Keir Starmer will go – the question is when?

Not here, not now, not this month – but sometime soon the tumbrel will come for Keir Starmer. What saves him is the dismal fact that Labour has no obvious contender that MPs would rally round. Waiting for Andy Burnham is a reason for delay – but that might prompt Wes Streeting or Angela Rayner to seize the moment before the mayor of Greater Manchester can ride back to Westminster. Starmer’s manipulation of Labour’s national executive committee to bar Burnham from standing at the Gorton and Denton byelection (that he probably would have won) was low, petty politics that turned many against him: this non-politician was supposed to rise above such grubbiness.

The prime minister’s troubles will continue: MPs have now called for Morgan McSweeney to appear before the committee. But Starmer already admits that appointing Mandelson was a serious error – though remember that despite the known Epstein link, Kemi Badenoch did not protest aganst the decision, Nigel Farage praised it and Labour’s massed ranks did not rise up.

It might have seemed a touch of brilliance to send an avaricious man without moral or political scruple to charm a president with even less – security be damned. But Labour people will have been doubly appalled by the revelation from Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, of a close runner-up for that Washington post: George Osborne! Austerity’s destroyer of public services is a cursed name that has Labour reaching for the garlic and stake. That exposed a prime minister with a spinning political compass. He has begun to find due north with his bold refusal to join Trump’s war – but it’s far too late. For now he has a stay of execution – but only until his cabinet decides differently.

Let’s not forget the root cause of this: Starmer’s Trump strategy has utterly backfired

Leader of the Liberal Democrats

It’s utterly depressing, isn’t it? We were supposed to be free of this cycle of chaos and scandal. It was exactly what Keir Starmer promised to change. To restore integrity to........

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