For “it is the urgent patriotic duty of this government…” to prevent “an extremist, racist, authoritarian takeover that would be against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population.” It is Starmer’s one existential task for “Nothing else matters more.”[1]
It may well be an existential task and much needed defining objective for the Labour government, party, and wider movement but it is becoming a growing possibility that it will not be Starmer who will be seeing this project through. For confidence in the Prime Minister’s judgement and his political antennae has been severely shaken by the unravelling of Mandelson’s ambassadorship. The trigger was the publication on the Monday of a gushing 50th birthday tribute by Mandelson (alongside Donald Trump’s pubic sketch) to his “best pal” Epstein, written before his conviction for soliciting prosecution from minors. At Wednesday’s PMQs, Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, finally discovered her mojo for the first time in her leadership, by using all her allocated six questions to the PM about what he knew at the time of Mandelson’s appointment and would he terminate his post. Starmer gave Mandelson’s the football chairman’s vote of confidence but when later that day emails surfaced (the publication of which Mandelson sheepishly forecast), that he had fondly urged his now disgraced friend to fight for early release and promising that “your friends stay with you and love you”[2], the US ambassador’s position truly became untenable and his dismissal quickly followed.
The previous week had seen the resignation of Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister, Party Leader and Housing, Communities and Local Government, after she had admitted not paying full stamp duty on a property purchased in Hove, East Sussex on the basis of inaccurate legal advice. While the government’s ethics adviser, Laurie Magner, found that she had behaved with integrity throughout, she had breached the Ministerial Code and Ms Rayner accordingly resigned. But the contrast between her departure and the grubbiness of the Mandelson episode could not be starker. Angela Rayner’s departure set in train a major Cabinet reshuffle, widely seen as a tack to the right, and also an election for the Deputy Leadership which could be seen as a surrogate referendum on Starmer’s leadership.
The Mandelson episode is a potential precipitator moment for Labour as doubts and grievances about the direction and even purpose of the government which came to power on a landslide majority on the promise of “Change.” Now even loyal MPs are positing a challenge to his faltering leadership. For one MP “the clock is ticking and ... it happens to people who are incredibly well meaning, but you can pass that tipping point and can’t recover." Lucy Powell, who was sacked from the cabinet in the reshuffle and who is vying with the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson for the Deputy Leadership, has called for a “change in culture” in an overly factional and error-prone Downing Street in which there’s “ a bit of groupthink happening at the top, that culture of not being receptive to differing viewpoints”.[3]
So how has Labour got itself to this point? Do the origins of the current malaise in government lie in the very pathways that saw Labour win a landslide victory of 174 seats in the general election of July 2024 just five years after suffering its worst general election defeat since 1935 in December 2019 when they lost 80 seats? Or do its troubles lie more closely in the exact metrics of its win; last year Labour gained over 200 seats but only increased its share of the vote by less than two percentage points to 34%? (In 1992, a 35% share of the general election vote condemned Labour to a fourth successive defeat at the hands of the Conservatives by a margin of 21 seats). To critics of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system; the 2024 outcome was another triumph of crude majoritarianism; another grotesque distortion of voters’ preferences. Set against it is that the sheer unpopularity of the then Conservative government led voters to informally game the electoral system to ensure the defeat of Conservative candidates in as many constituencies as possible. The election also saw the election of five members of Reform (now down to four due to a resignation, a suspension and the by-election victory of Sarah Poochin); the quadrupling of Green members to four and the election of seven assorted Independents including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and pro-Palestinian representatives opposed to the Labour leadership’s stance on Gaza. More about the peril that alignments arising out of this melange could pose for Labour in the next General Election later.
As described in forensic but captivating detail by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund in their book Get In, Labour’s election romp was due very largely to the efforts of one person – its legendary Cork born organiser and now PM Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney. Having cut his political teeth in helping to vanquish the hard left control of Lambeth Borough Council in 2006, he turned his attention during the Corbyn leadership 2015-19 to what should happen after what he saw as the inevitable defeat of the party and to ensuring that the hard left never gain any traction in any key organs of the Labour Parry again. Many observers of Labour politics see Keir Starmer - the politico who only became an MP in 2015 after a career in human rights law and serving as England’s Director of Public Prosecutions - as essentially Morgan MacSweeney’s creation. After Labour’s by-election loss in Hartlepool on 6 May 2021, the possibility of Starmer staying on as party leader looked as implausible as the prospect of him becoming PM three years later.
