Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for a general election after Sir Keir Starmer announced his resignation today. 

In a Substack essay, Farage hit out at Andy Burnham – the likely successor to Starmer – and said that the UK could not “afford to waste another week drifting from crisis to crisis”. 

“To men like Burnham, democracy is only a means to an end, to be discarded as soon as it is inconvenient for his personal ambitions,” Farage wrote. 

“That is not what I stand for, and it’s not a kind of politics I could ever support. That is why we must have a General Election at the earliest possible opportunity.”

He also said Britain was “broken” and accused Burnham of ignoring “our borders, our rotten high streets, our energy bills or our collapsing finances”. 

A Labour leadership contest is set to take place with nominations opening on 9 July. If Burnham is the only candidate, he will be made leader of the party and Prime Minister. 

Farage calls for election

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch had not released a statement on Starmer’s resignation by 11am, but shortly before his announcement she said he was a “terrible Prime Minister”. 

She listed a number of Labour policies including Starmer’s lack of funding for defence, failing to roll out welfare reform and hiking employers’ national insurance as evidence of a party that “only want[s] higher taxes to hand out more benefits, as the welfare secretary has pointed out”. 

The Green Party’s Zack Polanski called for a “bold change of direction” and said Starmer had failed to “challenge the power and wealth of an establishment which has taken for themselves while leaving the vast majority in a cost of living crisis”. 

He added: “We are still waiting to see which version of Andy Burnham is going to show up in Downing Street.”

The Liberal Democrats’ Sir Ed Davey called for a “bold new deal” with Europe and claimed the British people were “sick of being let down by an endless merry-go-round of Prime Ministers while nothing really changes”. 

Labour figures including Ed Miliband, Lord Hermer, Steve Reed and Darren Jones paid tribute to Starmer for showing “dignity” in his resignation.