“Erwin Schrodinger gave us his famous cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead. The curious case of Sir Keir Starmer presents us with Schrodinger’s prime minister. His premiership is fatally wounded in the view of a great many Labour MPs across the factions. It is their settled conclusion that he will not lead them into the next general election and is likely to be removed from Number 10 before the year is out.”
The opening lines of the Observer’s Labour supporting chief columnist Andrew Rawnsley captured the prime minister’s critical predicament last Sunday.
Sticking with Schrodinger briefly, Keir Starmer might have finished the weekend thinking he was still alive politically after a forceful speech at the Munich defence summit and the absence of a leadership challenge from rivals too disorganised, too caught up in crises of their own or simply too smart to want to own the May election bloodbath the polls suggest is coming. In short, keep the prime minister alive to own this month’s Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election loss and its May sequel.
Ah, the May elections. By Monday, in a twist none of the plotters had anticipated, the prime minister was more Schrodinger’s dead cat after his government was forced in the face of a Farage / Reform High Court challenge to U-turn on the cancellation of 30 May local election contests that would deprive more than 4 million people of the right to vote, some for the second year running. It was, by common political and media consent the 14th or 15th significant U-turn of Starmer’s 19 months in power. For many, it represents the biggest and most fatal one from which there can be no dead cat bounce.
Farage’s coup
The U-turn that proved a pre-election publicity coup for Farage. While other parties (and some of Labour’s own MPs) had opposed the election cancellations, it was Reform who took up the legal challenge and will add to Starmer’s woes with the government footing Reform’s £100,000-plus legal bill. (*Declaration of personal interest. Although I’m a far from uncritical Labour sympathiser, I argued on air several times that cancelling elections was undemocratic, bad politics and a hostage to Starmer’s political and media opponents. What I hadn’t anticipated initially was Farage’s determination to mount a High Court challenge.)
Undeniably, this latest U-turn has left a prime minister, who was already in deep trouble in the court of public opinion and within his own party, looking helpless, hapless, hopeless and humiliated. Among many questions: What took the government so long to get the legal advice that they would almost certainly lose Reform’s High Court challenge? What advice did it seek in the first place on the legality of election postponements? Did Starmer time as a distraction bid a major speech / press conference on tougher policy plans over under 16s and social media access while staying schtum on the massive election U-turn he knew would be coming a couple of hours later?
Councils in chaos
The fact that the U-turn came just 72 hours before Reform’s High Court challenge was due to be heard only accentuates the air of chaos and confusion around the Starmer administration as council officials and local political party officials around the country now scramble desperately to re-organise elections in time for May 7th. Fairly or not, the mere fact that the majority of English areas where elections were being cancelled were Labour-held only gifted Farage and other Opposition parties, together with media allies, the opportunity to level charges of political ‘chicanery’.
One senior Labour MP, not normally an anti-Starmer hardliner, put it to me this way: “There was still a slim chance we could hold onto traditionally rock-solid Gorton on February 26, but not now. As for the May elections, we knew we were in for a bloody beating but now it’s guaranteed to be a bloody massacre that the prime minister can’t hope to survive.”
Headlines, headlines
Tuesday’s front pages – not just in the right-wing titles – made uncomfortable reading for a beleaguered PM. ‘Anger as PM abandons plans to delay May elections’ with a boxed sub-head quoting a Labour MP in an affected area saying, ‘Most councillors feel devastated – many didn’t want to cancel elections. They felt pressured into it.’ (Guardian).
‘Farage forces elections U-turn-triggering next threat to Starmer leadership (the i); ‘Starmer abandons delay of 30 council elections after Reform legal challenge’ (Financial Times); ‘Yet another U-turn as elections are back on’ (Express); ‘STARMER FORCED TO FACE WRATH OF VOTERS’(Mail); ‘Starmer’s plan to delay elections abandoned’ (Times); ‘Starmer U-turn No15’ (Sun); ‘Starmer U-turns on cancelled elections (Telegraph). Only my old ship the Mirror (mistakenly in my book) failed to even mention it on page 1, preferring to splash on the PM’s earlier social media speech, headlined ‘SAVE OUR NEXT GENERATION’.
The editorials and columnists offered cold comfort for the prime minister and warm words for Farage (like it or not). Sample: ‘Labour’s failed bid to subvert democracy’ the Mail’s main leader headline, with the opening paragraphs, “Labour’s blatant attempt to trample over local democracy for base political motives has failed. Around 4 million people were to be denied a vote in the May elections, after the government cancelled polling in 30 council areas, ostensibly because of an ongoing reorganisation. The real reason, many believe, was because Labour faced being wiped out in most of those areas by Reform UK and/or the Green Party and hoped a delay might mitigate this disaster.”
