Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Sir Keir Starmer tried to pacify mutinous MPs on Thursday by hosting them at his Chequers country retreat in the latest of a series of gatherings for Labour backbenchers. “At the last two events the soundtrack was very calming, Ibiza chill and modern soul,” said one party official. It may take more than soothing music and bowls of chilli to calm his frazzled party.
While some of the raw anger over the prime minister’s handling of the Lord Peter Mandelson scandal has subsided, there were signs that it had curdled into a simmering resentment and a feeling among some MPs that Starmer’s days in Number 10 are drawing to a close.
For now he is holding on, propped up by the fact that none of his leadership rivals have yet worked out how or when to challenge him. “Stasis could last for some time,” said one Labour MP.
On Thursday Starmer tried to project an image of “business as usual”, making a speech about local regeneration in Sussex before heading to Chequers to schmooze dozens of MPs from a parliamentary party which he has dangerously neglected since becoming prime minister in July 2024.
But these remain dangerous times for Starmer, whose tenuous grip on his party was broken on Wednesday when he attempted to explain his disastrous decision last year to appoint Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US.
In the short term Labour MPs are gunning for Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who was instrumental in securing Mandelson the Washington job and who is blamed by some backbenchers for last year’s brutal and divisive ministerial reshuffle.
Jonathan Reynolds, government chief whip, received numerous demands from MPs calling for McSweeney’s removal. “Morgan has to go,” said one Labour frontbencher. “Mandelson was his mentor and he has undermined Keir. People have had enough.”
It was McSweeney who pushed for Mandelson to get the ambassador job and he was also responsible for questioning the Labour peer about details of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
Labour officials confirmed that McSweeney asked Mandelson if he had stayed at Epstein’s $77mn townhouse in New York’s Upper East Side in 2009, at a time when the financier was in prison for soliciting sex from a minor.
Starmer said on Thursday that Mandelson “lied” in his response, but Labour MPs are furious that more questions were not asked at the time. Downing Street said McSweeney retained Starmer’s “full confidence”.
It was McSweeney, not Starmer, who conveyed the news to Mandelson in late 2024 that he would get the Washington job. Mandelson was in hospital at the time, recovering from an operation on an aneurysm. “I think so highly of him,” Mandelson told the Financial Times last year.
The prime minister has so far shown great loyalty to McSweeney, who drove the Corbynite left out of the Labour party and ran the successful 2024 general election campaign. But the words “sacrificial” and “lamb” are now often used by Labour MPs to describe his future prospects.
But many MPs believe that will not be enough, and Starmer is now on borrowed time. The question is how much time — Theresa May was deemed to be “finished” after the disastrous 2017 Conservative election campaign, yet she staggered on for two more years.
One normally loyal minister predicted the reaction on the doorstep as MPs returned to their constituencies this weekend would be crucial in their decisions on whether to act. “We will see how much this has cut through and one way or another we will be in a completely different place by Monday,” they said.
Some Labour MPs who want to get rid of Starmer talk excitedly of the February 26 Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election as a potential trigger for a coup, if Labour loses what was once regarded as a safe seat to Reform UK or the Greens.
Most point to the May 7 elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and to English councils as a more likely moment when the party’s bottled-up anger with Starmer is finally uncorked. But neither scenario is a certainty.
Starmer successfully stopped Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s Labour mayor, from trying to return to Westminster in the Gorton and Denton contest, meaning that the prime minister’s most potent rival remains a safe 200 miles away.
Other leadership contenders have their own problems. Wes Streeting, health secretary, was an acolyte of Mandelson and is keeping his head down, telling colleagues not to “underestimate the level of anger” felt in the party towards his former patron.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s former deputy leader, is still sorting out her tax affairs with HM Revenue & Customs and allies insist she is “not an agitator who is going to push for regime change”.
One option being discussed by some MPs is a delegation of Labour select committee chairs being sent to tell Starmer his time is up. “He’s a decent man and he might be persuaded to see that it’s not working,” said one MP.
The problem, as one Labour official observed, is that nobody can be sure who would win the contest. “The left hate Wes and the right can’t stand Angela or Ed [Miliband, energy secretary].”
One Labour MP said Starmer’s leadership was “over and done”, adding: “The only questions left are when, how and how painful.”