After Angela Rayner’s resignation last week, the sweeping cabinet reshuffle that followed, and the blundering defenestration of Lord Mandelson mere days later — a restlessness has descended on the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party). The avoidable errors, the steady stream of strategic miscalculations, are eroding the togetherness and morale of Labour MPs.
The Lord Mandelson scandal represents the latest eruption of ill-feeling within Labour. The political repercussions are profound, and multiplying.
Starmer signalled his staunch support for Mandelson at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, only to summarily sack him less than 24 hours later. The PM’s position, articulated in response to Kemi Badenoch, was uncompromising and uncomplicated: he retained confidence in the US ambassador, insisted due process was followed in his appointment, and maintained Mandelson was playing an “important” role in the US-UK relationship.
Starmer repeated the phrase “full due process” a full three times across the session. Badenoch had the PM on the run. “I see that she is finally catching up with the questions that she should have asked last week about the deputy prime minister”, Starmer quipped at one point, trying to shift the spotlight from this week’s fiasco to last week’s. The comeback was met with well-deserved derision.
At this stage of course, Mandelson had already made his final public appearance as US ambassador.
In a pre-planned interview with The Sun, broadcast 8:10 am UK time on Wednesday, Mandelson described Jeffrey Epstein as an “albatross around his neck”. The confessional came shortly after a US congressional committee released Epstein’s “birthday book”. It featured Mandelson sitting with the financier wearing a bathrobe, a note describing him as his “best pal”, and a reference to meeting Epstein’s “‘interesting’ friends”.
Forebodingly, Mandelson volunteered a pre-emptive mea culpa. The ambassador warned that further “traffic, correspondence, exchanges” between himself and Epstein would be released. Mandelson had already seen the “very embarrassing” communications that would cost him his job.
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The Mandelson debacle and other unforced errors
At 3:36 pm on Monday, Bloomberg News sent a 2,000-word email to Mandelson detailing further disclosures, appearing to reveal he maintained a close and supportive friendship with Epstein after the paedophile’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a child for prostitution. In these missives, Mandelson variously reassured Epstein that “your friends love you”, suggested his first conviction was wrongful, and urged him to seek early release from prison.
As for what comes next, a great deal hinges on what Starmer and Downing Street knew, if anything, about this correspondence before it was made public on Wednesday evening — and before he delivered an unequivocal defence of Mandelson at PMQs. The No 10 line is that Starmer’s confidence in Mandelson — expressed so absolutely at the despatch box on Wednesday afternoon — evaporated upon contact with Bloomberg’s tranche of emails.
This saga is bigger, of course, than the events of recent days. It was more than two years ago that the Financial Times first reported that Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse while the latter was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Asked about the report in February of this year, Mandelson told the FT: “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession, and frankly you can all f*** off. OK?”
Starmer, speaking in January 2024, was hardly more forthcoming. Questioned on the report, he responded: “I don’t know any more than you, and there’s not really much I can add to what is already out there, I’m afraid”.
The prime minister then went on to appoint Mandelson as US ambassador, despite the manifest reputational risks — despite the political baggage of two ignominious exits from government during Tony Blair’s tenure in Downing Street. The fact is that Mandelson’s appointment was an immense gamble; the decision has backfired, with spectacular and damaging consequences. Whatever gains the ex-ambassador exacted in charming the Oval Office incumbent and his MAGA coterie are dwarfed by the political tumult his deposition has wreaked.
But place the details of “what Starmer knew and when”, which opposition parties are clamouring to get to the bottom of, to one side. The PM’s deference to “due process” and reliance on dry procedural answers at PMQs were untenable from the outset. Starmer, once again, did not spot the obvious danger. Not for the first time, the politics of the moment looked to have passed him by.
That is what is so profoundly destructive about the management of the Mandelson debacle: for Labour MPs, it is all too familiar.
The Mandelson scandal (the first saga since July 2024 truly worthy of that term), the winter fuel fiasco, the hashed welfare reforms, and the unseemly U-turn on a national grooming gangs inquiry have little in common substantively. But a pattern emerges from No 10’s management: the adoption of an unsustainable position, the strained defence of it, the unequivocal denunciations of alternative approaches, the stubbornness — then the slow acquiescence to political pressure in the moments leading up to a brittle about-face.
The PLP’s reaction to the Mandelson scandal is therefore entirely predictable.
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Labour fractures deepen, and widen
The names of Starmer’s most strident critics will not shock No 10, but it is worth ruminating on the tenor of their criticism. John McDonnell, the independent MP and former shadow chancellor, had this to say of Morgan McSweeney’s widely reported role in appointing Mandelson: “A choice is emerging for Keir. Either McSweeney goes or he does.”
