The Incredible Shrinking Prime Minister

“Power resides where men believe it resides,” says Varys the spymaster in Game of Thrones. “It’s a trick, a shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

A big man can also cast a small shadow — and Sir Keir Starmer’s is shrinking fast. I was sitting in the Peers’ Gallery in the House of Commons on Monday watching him make his statement and you could feel his power ebbing away. An index of how little belief the Prime Minister’s colleagues have that power still resides with him was how few were prepared to defend him. He was flanked by Rachel Reeves and David Lammy, who nodded along loyally as he set out the case for his defence, but the rest of the front bench did little to indicate their support. Ed Miliband, sitting on the far Right hand side (the far Left from his perspective), put his head in his hands at one point and seemed similarly despondent when wheeled out to do the media round yesterday morning. Downing Street must have hoped that getting him to do it would have forced him to support the PM, but that didn’t work out as hoped. He was at pains to distance himself from the decision to appoint Lord Mandelson as His Majesty’s Ambassador to Washington, which he told Sky News he had always been “worried about”. As for Labour’s backbenchers, not a single one rose to defend him on Monday afternoon – at least, not for the 90 minutes I sat there before being called away to vote.

Starmer’s performance at the dispatch box was not very Prime Ministerial. Downing Street had briefed the lobby beforehand that he was “incandescent” about not being informed of Mandelson’s failure to get through developed vetting – not once but four times! – and he made a few half-hearted attempts to appear angry, but it wasn’t convincing. Rather, he sounded like a school prefect hauled in front of the whole school for breaking the rules and trying his best to blame his classmates, like the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in Scent of a Woman. His speech had a wheedling, slightly desperate tone – pleading for mercy, knowing he’s in serious trouble.

As you’d expect, he relied heavily on ‘process’ – the process he’d scrupulously followed and which Sir Olly Robbins, whom he sacked last week as Permanent Secretary of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), had scandalously ignored. But that was a poor battleground to pick because, as we found out on Tuesday morning when Robbins gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the senior mandarin knows more about Whitehall process than the PM and he made a pretty convincing case that he’d been following it while Starmer hadn’t.

According to Robbins, the Prince of Darkness didn’t fail the developed vetting process; rather, the UK Security Vetting (UKSV) team was “minded’ not to grant him top level clearance. But Robbins decided that risk was manageable so approved Mandelson’s appointment regardless, something he said he was entitled to do without informing No 10 about the security service‘s reservations. Given that Mandelson didn’t ‘fail’ – it’s not a pass-or-fail process, according to Robbins – the Perm Sec was under no obligation to tell the PM that he’d ignored UKSV’s advice. The same is true when Starmer assured the Commons that ‘due process’ had been followed, which is why Robbins hadn’t tipped him off about Mandelson’s vetting difficulties after he’d made that assurance. Due process was followed, said Robbins.

Having batted away the grenades the PM had thrown at him, the wily mandarin then lobbed a few of his own. No 10 had put the FCDO under “constant pressure” to hurry Mandelson through the process, he told the Committee, making it clear it would have preferred him not to undergo developed vetting at all. At one point, according to Robbins, Morgan McSweeney screamed “just fucking approve” him at Sir Philip Barton, Robbins’s predecessor – and hinted Sir Philip may have been bullied into resigning because of his reluctance to rubber stamp the appointment. Apparently, No 10 wanted to get it done before Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, 2025, only a week after Robbins had taken up the job, and were impatient with the ‘process’ the FCDO was following. By the time he’d got his feet under the desk, Mandelson’s appointment as Britain‘s ambassador to Washington had been announced, his name had been passed to the King, and he already had access to the Foreign Office, leaving Sir Olly feeling he had little choice but to push it through.

Robbins then dropped a bombshell: he’d later been asked by No 10 to find an ambassadorship for Matthew Doyle, then Starmer’s Director of Communications. Robbins said he felt “uncomfortable” about that since Doyle didn’t have the “credentials”. In addition, No 10 told the FCDO chief not to tell David Lammy about it, even though Lammy was the Foreign Secretary at the time. The reason this is so shocking is that it later emerged that Doyle had campaigned for a Labour councillor who was being investigated for child sexual offences, something Doyle knew about at the time. That scandal erupted after Starmer had made Doyle a life peer, having failed to secure him an ambassadorship.

The subtext of Robbins’ testimony is that Sir Keir Starmer isn’t Mr Process after all. He, or at least his Downing Street proxies, had wanted to bypass the developed vetting that all ambassadors go through as a matter of course, put huge pressure on the FCDO to expedite Mandelson’s appointment and then demanded that his spin doctor be parachuted in to a senior diplomatic post in spite of not being qualified.

Yesterday evening, the Times was reporting that Starmer’s Cabinet colleagues were distancing themselves from him, with Yvette Cooper describing the attempt to install Doyle as an ambassador behind her predecessor’s back as “extremely concerning”.

Is time up for Starmer? I discussed this with an experienced old political hand in the Lords on Monday afternoon while we were filing through the lobbies to inflict seven successive defeats on the Government, and he said he didn’t think Sir Olly Robbins or anyone else in in the Westminster firmament had anything up their sleeves that constituted a “killer blow”; it was more like “death by a thousand cuts”, of which Robbins testimony would be another (or several). And bad though that testimony is for Starmer, I think my colleague is probably right. The Prime Minster is unlikely to go before next Tuesday, however bad Prime Minister’s Questions is today, at which point Parliament is expected to be prorogued, granting him a two-week stay of execution. The local elections on May 7th, widely expected to be terrible for Labour, are also unlikely to be the final straw because on May 13th we’ll have the King’s Speech and the beginning of a new parliamentary session – an opportunity for yet another ‘fresh start’ for the Government.

What’s keeping Starmer in post for the time being is the fact that it’s very, very difficult for the Labour Party to get rid of a leader who doesn’t want to go, far harder than it is for the Conservatives. It requires at least 20% of Labour MPs to nominate a challenger – that‘s 81 – quite a high bar, and none of those currently prepared to wield the knife can marshal that level of support (apart, perhaps, from Ed Miliband, but he will be reluctant to play the assassin again, having plunged the knife into his brother’s back). Angela Rayner probably could, but she cannot throw her hat into the ring until HMRC has concluded its investigation into her underpayment of Stamp Duty Land Tax on the purchase of her £800,000 flat in Hove. If the verdict is unfavourable, she may want to appeal it, further delaying a leadership bid.

I could be wrong of course because politics is so unpredictable and there’s always a chance that Starmer will fall on his sword. But I suspect he’ll stagger on for the time being, a dead man walking until the party coalesces around a successor, or one of the hyenas prowling behind him breaks loose from the pack. That’s good news for the other parties, because it’s hard to imagine any of the alternative Labour leaders being as politically inept as him. Kemi Badenoch, in particular, couldn’t hope for a better punching bag every Wednesday afternoon. But it’s terrible news for the country. Starmer’s collapsing authority leaves a vacuum and more malevolent forms of power, unaccountable to Parliament, will gradually start to fill it.

Stop Press: It sounds like Starmer could be gone quite soon. The Guardian reported on Wednesday evening that Starmer was questioned about his decision to sack Sir Olly Robbins by several colleagues round the table at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, while the Telegraph quoted one senior source predicting the coup could come any day:

A senior Government source said: “The wheels have stopped turning. The question is no longer whether things can go on. It’s a question of when people move.”

They said the two names under discussion to replace Sir Keir were “always Wes and Ange”, but there was debate about “who would move first”, adding: “There is a sense that it’s over now.”

Worth reading in full.