If this were a poker game, Thursday lunchtime was the point when players were finally forced to show their cards. Was Wes Streeting holding all the aces, as his people relentlessly claimed, or a pair of fours and a lot of empty bluster? Did Andy Burnham even have any cards, if he couldn’t name an MP willing to surrender their seat for him? (At the 11th hour, Makerfield MP Josh Simons did the honours). Would Angela Rayner – late to the table, after scraping together £40,000 in accidentally underpaid stamp duty in order to play – scoop the jackpot by default? Or does the house, in the shape of a prime minister stubbornly refusing to budge, ultimately always win?

But in the end Streeting simply kicked the table over, scattering poker chips in all directions. His resignation from cabinet, in a blistering statement that noticeably failed to confirm he had the numbers to trigger a formal contest, was a frustrated last attempt to break the stalemate by taking what he called “personalities” – including possibly his own – and “petty factionalism” out of a revolt against Keir Starmer in which both are surgically embedded. Since the outcome is unclear at the time of writing, for now let’s leave aside the issue of whether Starmer even has the authority to do a reshuffle and focus on one question: why does Britain need a Labour party in 2026?

If it didn’t exist, would you invent it? Who would lack a voice, what problems could not be resolved, what opportunities would be missed or injustices perpetrated if it didn’t exist? Should it still hanker after representing the huddled masses, or settle for the people who actually seem to vote for it now, which is mostly the liberal middle classes? (In practice, the financially secure are most likely to vote either Labour or the Tories while the struggling go Green or Reform, depending on whether they’re socially liberal or conservative.) And what can Labour uniquely do that all the smaller leftwing parties can’t?

The answer to the last used to be easy: “get elected”, with “and keep Nigel Farage out” scrawled beneath more recently. But Labour’s monopoly on both is crumbling. New analysis of last week’s vote by the Persuasion thinktank finds a whopping 62% of Labour-to-Plaid Cymru switchers were mostly motivated by wanting to beat Reform. Wherever the Greens did well in England, they’ll pitch themselves as the anti-Farage choice next time. So should Labour embrace this multiparty reality and learn to work in coalition, or put up a fight?

For if it’s no longer seen as the left party of government, then potentially the trapdoor really opens. What was considered Labour’s “floor” – the baseline below which it couldn’t realistically fall – is already becoming a floor for the left in general, not Labour in particular. The need for the party to exist could start to look like one of those truths so apparently self-evident – like the fact that vaccination saves lives, or leaving the EU would be madness – that nobody bothers to defend for years, only to realise when the contrarians attack that we’ve all forgotten how. Well, here come the contrarians. The next Labour leader is the person with an answer for them.

Starmer is not obliged to make things easy for Streeting, or anyone else. He is entitled to stand in any contest and could feasibly win, as Jeremy Corbyn did, if members feel he has been wronged. But like Corbyn, he could then go on to lose the next election. He should not fight unless he has something genuinely new to say, that for some reason he has neglected to mention in two years.

Starmer has struggled in office partly because his answer to “Why Labour?” was mostly about his own individual competence, intended to work magic where fumbling Tories had failed. We could argue about whether his current unpopularity shows that competence isn’t enough or just that he wasn’t actually that competent, but that’s another column entirely. For now, Streeting’s argument that the lack of vision has led to a vacuum seems to echo the public’s view. According to Persuasion again, those in England who voted Labour in 2024 but who wouldn’t now are most likely to blame the party becoming too “Tory-lite” or say they don’t know what it stands for, with anger at the cost of living further down the list.

Ironically, the visions of the likely candidates aren’t miles apart. Though bond traders are reacting as if the Burnhamites – whether led ultimately by Burnham or not – would set fire to all the money, they’re mostly not that dumb. They believe there’s more scope to borrow for longterm investment, as Louise Haigh set out in a recent essay; that may or may not be true, but it falls well short of believing in magic money trees. Burnham’s own record in Manchester is more pragmatic, too, than it looks from down south. He has worked happily with the private sector on regeneration, with the former Tory mayor Andy Street on shared interests, as well as with the grassroots left. Not for nothing did he cut his political teeth working for Tessa Jowell.

And while Streeting gets caricatured as a crazed rightwinger, if given half a chance he too would meet Labour members where they are. Having pointedly mentioned Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech in his resignation letter, I suspect he has more to say about how Labour got it wrong on immigration. While every candidate will describe meeting voters to whom life feels squeezed and joyless, he might also want to talk – as the Labour Growth Group did this week in a paper urging reforms to cut the cost of housing, energy and childcare, and a shift from taxing work to taxing wealth – about that less in terms of grinding poverty than lacking choices. This is politics for people who can pay the bills but have nothing left afterwards for the things that make them feel good, from treating the kids to doing up the bathroom. Is Labour’s role in 2026 less to be crusading social justice warriors like the Greens and more the plausible party of ordinary desires for a good life? Maybe, in part. But values matter too.

To turn my own cards face up: I don’t yet have a dog in this fight. As many readers will be, I’m still looking for someone who seems up to the scale of the challenge and worrying that I don’t see them yet. But that’s what the battle of ideas Streeting demanded should be about: the lightbulb moment where you suddenly think, “ah, that’s what was missing.” Without one, we really are in the dark.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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