Mail lauding Farage is bad news for Kemi
Worryingly for Kemi Badenoch, the leader went on: “This is a huge victory not only for Nigel Farage but also the integrity of British politics. Mr Farage said yesterday that the PM is ‘running scared of the electorate’. It is hard to disagree.”
The leader concludes with, “If Starmer is toppled, he has only himself to blame. By his dithering, policy blunders and constant U-turning, he has shown himself to be almost devoid of the political skills required to lead a government. This latest embarrassment suggests he may not be quite as brilliant a lawyer as he likes to think either.”
Elsewhere in Tuesday’s Mail, political commentator Dan Hodges (scion of fabled Labour minister Glenda Jackson) weighed in under the headline, ‘This lays bare so much of Sir Keir’s bankrupt and abject political character’.
Hodges’ article opening with this: “Is there anything – a single piece of basic governance – Keir Starmer can get right? Yesterday it was announced he’d caved in over his proposal to scrap 30 local council elections in May. It would be nice to report this followed a principled change of heart over stripping more than 4 million British citizens of the right to vote. But, in reality, Starmer was forced into another humiliating U-turn through court action by Nigel Farage. A couple of hours earlier he had been specifically asked this on BBC Radio 2: ‘Can we be sure you’ll stick to your course now after those U-turns?’ His answer? ‘Absolutely’.”
Good sources tell me that Ms Badenoch needs to brace herself for a renewed Mail push for her to join a ‘Unite the Right’ electoral pact with Reform UK with Captain Farage at the helm. Not that there was any sign of the Mail’s wish at the press conference Farage, ever the media savvy, headline grabber, staged on Tuesday morning to counter the one-man band accusations by announcing his proposed key cabinet ministers – recent Tory defectors Robert Jenrick as chancellor, twice-sacked Suella Braverman as education, skills and equalities secretary and his longtime allies Richard Tice as deputy PM and business / energy secretary and Zia Yusuf as home secretary and migration crackdown czar. Chillingly, Braverman’s brief would be to scrap the 2010 Equalities Act.
The Mail’s growing romance with Farage was on display in Wednesday’s edition with a double page spread on Reform's “Shadow Cabinet” team and an op-ed by the Reform leader with an eye wateringly large byline. The headline, ‘This is the team to boot Starmer and his rag tag gang of socialists out of power’. Eat your heart out, Kemi?
Blame gaming Boris
What wouldn’t have been sweet music to the Mail’s unity chorus was the non-stop assault on the Conservatives record in office, with the ‘Boris wave’ of the Mail’s star columnist coming in for particularly brutal assault. Badenoch was mocked for initially supporting Tory councils favouring May election postponements.
Suddenly, Farage and his team are reconvincing themselves that they could win an overall general election majority on their own. But Farage’s affability approach veered into something Trumpesque when Financial Times journalist Anna Gross asked if Reform UK plan an Ice-style deportation unit and also pointed out everyone in his cabinet quintet had been privately educated. Farage snapped sarcastically that he “loved” the FT telling her to “write something silly”. It certainly wasn’t the first time Reform’s leader has been rude or patronising to a female journalist, the Guardian duly reported within minutes.
Meanwhile, a Tuesday Guardian analysis by Kiran Stacey and Ben Quinn made far more palatable reading for Farage than Starmer. Headlined ‘Prime Minister delights Reform while infuriating his colleagues’, wasn’t alone in flagging up BBC interviews Starmer gave before the election bombshell in which he said, “I am a pragmatist, I am a common-sense merchant” while indicating his U-turn days were over before, as the Guardian noted, “two hours later his government was announcing yet another U-turn”. The analysis prominently quoted Farage’s call for the resignation of Starmer’s local government secretary, Steve Reed, and the Reform leader’s boast: “The government tried to cancel democracy. They have been defeated.”
Ironically, some allies of Reed tell me he wasn’t originally an enthusiast for the election postponement strategy but was effectively bounced into it by the PM’s now departed chief of staff Morgan McSweeney who convinced Starmer to sign up to it.
Guardian offers cold comfort for Keir
The Guardian also mocked the government for only citing new ‘legal advice’ when announcing the U-turn without acknowledging its hand had been forced by Farage’s High Court challenge. Senior political correspondent Peter Walker writing: “As well as being forced to back down by Reform, Labour now probably faces even more of a kicking at the local elections. It is one thing to change course, but quite another to do so when being told your course of action would probably be struck down by a court.”