After a narrow victory in another crucial by-election in Batley and Spen on 1 July 2021 which saw Kim Leadbeater, sister of the murdered MP for this constituency Jo Cox, ward off a Labour nemesis George Galloway, the tide turned. McSweeney plotted Labour’s path to power by focusing on winning back the “hero voters”; those in the “Red Wall” who had deserted Labour due to its supposedly metropolitan character and concerns and many of whom had voted for Brexit; the micromanagement of the selection process for election candidates and the relentless focus of messaging.
That it delivered a Labour PM in 10 Downing Street with a mandate to “Change” is one side of the story. The other is the absence, in the eyes and ears of many, of a coherent narrative and agenda. Allies say he doesn’t like the “V” word (think of President George HW Bush’s alleged lack of “the vision thing) and has made no secret of being a distinctly non-ideological politician. Instead, he believes the government should demonstrate change by making a significant difference to people’s lives, through schools, the NHS, the immigration system, and the economy, even if that is in relatively slow, incremental steps.[4]
The absence of a firm ideological compass should not necessarily be a burden on a Labour Prime Minister. Tony Blair famously travelled light on ideology but conveyed a sense of the transformative through mantras such as “New Labour. New Britain,” “Modernise, Modernise", “and “Education, Education, Education.” Harold Wilson, a deft manager of Labour’s ideological chasms, heralded the dawn of “The White Heat of Technology” in the early 1960s. It helps that both Wilson and Blair took office at moments of cultural optimism and that such sentiment among the British public is in short supply at the moment. However, in the words of one minister:
It may well be an existential task and much needed defining objective for the Labour government, party, and wider movement but it is becoming a growing possibility that it will not be Starmer who will be seeing this project through. For confidence in the Prime Minister’s judgement and his political antennae has been severely shaken by the unravelling of Mandelson’s ambassadorship. The trigger was the publication on the Monday of a gushing 50th birthday tribute by Mandelson (alongside Donald Trump’s pubic sketch) to his “best pal” Epstein, written before his conviction for soliciting prosecution from minors. At Wednesday’s PMQs, Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, finally discovered her mojo for the first time in her leadership, by using all her allocated six questions to the PM about what he knew at the time of Mandelson’s appointment and would he terminate his post. Starmer gave Mandelson’s the football chairman’s vote of confidence but when later that day emails surfaced (the publication of which Mandelson sheepishly forecast), that he had fondly urged his now disgraced friend to fight for early release and promising that “your friends stay with you and love you”[2], the US ambassador’s position truly became untenable and his dismissal quickly followed.
The previous week had seen the resignation of Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister, Party Leader and Housing, Communities and Local Government, after she had admitted not paying full stamp duty on a property purchased in Hove, East Sussex on the basis of inaccurate legal advice. While the government’s ethics adviser, Laurie Magner, found that she had behaved with integrity throughout, she had breached the Ministerial Code and Ms Rayner accordingly resigned. But the contrast between her departure and the grubbiness of the Mandelson episode could not be starker. Angela Rayner’s departure set in train a major Cabinet reshuffle, widely seen as a tack to the right, and also an election for the Deputy Leadership which could be seen as a surrogate referendum on Starmer’s leadership.
