Keir Starmer: he governs in the shadows of a world that has already passed

Keir Starmer, who once aspired to put country before party and to lead a reforming government defined by seriousness and moral probity, continues this weekend in office only on the sufferance of the parliamentary Labour party and its powerbrokers, above all Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister now considered his likely successor.

Weakened by repeated policy U-turns, collapsing poll ratings and a breakdown in relations with even some of his closest former colleagues, Starmer, the most unpopular prime minister on record, has lost his authority within the party. More damaging still, he is losing respect, invariably fatal for a prime minister. “You can see the confidence draining away from him,” one former ally said. “Look at his body language, his facial expressions, his lack of assertiveness – he is mortified.”

He is indeed mortified, his discomfort intensified by the realisation that his premiership has been gravely undermined by his own catastrophic error of judgement: the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to Washington, despite what was known about Mandelson’s continued friendship with the convicted paedophile and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein after his imprisonment. Starmer is raging. He blames the security services for inadequate vetting and Mandelson himself for dishonesty. He blames Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, for pushing him so hard to appoint Mandelson. Like King Lear, he sees himself as more sinned against than sinning.

Yet Starmer has no one to blame but himself. I understand he was warned by David Lammy, the then foreign secretary, not to appoint Mandelson. Lammy favoured Karen Pierce, who was well connected with Trump’s people, extending her term as ambassador. Starmer listened instead to Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, whose “singular purpose” was to have Mandelson in place in Washington when Donald Trump returned to the White House. But the final decision was Starmer’s alone, and he must now endure the consequences as the government braces for further revelations in the wake of the Metropolitan police investigation into Mandelson.

Starmer is desperate to cling on as prime minister: this is the moment, he thinks, to change course, to completely reboot his failing government. He believes he is misunderstood - Gordon Brown said the same to me in the last days of his doomed premiership - but even several senior cabinet ministers believe it is over. Ministers, once staunchly loyal, are openly briefing against him. The question, then, is simple: when, not whether, to replace Starmer?

Lacking deep roots in the party and never aligned with any faction, he is an outsider to the Labour movement. One way to understand Starmer is to see him as a 1980s-style pre-woke progressive. His worldview was formed by a long career dedicated to human rights and faith in the liberal rules-based order. His natural milieu is the old Amnesty International, the anti-apartheid movement, the Inns of Court, the London liberal-left and the Guardian newspaper as it used to be. He represents the politics of a dying era which is why his mechanical, constricted style is so ill-suited to the discontent of these times. He governs in the shadows of a world that has already passed.

He never seemed to understand – or at least had no answer to - the deeper, systemic forces that have rendered Britain almost ungovernable: economic stagnation, state failure, spiralling welfare costs, the effects of mass migration, regional and intergenerational inequalities, the new populism, geopolitical uncertainty and the threat of war. Whoever replaces Starmer will face the same problems and the same lack of answers.

Never much interested in philosophy or ideas, Starmer is a political bureaucrat, a man of process and procedure, of inquiries and committees. An elevated self-image of righteous public service has sustained him through 18 months of chaotic Labour rule. That is why he feels the pain of this moment so acutely. Starmer believes himself to be an honourable public servant, and the revelations about the full extent of Epstein’s depravity horrify him. Friends speak of his “resilience” and of how, in the recent past, many of the government’s troubles have simply “washed over him”.

This time is different. He is at the epicentre of a crisis greater than any that engulfed the government of Boris Johnson, whose moral carelessness Starmer, as leader of the opposition, condemned with prosecutorial zeal. Starmer the lawyer must surely have noted how Kemi Badenoch skewered Starmer the politician so expertly at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Starmer has struggled to cultivate relationships within the PLP – it’s said he only appears in the tearoom at moments of crisis – and has habitually outsourced politics, strategy and policy to others. The result is a government that has no mission command or sense of direction. Ministers are left confused about what the prime minister wants, which in part explains the succession of U-turns and the pervading sense of drift and aimlessness.

Starmer has no intellectual outriders prepared to explain the political purpose of his government. There are perhaps only a few hardcore Starmerites left. For now, he still has Morgan McSweeny, however, his chief of staff, whose strategic acuity and ruthless dedication in opposition enabled Starmer first to win the leadership of a divided party traumatised by the Corbyn years, and then to become prime minister.

