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After a dismal 24 hours for Sir Keir Starmer, on Friday an online jibe against the prime minister was circulating among despairing Labour MPs. “We could solve the small boats crisis by renaming the English Channel ‘Keir Starmer’s desk’ — nothing will ever cross it.”
Starmer will next week attempt to rebuild his authority and cling on to his job when he tries to explain how he appointed Lord Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US without knowing that his nominee had been deemed a security risk.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, claimed that Starmer was “lying” when he said he was kept in the dark by Foreign Office officials over Mandelson’s failed vetting process.
Yet that is exactly the prime minister’s defence: that his government is so dysfunctional that key information on national security does not reach his desk and he has neither the time nor the inclination to seek it out.
It is hardly a heroic argument. Many Labour MPs have been left despondent — or resorting to gallows humour — as the party is pulled back into the Mandelson scandal, just three weeks before the party faces a tough set of local elections.
The sense of hopelessness stems partly from the fact that Starmer has had a better few weeks, winning plaudits for keeping Britain out of the Iran war and standing up to taunts from US President Donald Trump.
“It’s so bad,” said one senior Labour MP who is usually supportive of Starmer. “He was slowly hauling himself out of this pit and now he has gone back into it again. He was cheering up, being a bit more natural. It was actually getting better. And now this.”
The Mandelson scandal has sucked the life out of Starmer’s premiership. This fate is all the more miserable for the prime minister since he was never particularly close to the veteran Labour peer in the first place.
“This was all down to Morgan,” said one Labour minister, referring to Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a Mandelson protégé who pushed hard for his friend to go to Washington for a last political hurrah. McSweeney quit in February over his role in the affair.
The latest blow came on Tuesday night when Cabinet Office officials discovered that the government’s in-house security vetting service had raised red flags in January 2025 about Mandelson’s appointment. Starmer raged on Friday that it was “unforgivable” that nobody had told him.
While Starmer agonised about how to deal with this bombshell — soon to be detonated as part of a dump of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment required by parliament — the news leaked to the Guardian on Thursday afternoon.
The events that followed threw a spotlight on Starmer’s chaotic administration.
He instructed Dame Antonia Romeo, cabinet secretary, and Cat Little, Cabinet Office secretary, to find out what had gone on and who was to blame.
Remarkably the minister in charge of security vetting, the prime minister’s chief secretary Darren Jones, knew nothing about the discovery until he read about it in the media. He responded by ordering an immediate suspension of Foreign Office vetting.
“Cat was going to share it with Darren after she had written up the chronology for the PM,” said one person briefed on the internal inquiry. It was Jones who was dispatched by Starmer to defend him on the Friday morning broadcast round.
Badenoch claims it is simply impossible that nobody told Number 10 about Mandelson’s failed security vetting and it remains mystifying to some officials that Sir Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office’s top official, did not pass it on.
Robbins was fired by Starmer on Thursday night in a frosty phone call after the permanent secretary had “lost the confidence” of Starmer and Yvette Cooper, foreign secretary.
Robbins will give his own account of events if he takes up the Commons foreign affairs committee’s request to give evidence to MPs next Tuesday, in what is likely to make for tense viewing in Downing Street.
One Whitehall official close to the affair believes Robbins may have withheld information from ministers because Mandelson’s appointment had already been announced and it was clear that Starmer — or at least McSweeney — wanted it to go ahead.
Dame Emily Thornberry, Labour chair of the foreign affairs committee, told the FT: “I find it difficult to believe a careful and very senior civil servant would make a decision like this completely off their own bat.
“Obviously Morgan was very keen for Peter Mandelson to get this job and I would not be surprised if he put pressure on the FCDO to get on with the decision.”
Downing Street and McSweeney’s friends strongly deny receiving any information about the vetting red flags.
Starmer next week faces a humbling moment when he has to explain all of this to MPs. Many on Labour’s backbenches believe he has begun the long march to the Number 10 exit, even if most do not think he will be toppled immediately.
“The excuses coming from Downing Street won’t cut it on the doorstep in the run-up to the local elections,” said Jon Trickett, one veteran Labour MP. Polls on May 7 in Scotland, Wales and English councils now look increasingly perilous for Starmer.
One minister insisted Starmer would hang on for now. “There is still life until a critical mass of MPs deems there to be a viable alternative. That could be several years away, it could be post-May.”
Starmer’s protestations that the whole episode has been “staggering” and “unforgivable” might get him through the next few days, but Labour MPs have been left wondering who is actually in charge.
Jones on Friday called it a “failure of the state”. But ultimately the decision to appoint Mandelson, a friend of Jeffrey Epstein with a long history of scandals behind him, came down to Starmer alone.