What the Tories see when they look at Starmer
We're watching the same failure loop.
“We don’t do betting in the Tory Party anymore,” quipped one shadow cabinet minister to me yesterday when asked about the odds of Sir Keir Starmer resigning as Prime Minister – an aside to bad memories of the gambling scandal at the last election.
Others were less restrained. One member of LOTO told me plainly: “He’s a dead man walking. He will be there for PMQs this week – but he may not be there for the next one.”
But there is a line for Kemi Badenoch to follow as Starmer’s leadership seems to unravel. “Kemi has to balance doing the constitutional role as Leader of the Opposition with not seeming to enjoy the Prime Minister’s discomfort too much,” they added, “it is delicate”.
But as one CCHQ source told me: “It is quite nice seeing it from the other side for a change.”
Some in the shadow cabinet had thought the Prime Minister might depart alongside his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. Politically amputated, with the vultures circling, Starmer might have been tempted to recognise where he had lost and call it quits.
Not quite yet. I would say he is fighting on, but that feels overly generous. From McSweeney’s resignation at 2pm on Sunday, Starmer went more than 24 hours without a single cabinet colleague offering public support. Even at the height of Boris Johnson’s collapse, half the Cabinet could still be relied upon to appear on air in his defence.
With cabinet silence still lingering throughout the morning, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar made his move with a public defenestration of Starmer, calling for his resignation. But it left him conspicuously alone. He jumped, but no one followed.
As yesterday wore on, the leadership contest that had seemed genuinely plausible at the start of the day began to fizzle. It had the feel of a Burnham moment: the senior figure safely outside Westminster making a bid for personal advantage – in Sarwar’s case, some distance from the poor Scottish Labour results expected in May – only to trigger a reflexive show of loyalty to the wounded leader from those at the centre of government.
“Honestly, how has Sarwar ended the day in a worse position than Starmer?” one Tory MP asked.
Eventually, David Lammy became the first cabinet member to break cover, tweeting: “Keir Starmer won a massive mandate 18 months ago, for five years to deliver on Labour’s manifesto that we all stood on. We should let nothing distract us from our mission to change Britain and we support the Prime Minister in doing that.”
A slow trickle followed. One by one, cabinet ministers – alongside the likes of Angela Rayner – posted strikingly similar messages on X about Starmer’s “huge mandate” and their “fullest support”. They had apparently been instructed to tweet them, if the curiously identical phrasing and forced language wasn’t …
We're watching the same failure loop.
“We don’t do betting in the Tory Party anymore,” quipped one shadow cabinet minister to me yesterday when asked about the odds of Sir Keir Starmer resigning as Prime Minister – an aside to bad memories of the gambling scandal at the last election.
Others were less restrained. One member of LOTO told me plainly: “He’s a dead man walking. He will be there for PMQs this week – but he may not be there for the next one.”
But there is a line for Kemi Badenoch to follow as Starmer’s leadership seems to unravel. “Kemi has to balance doing the constitutional role as Leader of the Opposition with not seeming to enjoy the Prime Minister’s discomfort too much,” they added, “it is delicate”.
But as one CCHQ source told me: “It is quite nice seeing it from the other side for a change.”
Some in the shadow cabinet had thought the Prime Minister might depart alongside his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. Politically amputated, with the vultures circling, Starmer might have been tempted to recognise where he had lost and call it quits.
Not quite yet. I would say he is fighting on, but that feels overly generous. From McSweeney’s resignation at 2pm on Sunday, Starmer went more than 24 hours without a single cabinet colleague offering public support. Even at the height of Boris Johnson’s collapse, half the Cabinet could still be relied upon to appear on air in his defence.
With cabinet silence still lingering throughout the morning, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar made his move with a public defenestration of Starmer, calling for his resignation. But it left him conspicuously alone. He jumped, but no one followed.
As yesterday wore on, the leadership contest that had seemed genuinely plausible at the start of the day began to fizzle. It had the feel of a Burnham moment: the senior figure safely outside Westminster making a bid for personal advantage – in Sarwar’s case, some distance from the poor Scottish Labour results expected in May – only to trigger a reflexive show of loyalty to the wounded leader from those at the centre of government.
“Honestly, how has Sarwar ended the day in a worse position than Starmer?” one Tory MP asked.
Eventually, David Lammy became the first cabinet member to break cover, tweeting: “Keir Starmer won a massive mandate 18 months ago, for five years to deliver on Labour’s manifesto that we all stood on. We should let nothing distract us from our mission to change Britain and we support the Prime Minister in doing that.”
A slow trickle followed. One by one, cabinet ministers – alongside the likes of Angela Rayner – posted strikingly similar messages on X about Starmer’s “huge mandate” and their “fullest support”. They had apparently been instructed to tweet them, if the curiously identical phrasing and forced language wasn’t …
What the Tories see when they look at Starmer
We're watching the same failure loop.
“We don’t do betting in the Tory Party anymore,” quipped one shadow cabinet minister to me yesterday when asked about the odds of Sir Keir Starmer resigning as Prime Minister – an aside to bad memories of the gambling scandal at the last election.
Others were less restrained. One member of LOTO told me plainly: “He’s a dead man walking. He will be there for PMQs this week – but he may not be there for the next one.”
But there is a line for Kemi Badenoch to follow as Starmer’s leadership seems to unravel. “Kemi has to balance doing the constitutional role as Leader of the Opposition with not seeming to enjoy the Prime Minister’s discomfort too much,” they added, “it is delicate”.
But as one CCHQ source told me: “It is quite nice seeing it from the other side for a change.”
Some in the shadow cabinet had thought the Prime Minister might depart alongside his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. Politically amputated, with the vultures circling, Starmer might have been tempted to recognise where he had lost and call it quits.
Not quite yet. I would say he is fighting on, but that feels overly generous. From McSweeney’s resignation at 2pm on Sunday, Starmer went more than 24 hours without a single cabinet colleague offering public support. Even at the height of Boris Johnson’s collapse, half the Cabinet could still be relied upon to appear on air in his defence.
With cabinet silence still lingering throughout the morning, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar made his move with a public defenestration of Starmer, calling for his resignation. But it left him conspicuously alone. He jumped, but no one followed.
As yesterday wore on, the leadership contest that had seemed genuinely plausible at the start of the day began to fizzle. It had the feel of a Burnham moment: the senior figure safely outside Westminster making a bid for personal advantage – in Sarwar’s case, some distance from the poor Scottish Labour results expected in May – only to trigger a reflexive show of loyalty to the wounded leader from those at the centre of government.
“Honestly, how has Sarwar ended the day in a worse position than Starmer?” one Tory MP asked.
Eventually, David Lammy became the first cabinet member to break cover, tweeting: “Keir Starmer won a massive mandate 18 months ago, for five years to deliver on Labour’s manifesto that we all stood on. We should let nothing distract us from our mission to change Britain and we support the Prime Minister in doing that.”
A slow trickle followed. One by one, cabinet ministers – alongside the likes of Angela Rayner – posted strikingly similar messages on X about Starmer’s “huge mandate” and their “fullest support”. They had apparently been instructed to tweet them, if the curiously identical phrasing and forced language wasn’t …
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