Disowned by his MPs, despised by the public, Starmer must know the game is up

According to the bookies, Sir Keir Starmer is odds-on to leave No 10 this year, and if they are right, history might look back on Feb 4 as the day his departure became inevitable.

With two U-turns in the space of a day, with his political guru Morgan McSweeney standing on a trapdoor, and with Angela Rayner biting at his ankles, Sir Keir’s authority has been shredded.

Even before the Mandelson row exploded underneath him, Sir Keir was the least popular prime minister on record, dismissed by the public as useless and by his own MPs as a deadbeat.

Rumours of a leadership challenge had been dominating Labour politics for months, with only the timidity of his rivals keeping him safe. May’s local elections – despite Sir Keir’s attempt to game the result by cancelling lots of them – were seen as the moment of maximum danger.

All that has changed, though, with the wholly avoidable scandal brought down on Labour by Sir Keir’s highly controversial, and possibly career-ending, decision to appoint Lord Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington in February last year.

Sir Keir was the man who promised to “turn the page” on the chaos and scandals that dogged the Conservatives, but instead he has put his party at the centre of the biggest political betrayal since Profumo. The anxiety felt by Labour MPs over the opinion polls (dominated for a year now by Reform UK) has turned to anger.

Whenever prime ministers are toppled mid-term, there is a moment when the mood turns irreversibly against them, even if they manage to limp on for a while longer.

In Margaret Thatcher’s case it was Geoffrey Howe’s excoriating resignation speech; with Theresa May it was her Commons defeat on her Brexit deal; and with Boris Johnson it was the vote of confidence in his leadership, when 148 of his MPs voted against him, that signalled the end was near.

The mood that permeated Westminster on those fateful days has gripped the Commons chamber once again as a succession of Labour MPs effectively disowned Sir Keir on Wednesday afternoon.

Labour’s progress ‘overshadowed’ by Mandelson

Folded arms, grim faces and the tone of despair were all in evidence on the Government benches and in the speeches by Labour MPs.

It was summed up by Matt Bishop, the Labour MP for the Forest of Dean, who said any progress made since Labour came to power had been “almost entirely overshadowed” by the Mandelson scandal.

“We stood on a promise to do politics differently this time,” he said. “We said we would turn the page on the scandals, the secrecy and the sense that there was one rule for the powerful and one for everyone else. We said that we would restore trust in public life. And trust, once lost, is extraordinarily hard to rebuild.”

Sir Keir, after all, knew of Mandelson’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein when he gave him the biggest diplomatic posting in his gift. He knew of Mandelson’s track record when it came to scandals involving wealthy men. He knew that Epstein’s victims would be disgusted that Mandelson was being brought back into public life. Yet he gave him the job anyway, before he had even been vetted.

Many Labour MPs blame Mr McSweeney, Sir Keir’s chief of staff, for Mandelson’s appointment. He was reported to have pushed the idea, and it was he who sent a skimpy list of just three questions to Mandelson about his friendship with Epstein before he was offered the ambassador role. Mr McSweeney, already a hate figure for the Labour Left because of his strategy of steering the party to the Right, looks doomed, and if Sir Keir were to sack him it would be like switching off his own political life support machine.

The reason the Mandelson saga is so toxic for Sir Keir is not only the accusations that he ignored Epstein’s victims, nor even the failure to see through Mandelson’s lies, but the fact that his appalling lack of judgment is so entirely in character for a prime minister who always makes the wrong call.

From cutting winter fuel payments to hiking National Insurance and the about-turn on digital ID cards, Sir Keir’s premiership has been an endless tale of broken promises, policy reversals and crazy ideas.

He was at it again when the focus of the Mandelson affair turned to his inadequate vetting of him. Having initially resisted calls to release details of the vetting process, he relented to pressure and said he would do so, but only with parts of it censored for “national security” reasons.

That triggered a full-scale revolt on the back benches, with his former deputy Ms Rayner leading the calls for the publication process to be handed to Parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC).

“Given the public disgust and the sickening behaviour of Peter Mandelson and the importance of transparency, shouldn’t the ISC be put in charge?” Ms Rayner said.

In other words, we don’t trust you, Prime Minister, and nor does the country.

Paula Barker, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, said she was “ashamed” of Sir Keir’s actions and was among those saying she would rebel when the matter was put to a vote.

By 4pm, Sir Keir had accepted the game was up, and agreed to give the ISC the final say on what would be published about Mandelson’s vetting process. A man with a working majority of 168 was running scared of his own MPs. The likes of Johnson, May and Truss will know how he feels.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]