Clive Lewis, the onetime leadership contender who remains a Labour MP, was less equivocal. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster programme, he said of Starmer: “You see a Labour prime minister who feels that he’s lost control within the first year…
“It terrifies my constituents, and it terrifies a lot of people in this country. We don’t have the luxury of carrying on this way with someone who I think, increasingly, I’m sorry to say, just doesn’t seem up to the job.”
Paula Barker, who was until Thursday a candidate for Labour’s deputy leadership, described Mandelson’s appointment as an “absolute betrayal”.
She told BBC Radio 5 Live: “It smacks of putting party before the country, which is something that we said we wouldn’t do… My colleagues, who represent their constituents every single day, diligently, and stood up against welfare cuts, some of those were suspended for doing the right thing, for standing up for their constituents, and yet we have a man like Mandelson who is just basically allowed to get away with this.
“I just think it’s absolutely disgusting, quite frankly.”
Barry Gardiner, another erstwhile frontbench colleague of Starmer’s — but by no means an ally — told BBC Newsnight that Labour MPs are “frustrated” and “angry”.
“I think it’s the culmination of a number of factors. It’s not just this but there’s been a series of what people regard as political slip-ups”, he said. “I found it very difficult to have a meeting with the prime minister when I asked for one a few months ago. It took six weeks to do that.
“Now, I remember the days when I asked to see Tony [Blair] and it was, oh, fine, yeah, sure, Barry, why don’t you come in after PMQs on Wednesday? And if it wasn’t that, it would be, oh, it’s busy at the moment, can it hold off a week, you know.”
But one cannot characterise recent criticism as confined to No 10’s “the usual suspects”. Protests are beginning to permeate hitherto unexplored corners of the PLP.
Justin Madders, who served as employment rights minister until last week, referred to Mandelson’s removal as the “Best sacking of the week by some distance”.
Charlotte Nichols, Labour MP for Warrington, maintained Mandelson “should never have been appointed in the first place”.
Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull East, told Sky News: “I am worried that we are in danger of losing the entire Labour movement unless we change stance, fast.”
Sadik Al-Hassan, first elected in 2024, stated: “There are some serious questions about the vetting process of the ambassador and whoever conducted those should be sacked immediately.”
Chris Curtis, generally regarded as a Starmer loyalist, noted that there are “definitely frustrations” among backbench MPs — “and that includes myself”.
He told Newsnight: “We also know that the threat if we don’t get this right is massive, because unless we can turn these things around, what we’re looking at is a Nigel Farage-run government… It’s a duty on this government to ensure we stop that from happening.”
Curtis is a member of the Labour Growth Group (LGG) and the Living Standards Coalition of Labour MPs — prominent, nominally pro-government caucuses. Curtis represents a genre of Labour MP that No 10 cannot afford to lose.
Meanwhile, Labour grandees Lord Glasman, Blue Labour doyen, and Baroness Harman, the former deputy leader, have both been outspoken this week in criticising Mandelson’s initial appointment.
Frustration is being forced into the open by a collective recognition of two interconnected observations: the series of avoidable crises overseen by No 10, and the electoral threat posed by the rise of Reform UK.
The result is this: the fractures opened by past policy debacles have both deepened, with regular critics radicalising in their opposition, and widened, as loyal figures now openly acknowledge their frustration.
The launch of a new internal campaign group, Mainstream, now threatens to become a lasting thorn in Starmer’s side. Backed by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and a cohort of Labour MPs, the group wasted no time this week in issuing a blistering response to Mandelson’s dismissal.
“Peter Mandelson’s inevitable sacking is what happens when you put your party faction’s interest before your party and before the country”, Luke Hurst, Mainstream’s national coordinator, stated.
“If Starmer keeps running a narrow and brittle political project, it will break him and could break the Labour Party. We need a government and party of all the talents and all the views.”
In a social media post, the organisation added: “Keir Starmer has constantly put factionalism ahead of the Labour Party and ahead of the country.”
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A contest becomes a reckoning
These internal ructions played out in a week that saw the Labour deputy leadership contest enter its next stage. Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and Lucy Powell, the recently removed leader of the commons, both vaulted the race’s first and highest hurdle: 80 MP nominations.
Having topped the ballot, Phillipson enters the next round advantaged by her strong standing among parliamentarians, but politically encumbered by her role as a serving minister. In any case, Phillipson’s 175-MP total — a figure just north of the frontbench “payroll vote” of around 170 MPs — hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement of either her or the government she represents.