The Mandelson episode is a potential precipitator moment for Labour as doubts and grievances about the direction and even purpose of the government which came to power on a landslide majority on the promise of “Change.” Now even loyal MPs are positing a challenge to his faltering leadership. For one MP “the clock is ticking and ... it happens to people who are incredibly well meaning, but you can pass that tipping point and can’t recover." Lucy Powell, who was sacked from the cabinet in the reshuffle and who is vying with the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson for the Deputy Leadership, has called for a “change in culture” in an overly factional and error-prone Downing Street in which there’s “ a bit of groupthink happening at the top, that culture of not being receptive to differing viewpoints”.[3]
So how has Labour got itself to this point? Do the origins of the current malaise in government lie in the very pathways that saw Labour win a landslide victory of 174 seats in the general election of July 2024 just five years after suffering its worst general election defeat since 1935 in December 2019 when they lost 80 seats? Or do its troubles lie more closely in the exact metrics of its win; last year Labour gained over 200 seats but only increased its share of the vote by less than two percentage points to 34%? (In 1992, a 35% share of the general election vote condemned Labour to a fourth successive defeat at the hands of the Conservatives by a margin of 21 seats). To critics of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system; the 2024 outcome was another triumph of crude majoritarianism; another grotesque distortion of voters’ preferences. Set against it is that the sheer unpopularity of the then Conservative government led voters to informally game the electoral system to ensure the defeat of Conservative candidates in as many constituencies as possible. The election also saw the election of five members of Reform (now down to four due to a resignation, a suspension and the by-election victory of Sarah Poochin); the quadrupling of Green members to four and the election of seven assorted Independents including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and pro-Palestinian representatives opposed to the Labour leadership’s stance on Gaza. More about the peril that alignments arising out of this melange could pose for Labour in the next General Election later.
As described in forensic but captivating detail by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund in their book Get In, Labour’s election romp was due very largely to the efforts of one person – its legendary Cork born organiser and now PM Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney. Having cut his political teeth in helping to vanquish the hard left control of Lambeth Borough Council in 2006, he turned his attention during the Corbyn leadership 2015-19 to what should happen after what he saw as the inevitable defeat of the party and to ensuring that the hard left never gain any traction in any key organs of the Labour Parry again. Many observers of Labour politics see Keir Starmer - the politico who only became an MP in 2015 after a career in human rights law and serving as England’s Director of Public Prosecutions - as essentially Morgan MacSweeney’s creation. After Labour’s by-election loss in Hartlepool on 6 May 2021, the possibility of Starmer staying on as party leader looked as implausible as the prospect of him becoming PM three years later.
After a narrow victory in another crucial by-election in Batley and Spen on 1 July 2021 which saw Kim Leadbeater, sister of the murdered MP for this constituency Jo Cox, ward off a Labour nemesis George Galloway, the tide turned. McSweeney plotted Labour’s path to power by focusing on winning back the “hero voters”; those in the “Red Wall” who had deserted Labour due to its supposedly metropolitan character and concerns and many of whom had voted for Brexit; the micromanagement of the selection process for election candidates and the relentless focus of messaging.
That it delivered a Labour PM in 10 Downing Street with a mandate to “Change” is one side of the story. The other is the absence, in the eyes and ears of many, of a coherent narrative and agenda. Allies say he doesn’t like the “V” word (think of President George HW Bush’s alleged lack of “the vision thing) and has made no secret of being a distinctly non-ideological politician. Instead, he believes the government should demonstrate change by making a significant difference to people’s lives, through schools, the NHS, the immigration system, and the economy, even if that is in relatively slow, incremental steps.[4]
The absence of a firm ideological compass should not necessarily be a burden on a Labour Prime Minister. Tony Blair famously travelled light on ideology but conveyed a sense of the transformative through mantras such as “New Labour. New Britain,” “Modernise, Modernise", “and “Education, Education, Education.” Harold Wilson, a deft manager of Labour’s ideological chasms, heralded the dawn of “The White Heat of Technology” in the early 1960s. It helps that both Wilson and Blair took office at moments of cultural optimism and that such sentiment among the British public is in short supply at the moment. However, in the words of one minister:
It’s hopeless …Too many people feel the country is in decline and the only route back is big radical solutions. We’re doing lots of good stuff, but it barely gets noticed. It just doesn’t hit the mark.[5]
While Morgan McSweeney may be a lightning rod for the anger and disappointment of MPs, it is tempting to suggest that under Sue Gray, the PM’s ousted former Chief of Staff, Peter Mandelson, would not have been made US ambassador. As someone who took such a forensic approach towards the wrongdoings of Boris Johnson in Downing Street over Partygate, she would have taken seriously the assessment of the security services as well as what was already in the public domain about Mandelson’s links to Epstein. Keir Starmer and his advisers took a calculated risk in replacing the highly regarded incumbent ambassador Karen Pierce with “Mandy” in the belief that his ability to schmooze the rich and powerful would secure a trade deal with Donald Trump (yet another lamentable consequence of the UK’s exit from the European Single Market and Customs Union). The deal was ultimately secured (could Ms Pearce not been able to negotiate and achieve the same?) but at what political and moral cost for Starmer’s government?
