Chris Mason: Crunch time for the prime minister
6 minutes agoChris MasonPolitical editor
PA MediaFrom the moment it was announced that the prime minister’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney was leaving, I have been talking to plenty of Labour folk, from the cabinet down, to get a sense of their mood and, crucially, what might happen next.
We are in one of those moments of intense fluidity and volatility where anything seems possible, or at least nothing would be entirely surprising.
Who is to blame for the mess the government finds itself in varies depending on who you ask. Just how angry people are varies too.
But one thing that doesn’t is the pretty much universal acceptance that Sir Keir Starmer’s predicament is dire and he confronts immense peril.
Those who have spoken to him over the weekend describe a man acutely aware of the situation he is in. He remains boiling with anger at what he calls “the lies” from Lord Mandelson that he fell for. And he is angry with himself for the gravity of the misjudgement he made in appointing the peer as ambassador to the United States.
“He hates the idea that he’s let people down and that cuts very deep. He knows he’s made a very big mistake,” one senior figure tells me.
He now approaches the week ahead in an unprecedented position.
For as long as he has sought political leadership or held it, he has had Morgan McSweeney at his side. McSweeney was there when Starmer ran for the Labour leadership six years ago. He was there throughout his years as leader of the opposition – from the low moments, such as the loss of a by-election in Hartlepool which nearly prompted Starmer to walk away, to the ecstasy of a landslide general election victory in the summer of 2024. And then, from there, into Downing Street and into government.
The two men are very different: McSweeney, a political operative to his fingertips, steeped in Labour politics for decades; Starmer, the man who arrived in Westminster in his fifties and travels light ideologically.
What is Starmer the leader like without McSweeney alongside him? We are about to find out.
We are also about to find out what happens when the lightning conductor is removed from a building and it remains stormy. McSweeney, fairly or otherwise, copped plenty of blame for the various foul-ups Labour MPs have blamed Downing Street for in recent months. The danger for the prime minister is the next lightning strike will take him out instead.
Some Labour MPs are bereft that McSweeney has gone. “Brilliant, dynamic, nimble, motivating, he got us here,” says one of Labour’s vast intake of MPs first elected in 2024.
“This was looking inevitable but you are losing a lot of politics from the building and that is not necessarily a good thing,” one long-standing MP reflects.
Others argue that for all his successes in making Labour electable again, McSweeney was also in the room when the mistakes were happening, repeatedly, in government. Expect variations of this disagreement to play out in the coming days.
But the key questions now are all about the prime minister, rather than his now former chief of staff.
The language from the prime minister’s allies and his critics within the party (and some are both) is remarkably similar. So too is the tone, demeanour and mood of so many I speak to – an unmaskable sense of gloom.
“This is one of his last rolls of the dice,” one supportive senior figure tells me.
“He’ll have to get out there and pretty quickly and like never before set out what he’s all about and what he wants to do,” another adds.
We are expecting the prime minister to address the weekly private meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on Monday evening. As things stand he is not expected to be appear in front of the cameras, but that may change.
Remember, it is the PLP who are his most important electorate right now: a prime minister who cannot command the authority of their parliamentary party, as Starmer was unable to do last week, doesn’t last long in office. Just ask Liz Truss – it was this that did for her in the end.
Another MP talks of the “last chance saloon”. Very few say any of this with any relish; plenty have long desperately wanted Starmer to succeed.
“Getting rid of McSweeney has bought him time. But maybe only a week. Then loads of MPs will be jittery again,” says a critic. And plenty are jittery now.
One MP reflects on the arbitrary nature of luck and timing in politics.
Imagine, they pondered, that this recent deluge of news about Lord Mandelson and the catastrophic situation it has left the prime minister in had happened a fortnight ago and news of the by-election in Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester was only emerging now.
Would the prime minister, in that situation, have had the authority, the political capital, to block Andy Burnham from standing in the by-election? Probably not, they imagined.
And would Burnham’s route to a leadership challenge have appeared clearer, given the jeopardy Starmer now faces? Yes it would. Instead, the mayor of Greater Manchester’s path to Westminster is blocked as are, for now at least, his ambitions for higher office.
So Burnham is out of the race, the former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is still having her tax affairs poured over by HM Revenue and Customs and Health Secretary Wes Streeting is widely seen as a protégé of Lord Mandelson, even if Streeting has been criticising the peer in the strongest possible terms in recent days.
All this means “there is absolutely no consensus on what comes next” as one keen internal observer of the mood of Labour MPs tells me.
And the prime minister can point out that it is he who secured a mandate from the electorate at the general election, which no successor would have, it is he who has built international alliances and relationships with other world leaders, not least US President Donald Trump, and a big part of the appeal of Labour at the election was escaping the merry go round of prime ministers in the latter years of the Conservatives’ time in office.
This is how we end up in a “Mexican standoff situation”, as one figure put it to me.
“Stalemate might be the worst possible scenario” says another, while acknowledging that is precisely what could happen.
And all this with that by-election in Gorton and Denton just over a fortnight away and a huge set of devolved elections in Scotland and Wales, and local elections in many parts of England coming in just a few months.
Are either, or both of those moments survivable for Starmer if the results are bad for Labour?
“Starmer and Mandelson will be appearing on election leaflets, that’s for sure. Just not ours,” was how one Labour MP put it to me.
So now we await to see how the coming days, weeks and months unfold.
Sir Keir Starmer is the sixth prime minister in the last decade.
Were he to go in the coming months, the UK would have its fifth PM in four years.
And that is now a live possibility.
But hang on, for just a moment. Several people have emphasised the prime minister’s resolve, for now at least, and his “self-belief,” as one put it to me.
He is desperate not to be the instigator, or author, of another blast of extraordinary turbulence in British politics.
If he continues to want to stick around and the party can’t make its mind up about what to do next, there could yet be quite a long tail to this story.
Let’s see.
Even the key players at the heart of all this acknowledge they don’t know how this is going to play out.