Minister credits Starmer for ‘taking responsibility’ over Mandelson ahead of key meeting with Labour MPs – UK politics live

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Robert Jenrick, the former shadow justice secretary who recently defected to Reform UK, told Sky News this morning that he thought the Labour government under Keir Starmer was becoming as dysfunctional as the last Tory government was. He said:

The government appears to be collapsing into chaos. Now the prime minister has no authority. There’s an outright revolt against him from his own members of parliament and the cabinet.

Nothing is going to happen now. Government will be brought to a standstill. I’ve seen this up close in previous Conservative governments. There’ll be no agenda. The issues that people are facing in their daily lives - whether it’s wages, energy bills, crime, immigration, the NHS - are all just going to go into stasis now and the public are going to be let down very badly in the weeks and the months to come.

Emily Thornberry welcomes McSweeney's resignation, saying it creates 'opportunity' for Starmer

Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told the Today programme this morning that she was glad that Morgan McSweeney had resigned. She said:

I’m glad to see that the person who was the architect of Peter Mandelson’s appointment has taken responsibility and has gone … Morgan had become quite a divisive figure.

There were a couple of things that everyone agreed on, one was that he was brilliant, but I think the other one was that people felt he was in the wrong job, so I think it’s right that he’s gone, and I think it’s an opportunity.

Thornberry said that Keir Starmer was a “decent man”, but that he needed to “step up a bit more than he has” and that he neeed a “reset” offering “clear leadership”.

John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has said that he thinks Keir Starmer is in a position of “complete weakness” as PM. Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Swinney said:

All that’s happened in recent days demonstrates an appalling judgment by the prime minister in appointing Peter Mandelson as the ambassador to the United States.

Although Morgan McSweeney might have resigned, the person that took the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was the prime minister and his position is a demonstration of his complete weakness as prime minister in the aftermath of this terrible decision.

Labour MP Andy McDonald says it will be 'end' for Starmer if he does not 'own the error he's made'

The Labour MP Andy McDonald told the Today programme this morning that it would be “the end” for Keir Starmer’s leadership if he failed to persuade backbenchers that he will change the way he operates for the better.

McDonald said:

If [Starmer] doesn’t own the error he’s made, and recognise the problem in front of it and articulate it and tell us how he’s going to deal with it, then I’m afraid it is coming to an end – if not today, but certainly in the weeks and months ahead.

He’s got to convince the PLP tonight that he’s got it and a change is necessary.

And the change that he promoted was no other than to purge the left, and it’s got us in this terrible mess that we’re in now.

McDonald said he wanted to see a change to a “more pluralist, democratic socialist agenda”.

McDonald, who served in shadow cabinet under Jeremy Corbyn, has been one of the MPs most critical in public of way Labour has been led by Starmer and Morgan McSweeney. In part he feels aggrieved because he was suspended from the party for five months for using words “the river and the sea” at a pro-Palestine rally, supposedly on the grounds that this was anti-Israel (it has echoes of a chant criticised as antisemitic), even though McDonald specifically said he wanted to see “Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea … [living] in peaceful liberty”. Labour’s decision to suspend McDonald was criticised as excessive, and that is partly why he is so critical of the purges of the left overseen by McSweeney.

Badenoch says Starmer's position now 'untenable'

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has said that Keir Starmer should resign given his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington.

In an interview on the Today programme this morning, Badenoch said:

[Claiming] ‘I was badly advised’ is not a good excuse for a leader. Advisers advise, leaders decide. He made a bad decision, he should take responsibility for that … this man said that he was the chief prosecutor for the country, when did he start believing everything that people told him?

Peter Mandelson had been sacked twice for unethical behaviour. [Starmer] is allowing someone else to carry the can for a decision that he chose to make. But the real problem is that this country is not being governed.

Keir Starmer promised a government that would be whiter than white. His position now is untenable, because if he thinks that bad advice is enough for Morgan McSweeney to go, then, yes, I think that makes his position untenable.

Kemi Badenoch on the Today programme Photograph: BBC

Skills minister Jacqui Smith says she is sure Starmer won't resign

In interviews this morning Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, insisted that Keir Starmer will carry on as PM.