They were never friends and from the beginning their relationship was transactional: McSweeney had a plan to take back control of the party and return Labour to power but he needed a candidate who was disciplined and plausible. He eventually settled on Starmer, a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet but not a Corbynite, who was driven more by personal ambition than political conviction.

Yet McSweeney is now even more vulnerable than the prime minister and is personally at a low ebb. Loathed by many MPs - who feel undermined, slighted or ignored by him and want him sacked - McSweeney is portrayed by his detractors as a Machiavel who allowed himself to be “groomed” by Mandelson.

I don’t think that’s correct. McSweeney was always clear-eyed about the challenges facing the country and the risks of associating with Mandelson, an arch manipulator who relishes the game. They have different politics – Mandelson is, in the words of Maurice Glasman, the Blue Labour peer, “an iconic progressive, the chief ideologue of New Labour”, while McSweeney is a conservative social democrat - but they share an obsession with power, how to gain it, hold it and use it. They are both hostile to the left. “Unlike all those MPs attacking him, Morgan had a far better understanding of the political situation than they do,” says one McSweeney ally.

Glasman publicly warned of the risks of appointing Mandelson and privately sent a detailed memo to Downing Street. He was the only parliamentarian invited to Trump’s inauguration in January last year. Back then I interviewed him while he was in Washington. Before Mandelson’s appointment had been approved by the new administration, he told me: “Whenever Mandelson’s name came up people showed me pictures of him out shopping with Epstein. He is a truly hostile figure from the old order.” Mandelson was outraged by Glasman’s comments. He got the job.

McSweeney listened to Mandelson because he was so central to the Blairite ascendency of the 1990s. He knew how to win and how to remake the party from within. The admiration was mutual. McSweeney benefitted from Mandelson’s experience and strategic analysis and Mandelson from McSweeney’s patronage. He was back where he wanted to be – at the heart of Labour’s web of power, spinning connections, ensnaring rivals. The last time I saw Mandelson was in September at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where he delivered a lecture on geopolitics a few days before he was sacked by Starmer. During drinks afterwards he approached me but only wanted to discuss a recent column I’d written on McSweeney.

Even before the latest revelations about the depth and complexity of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein, Starmer was leading what many colleagues privately regarded as a zombie government. Before Christmas, I wrote here that some of his own MPs were describing him as a caretaker prime minister. Badenoch seized on the phrase and used it to torment him at prime minister’s questions. For Labour MPs sitting gloomily on the backbenches, it was no longer a question of whether Starmer should be replaced, but when and how. That conviction has only hardened in recent days.

Starmer pleads for more time and may get it if he does not choose to resign - because there is no obvious alternative and Rayner is reluctant to be seen as the first mover in his downfall. “Angela does not want to be the lightening rod,” I was told. She is also waiting for HMRC to resolve her tax affairs following her resignation over unpaid stamp duty on a property in Hove. But as one friend put it, in politics you do not choose the moment to act, the moment chooses you.

Starmer made his own humble address on Thursday, apologising at a press conference to the many female victims of Epstein. The apology was sincere but was received, by some, with derision. Delivering a hastily rewritten speech in Hastings – having originally wanted to concentrate on the government’s “pride in place” initiative – the former director of public prosecutions also apologised for allowing himself to be deceived by a man known as “the prince of darkness”. The clue, one might say, was in the moniker.

Starmer is now locked in a humiliating struggle for political survival. More sackings seem inevitable: some predict McSweeney and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, could be replaced in yet another reset. But if they go, he goes. And so, he stumbles on.

A King’s Speech is expected immediately after the May elections in Scotland, Wales and parts of England, in which Labour is preparing for heavy losses, followed by yet another reshuffle. Further revelations about Mandelson and Epstein and Mandelson’s relationship with No 10 will emerge. If he stays Starmer will apologise again, others will be blamed. None of this can disguise the central fact: the Starmer government is sinking. The rule of a prime minister who promised to tread more lightly on people’s lives and to remoralise politics is now coterminous with scandal, failure and decay. No wonder he feels mortified.