The peril the deputy leadership contest poses to Downing Street remains: the campaign threatens to turn into a running verdict on the government’s performance, culminating in a de facto approve-disapprove referendum on Keir Starmer. But Mandelson’s sacking has intensified this danger. This latest avoidable crisis has made a seismic rebuke evermore likely.
The tenor of the coming contest will be shaped, principally, by how Powell chooses to conduct her campaign. Already she has called for a “change of culture” inside No 10 — echoing a common criticism levelled at Starmer’s political operation. Powell contends that No 10’s self-imposed isolation, its disconnection, only reinforces its dysfunction. After the welfare and winter fuel fiascos triggered a torrent of briefings to this effect, No 10’s conduct in recent weeks will not have convinced Labour MPs that the necessary lessons have been learnt.
Powell’s sacking and the wider reshuffle lend credence to her platform. She reportedly asked Starmer to explain his decision three times — without reply. Meanwhile, junior ministers were not informed of their fates by the prime minister; that task fell instead to Darren Jones and Jonathan Reynolds, the new chief secretary to the PM and chief whip respectively.
At this point, Downing Street knew a deputy leadership contest was imminent. This treatment of colleagues, therefore, looks like yet another serious misstep; a conspicuous overlap has since emerged between those who were sacked in the reshuffle and supporters of Powell’s candidacy.
Speaking to the Guardian in the wake of Mandelson’s departure, Powell described a sequence of “unforced errors” by the government and pitched herself as part of the solution: as deputy leader, she would serve as a “shop steward”, making the government appear less factional and closed-off.
She declared: “We’ve got a bit of a groupthink happening at the top, that culture of not being receptive to interrogation, not being receptive to differing views. But it’s a show of strength, a show of being effective, when you are receptive to interrogation and accountability and differing views, and then you come to better decisions.”
That is Powell’s opening pitch to Labour activists; she has embraced her role as the “send a message to Starmer” candidate. Unburdened by collective responsibility, Powell now has carte blanche to contort her campaign into a ready-made receptacle for activist dissatisfaction.
An intriguing known unknown concerns the prominence of Burnham, Starmer-critical mayor and close friend to Powell. There is also an outstanding question as to Mainstream’s role during the campaign. Tellingly, none of its MP supporters have declared their support for Phillipson — do not expect that to change as the campaign unfolds.
At this juncture, the deputy leadership election could still resolve into a contest between Burnham-backed candidate (Powell) and government spokesperson candidate (Phillipson). In fact, one immediate effect of the Mandelson scandal is that the prospect of such a battle is higher. Prepare then for the possibility of a feverish proxy war, not just for the future of the party, but specifically between supporters of Burnham and Starmer: a kind of advisory, non-binding confidence vote.
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‘Change’
The central weakness of the Starmer project has always been its narrowness politically. Its grounding in the Labour Party is shallow. The brittleness of the government is explicable in these terms; the PM’s assured-sounding proclamations are belied by a lack of outspoken pro-Starmer outriders.
The reshuffle marked a variation on a fundamentally familiar theme: a strident, single-minded set of moves designed to elevate McSweeney-ally Shabana Mahmood into the Home Office. But its ruthlessness has corroded relations down the Labour Party food chain. It is little wonder, given the account of the reshuffle relayed above, that its victims and collateral damage feel aggrieved.
The result is a familiar, even tragic irony. The very strengths of Starmer’s operation in opposition — its unyielding control, suppression of dissent, and strategic single-mindedness — have emerged as glaring weaknesses in government. There is precedent for prime ministers being undone by the traits that propelled them into power. Margaret Thatcher’s all-consuming conviction became her fatal inflexibility; Tony Blair’s flair for performance curdled into accusations of untrustworthy spin; David Cameron’s self-assured risk-taking culminated in a calamitous gamble; and Boris Johnson’s populist boosterism proved incompatible with the basic rules of office.
A new playbook is required. Starmer is not a career politician — a fact he is apparently proud of. But that does not absolve him of the responsibilities and intricacies of politics. A finer engagement is needed with the problems that beset his premiership. Political antennae are not about to sprout from the prime minister’s temples. But the time for deeper strategic thinking is overdue; reasonable-sounding tactics, like appointing a talented but flawed spinner to charm the US commander-in-chief, will not sustain this government.
Starmer, who condensed his 2024 general election campaign into the single, compelling promise of “change”, must prove he can too.
Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.
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