She told Times Radio:

I think that the prime minister absolutely is determined to [carry on]. He’s determined and has taken responsibility for the mistakes made in appointing Peter Mandelson.

On the Today programme Nick Robinson told Smith that Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, gave an interview yesterday morning saying it would be pointless for Morgan McSweeeny to resign. Only a few hours later McSweeney did just that. He asked Smith if she could be sure that Starmer too wasn’t about to resign.

Smith replied: “I am sure, yes.”

But when Robinson asked her if Starmer had told her that personally, Smith said she had not spoken to him directly. “I don’t believe he will [resign], I don’t think he should,” she said.

Good morning. One of the staples of political journalism these days (for better or for worse) is the “how damaging?” question. With Westminster preoccupied with the question of how long Keir Starmer can last as prime minister following the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, yesterday in the light of the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal, here is a summary of how long other prime ministers were able to stay on after key advisers quit.

• Margaret Thatcher stayed in office, after the resignation of Alan Walters, for one year and one month.

• Tony Blair stayed in office, after the resignation of Alastair Campbell, for three years and 10 months.

• Gordon Brown stayed in office, after the resignation of Damian McBride, for one year and one month.

• Theresa May stayed in office, after the resignation of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, for two years and one and a half months.

• Boris Johnson stayed in office, after the resignation of Dominic Cummings, for one year and 10 months.

• Johnson stayed in office, after the resignation of Munira Mirza, for seven months.

None of these are exact parallels. Most of these advisers were forced out because of pressure from MPs in the PM’s party, at least one (Mirza) was admired and her departure was a shock, but with McSweeney the picture is mixed. Many Labour MPs are glad to see him gone, but others credit him with winning them their seats and worry how the PM will manage without him.

The Cummings precedent is similar in some ways, because Cummings was the mastermind behind Johnson’s 2019 general election victory. McSweeney also gets credit for the Labour’s 2024 landslide. But only last night Prof Jane Green, who runs the British Election Study project, said “the major factors that contributed to the unique seats-votes outcome were outside Labour’s direct control” and the claim that McSweeney’s decision to focus on appealing to former Tories was a crucial factor has been shown by election analysis to be wrong. Besides, unlike Cummings, McSweeney remains hinged.

In some respects McSweeney is more similar to Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. They were decisive in enabling Theresa May to become PM, just as McSweeney was instrumental in showing Starmer how he could win the Labour leadership. But Timothy and Hill were even more dominant in No 10 than McSweeney ever was. And they were forced out because they wrote a manifesto that lost an election, whereas McSweeney did the opposite.

In short, there is no way of knowing how this will turn out. But previous experience suggests that even a damaging resignation like McSweeney’s doesn’t make the PM’s resignation imminent.

But we have got an inkling of what might happen today. Starmer is due to address Labour MPs this evening and Jacqui Smith, the former Labour home secretary who is now a peer and skills minister, has been giving interviews this morning. Speaking on Times Radio this morning, she said Starmer deserved credit for “taking responsibility” for the Mandelson appointment.

The prime minister is taking responsibility. He took responsibility for the decision that was made about Peter Mandelson, although to be clear here it was of course Peter Mandelson that, in consistent lying and engagement with Jeffrey Epstein, let down the party and the government and the country. And I think that will become clearer as the information around the appointment is put out into the public domain.

According to Sam Blewett and Bethany Dawson in their London Playbook briefing for Politico, Labour First, the right-leaning Labour group that supports Starmer, has been urging its MPs allies to make this point at tonight’s PLP meeting. They say:

One riled MP forwarded Playbook a message the right-leaning Labour First faction has sent to backbenchers it reckons are loyal to Starmer, urging them to speak up in support at the PLP meeting. Talking points include how the PM “accepts his mistakes and apologises,” compared to the carousel of Tory leaders forced from office … and how the government is delivering on “many areas of incremental change.”

Here is our overnight story by Pippa Crerar summing up all yesterday’s developments.

And here is an analysis by Kiran Stacey.

Today we will be focusing mostly on this crisis. Here is the agenda.

Morning: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit in Surrey.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

3pm: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, gives a speech in Birmingham.

6pm: Keir Starmer addresses Labour MPs at a private meeting of the PLP in Westminster.

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