But this has not been the only significant misjudgement of the Starmer administration. It is always dangerous for governments to promise to operate to the highest possible moral standards given that its ministers, like the rest of the population, are mere normal mortals with universal fallibility. Just as Tony Blair pledged “the highest standards of honesty and propriety in public life” but was then discovered to have allowed Labour to accept a donation of £1m from Bernie Ecclestone, the boss of Formula One, just before the 1997 election and so able to take a government decision favouring the support. So when as leader of the opposition in 2022 Keir Starmer spelt out his “contract with the British people” including those same high standards that Blair, it was rather unfortunate that he and his wife were found to have accepted gifts of clothing and fashionable new spectacles from the Labour peer Lord Ali after he had become Prime Minister.[6]
But more serious was the resignation of the housing minister, Rushanara Ali, who while steering the long-awaited Renters’ Rights bill into law was found to have acted against the interests of the people to whom she was trusted to represent by not renewing the lease of her tenant, claiming she intended to sell the house she had rented to them and then, months later, putting it back on the lettings market at a rent 20% higher. While Rushanara Ali had the awareness to resign once the matter became public, a longer running saga about glaring conflicts of interest in a key ministry concerned the City minister Tulip Siddiq whose anti-corruption brief proved to rightly incompatible with the acceptance of land from her aunt, the ousted prime minister of Bangladesh facing multiple corruption charges in her country. Since Siddiq’s familial connections to the former Bangladeshi has been a matter of public debate for some years, it seems inconceivable that warning lights did not flash on the dashboard when Starmer appointed his neighbouring North London MP to this role. Add the kerfuffle around Rachel Reeves embellishing her banking experience and not crediting the people whose work she had raided in order to write her book on economists in order to prove her credentials to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a pattern appears to emerge; one sadly emblematic of governments of all stripes.[7]
A scenario that is increasingly being sketched out by commentators and the growing number of Labour MPs despairing of Starmer’s aptitude for the job of prime minister is a leadership challenge after what are feared to be disastrous results for Labour in next year’s elections to English local authority and mayoralties, the Cymru Senedd and Scottish Parliament. Many see as the main challenger former Blair minister and current Greater Manchester Mayor - Andy Burnham. Andy’s main obstacle at the moment is his lack of a parliamentary seat; it is conjectured that a Greater Manchester Labour MP from a safe seat will resign to enable his return to Parliament in the subsequent by-election. Always assuming that the seat does not fall to Reform.
In the immediate to short term, the Deputy Leadership election campaign will act as a mini referendum on Starmer’s leadership. A tight timetabling schedule has left Labour members with the choice between the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson and the former Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell. Both represent Northern English seats with Bridget having a similar backstory to Angela Rayner as the daughter of a single mother who grew up in straightened circumstances and who has worked with survivors of domestic violence. So far, she has preached a message of unity in the face of a possible Reform insurgency. Lucy is widely regarded as on the “soft left” of Labour, close to Andy Burnham and will see herself as the conduit from the PLP and the wider party to the Party Leader.
To return to the case introduced in the opening paragraph, the animating mission for Labour going forward, under whatever leader, has to be to confront Reform UK and the wider far right nativist nationalist movement and the racist discourse that structures this cultural milieu. Anti racism is a sine qua non of Labour along with equality. Labour may divide and has divided over welfare reform, defence, nationalisation, pension reform, foreign policy especially the Middle East with Gaza at the top of so many progressives’ concerns. In dealing with the top mobilising issue for the contemporary Alt-Right, immigration, Labour has contorted itself in trying to deal with “the legitimate concerns” of people over irregular immigration and the invasion of the “small boats” by “smashing the gangs” and gung-ho public deportations while trying to remain true to its professed opposition to racism.
