allowed to stand in a by-election then overcome opposition from the Greens and Reform to win

the seat. It has prompted speculation that Energy Secretary Mr Miliband could be urged to stand instead as the standard-bearer for the Left.

As the likelihood of a quick contest grew this weekend, it prompted many leading Left-wingers to say they would not support Ms West’s challenge despite wanting Sir Keir out.

Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said: ‘We need to discuss how we go forward and I worry some in the shadows want to exploit her concerns and bounce us before we have a proper democratic process.’

Another Corbynite MP, Richard Burgon, said: ‘Catherine’s stated preference is for a Cabinet stitch-up – a kind of palace coup.

‘Catherine says that if there isn’t a Cabinet deal, she will trigger an immediate leadership election. I fear there’s a real danger that, whatever her good intentions, her move will be exploited by people on the Right of the party who want a coronation and not a proper democratic contest in the party.’

Ms West told the BBC: ‘I will hear what the Prime Minister’s got to say tomorrow and then, if I’m still dissatisfied, I will put out my email to the Parliamentary Labour Party, asking for names.’

She also encouraged women to stand against Sir Keir as there has never been a female Labour leader.

But Cabinet minister Ms Phillipson, sitting next to her in the BBC studio, told her: ‘I love you dearly, Catherine, but I just disagree on this one.’ She said her colleague’s move was ‘completely wrong’ and doubted if it would go ahead.

Earlier, the Education Secretary admitted that the public feel ‘bitterly let down’ by Labour – but backed Sir Keir in his ambition to remain Prime Minister.

Ms Phillipson acknowledged that cutting the winter fuel payment caused ‘huge, huge problems’ for the party and that the Government had been ‘too gloomy and too negative’ in its first months in power. But she insisted that changing leader would not ‘magically improve’ the situation.

Mandelson was toxic cronyism. Blocking Burnham was a big mistake… how Rayner knifed Keir

Statement by Angela Rayner

Our party has suffered a historic defeat. Many good Labour colleagues have lost their seats despite working hard for those they represented. We have lost good Labour administrations and lost the chance for more.

What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance.

The Labour Party must now live up to our name: we must be the party of working people.

We’ve heard the same on the doorstep as we’ve seen in the polls – the cost of living is the

top issue for voters of all parties. People have turned to populists and nationalists because we have not done enough to fix it.

Living standards are barely higher than they were a decade and a half ago. People feel hopeless – that the cost of living crisis will never end. And now they see oil and gas companies use global instability to post record profits.

Once again, ordinary people are paying the price for decisions they didn’t make.

It’s no wonder that across the UK, working people feel the system is rigged against them.

Things can be so much better than this. Countries including Spain and Canada have shown that economies can grow and people can thrive when governments stay true to labour and social democratic values and put people first.

We need to learn from that.

In London, we lost young people who fear they will never afford a home. In my patch and across the North, we lost working people whose wages are too low and costs too high. In Scotland and Wales, people do not currently see Labour as the answer. We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people.

The Peter Mandelson scandal showed a toxic culture of cronyism. Decisions such as cutting winter fuel allowance just weren’t what people expected from a Labour government.

For too long, successive governments have allowed wealth and power to concentrate at the top without a plan to ensure the benefits of economic growth are shared fairly.

The result is an economy that does not work for the majority, with wealth concentrated in too few hands. This level of inequality, alongside squeezed living standards, is the outcome of a model built on deregulation, privatisation, and trickle-down economics. But we have the chance to fix this.

We need immediate action to cut costs for households and put money back into the everyday economy. This can be done within the current fiscal rules, by ensuring those who benefit from the crisis contribute more so that everyone can thrive.

Our Employment Rights Act was just the first step in our plan to Make Work Pay. Now is the time to take the next steps, starting with a Fair Pay Agreement in social care – but not ending there. A rising minimum wage must go alongside our programme to get young people into work.

The investment we secured in social and affordable housing should now unleash a building boom that benefits British business and workers. We must double down on renters’ reform and show leaseholders our action on tackling ground rents and charges was just a first step to ending freehold for good.

Our devolution revolution has begun, but is nowhere near done.

Giving mayors powers to transform planning and licensing can boost local business and good growth, in the interests of local people. They must go alongside economic powers and public services.

Boosting community ownership and stopping the sell-off of local assets from pubs to playgrounds will put power back in local hands, helping restore the pride they feel in the places they live.

We must go further on planning reforms, to build the schools, hospitals, roads and infrastructure the country needs to grow.

We should be unafraid to promote new forms of public, community and cooperative ownership across the board. Buses and trains being brought back into public hands can now operate for the public good, at prices passengers can afford. Thames Water is an iconic failure of privatisation, which resonates for the same reasons. People are rightly sick of bonuses for bosses who deliver nothing but higher bills. We must face down demands that the public pay the price of private failure.

We must create good jobs that pay decent wages by ensuring defence investment includes a secure manufacturing base. Use our house building programme to boost construction, invest in the green economy, backing SMEs by reforming business rates and increasing support to revive our high streets and local economies, raise the minimum wage and get young people into work.

And then there is politics itself, putting power back into people’s hands so that they are shaping the decisions that impact them. We must tackle the inflow of dodgy money in our politics – something that Nigel Farage, who took £5million in a secret personal gift from an offshore crypto baron, will never do. We must make politics work for ordinary people.

We can only prove we mean it by putting the common interest ahead of factionalism.

This is bigger than personalities, but it is time to acknowledge that blocking Andy Burnham was a mistake. We must show we understand the scale of change the moment calls for – that means bringing our best players into Parliament – and embracing the type of agenda that has been successful at a local level, rather than reaching back to an agenda and politics that has failed people.

These are the fights we need to have, and the change in direction we need to see. Policy tweaks will not fix the fundamental challenges facing our country. This Government needs, at pace, to put measures in place that make people’s lives tangibly better, while fixing the foundations of a system rigged against them.

The Prime Minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.

Change our economic agenda to prioritise making people better off, change how we run our party so that all voices are listened to, and change how we do politics.

Labour exists to make working people better off. That is not happening fast enough, and it needs to change – now.