Westminster politics is currently consumed by the fact that the May elections are next week.

On Tuesday night Labour MPs voted down a Tory proposal that would have seen the prime minister referred to the privileges committee over his handling of the Mandelson scandal. Just 15 Labour MPs – mostly long-term critics of the PM – voted for the Tory motion; 53 did not vote, not all of whom abstained.

Rather than reading this result as a resounding vote of confidence in Keir Starmer, it is instead the case that MPs who may well be sincerely outraged about the most recent iterations of the scandal do not want to go into the week of elections with headlines dominated by internal strife.

There is a reasonable chance that Starmer will........

© The Guardian