For the strategy of continuing to bend to the whims of socially conservative, migration averse, mythical “Hero Voters” of the Red Wall is in the long term a vote loser for Labour. For in the aftermath of Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech which caused so much angst among progressive constituencies and which the PM has had to regret, Mathew Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, in a review of a survey of 30,000 people taken after that speech, found that Starmer had “increased the salience of immigration and decreased the Labour vote without getting any voters back from Reform”.[8]
John Curtice, leading psephologist at the National Institute for Social Research, has found that half of Boris Johnston’s 2019 voters now back Reform, while Labour has lost just one in eight of its 2024 voters to Reform. These anti-migrant, pro-Brexit, socially conservative climate sceptics are almost completely unaligned with average British opinion. About 49% of them say equal opportunities for Black and Asian people have gone too far: only 18% of the population agree.[9] Other sources suggest that for every vote Labour would gain from Reform; three would be lost to the Liberal Democrats and Greens.
So, the message is clear. Aping Reform over migration will not work. It will merely feed the crocodile and, as the Tories are discovering (another defection to Reform today, of Daniel Kruger MP), will lead to the cannibalisation of parties that do it. Silence in the face of racist remarks such as those from former Tory and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell who tweeted “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free!” is complicity. Hammer Farage for the Brexit calamity and dispense with the fear of alienating Reform voters – they are not coming back. Labour needs to stop being seen as part of the “elite” and leave misguided Tories to scrabble for the electoral scraps of the Reform table. Fight the next GE on natural Labour terrain and Labour achievements: falling NHS waiting lists, free breakfast clubs of schoolchildren, free nursery places, the Employment Rights Bill/Act, new towns; mega-developments on green energy – all as part of a compelling and transformative story.[10]
A welcome development in the taking of the fight to Reform and the far-right ecosphere was Starmer’s statement in the wake of the disturbances at Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally this weekend in London in which there would be ‘no surrender of the St George’s flag and British values.' 10 Downing Street strategists have promised that he will use his speech at the Labour Party conference this month to go on the offensive against the far right in the language of Labour values. Labour could do a lot worse than dusting down a 2005 speech by Tony Blair which was unequivocal on the need to tighten immigration and asylum but also on the need to condemn and reject racism, calling out division of Tory and Reform messaging and praising the contribution of migrant communities.[11]
Take the Fight to the Fagash Fuhrer!
[1] Polly Toynbee, Starmer’s one existential task: defeat Farage at all costs. The Guardian Journal 9th September 2025 pp.1-2.
[2] Gaby Hinsliff, Mandelson had three chances. How many left for Starmer? The Guardian Opinion 13th September 2025 p.3.
[3] Peter Walker, Eleni Courea & Pippa Crerar,Time is running out, MPs warn, MPs warn Starmer. The Guardian 13th September 2025 p.1, p.8.
[4] Pippa Crear, Can Starmer survive? Whispers and plotting as PM feels the heat. The Guardian Saturday Read 13th September 2025 pp.10-11.
[5] Ibid
[6] Patience Wheatcroft, Labour have lost the moral high ground. The New World 14th August 2025 p.14
[7] Ibid
[8] Polly Toynbee op cit.
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Jessica Elgot Labour MPs will hope PM’s ‘no surrender’ speech marks start of progressives’ fightback The Guardian 15th September 2025 p.13
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
I was caught by surprise at the scale of the Unite the Kingdom rally, I did laugh at the BBC saying it was only a few thousand when it was clearly much larger. Somethings never change. I attended the UVF rally in Belfast in the 90's and it was backed up from City Hall to halfway up the Newtownards road, and when we watched the news later it was a brief 20 second clip with remarks that a 'few thousand' people turned up! LOL!
ReplyDeleteI would like to see both Starmer and Despicable Dave in the Hague for complicity in genocide. Both are Tories at heart who gleefully attacked the most vulnerable in British society. As usual with your pieces Barry, a lot of good stuff in there.
ReplyDelete