While the PM’s breakfast digestion wouldn’t have been helped by the headline on Nesrine Malik’s Guardian column, ‘Keir Starmer has a unique talent… to alienate absolutely everyone’.
Coming hot on the heels of the High Court defeat over the terrorist proscription of Palestine Action (a move that had united the Guardian and The Times in opposing), the Starmer government’s political / legal judgement is taking quite a hammering. Both newspapers are urging Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to drop her planned appeal against the ruling.
The last thing Keir Starmer needs is another scandal uniting left and right wing media amid the escalating Mandelson fallout bedevilling his prime ministerial judgement. But he’s got one all the same and it's attracting damaging coverage across the media landscape.
Tuesday’s Times chose to make it the main leading article rather than the election U-turn under the headline, ‘Dirty Tricks’, focusing on allegations that Labour Together, the think tank formerly headed by Morgan McSweeney that effectively secured Starner the Labour leadership, had attempted to smear investigative journalists from the Sunday Times and The Guardian.
The Times leader contending: “Between 2017 and 2020, before Sir Keir was elected, Labour Together failed to declare £730,000 of donations. This error, which was later revealed by The Sunday Times, resulted in an investigation by the Electoral Commission. The group said it was an unintentional administrative oversight; the commission found it guilty of breaching electoral law and issued a significant fine.
“None of this thwarted Labour Together’s influence on Starmer’s Labour – it went on to fundraise millions in the run-up to the general election and many of its alumni entered parliament and the cabinet.”
Labour Together, a toxic legacy now?
Among those is McSweeney’s successor heading Labour Together, Josh Simons – now a Labour MP and junior cabinet office minister. What has emerged (partly as a result of investigative work by the campaign group Democracy for Sale) is that under Simons, Labour Together paid a controversial US PR firm APCO £36,000 to investigate the Sunday Times award-winning journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke who broke the original donations breach story, along with Guardian journalists who also pursued it.
According to The Times’ Tuesday leader, “APCO produced in return for its £36,000 fee a 58-page dossier codenamed ‘Operation Cannon’ that ‘contained a disgraceful set of false allegations and assertions, and claimed bizarrely and without evidence that the original expose was the result of a Russian plot. It questioned Mr Pogrund’s Jewish faith and relationships.”
Intriguingly, the report is alleged to have been compiled by the former Sunday Times home affairs correspondent Tom Harper who is now on APCO’s payroll. To date, neither McSweeney nor Simons has explained why Labour Together sought to probe investigative journalists’ private lives.
While the government has announced a cabinet office investigation into the Labour Together allegations, The Times isn’t alone in calling for Simons to be removed from his role in the department while the investigation goes on. But cross-party pressure is mounting for a fully independent probe – and possibly a Scotland Yard intervention. “Josh Simons must now recuse himself from his role as the minister with responsibility for inquiries policy while he himself is being investigated by the cabinet office. We must also see the terms of reference for the inquiry and know who is leading it,” was the media reaction of Tory party Chair Kevin Hollinrake.
LibDem Cabinet Office Spokeswoman Lisa Smart echoed that with: “I’m appalled by reports of smear tactics by a party that promised to make politics cleaner than clean. It looks like the group that credits itself with getting Labour into government has carried out an outrageous attack on our independent free Press.”
Number 10 is briefing that the prime minister still has “full confidence” in Simons which – even among many Labour MPs – only conjures up unnerving memories of him saying the same about Angela Rayner, Mandelson, McSweeney and most recently the revelation that Starmer’s former communications director, Matthew Doyle, was elevated to the Lords despite it being known he campaigned for an accused (later convicted) paedophile friend.
*Labour Together is now led by the respected former Mirror editor Alison Phillips who, to her credit, has expressed ‘horror’ at the revelations and backed an independent investigation into what happened under her predecessors.
Romeo… to love or loathe her?
Another appointment judgement storm is building over Starmer’s preferred pick for cabinet secretary, Britain’s top civil servant job, the talented, flamboyant but controversial Antonia Romeo. Tuesday’s Times finding room on page 1 for this headline: ‘Claims that Romeo was a bully were covered up’ – a reference to her time as our colourful, party-loving, celebrity courting, free-spending New York consul general. Allegations that have featured prominently on Channel 4 News, while publicly dividing opinion for and against her among normally publicity shy retired mandarins.
In the continuing Mandelson fallout, rumours are rife that National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell has turned down the offer of becoming Starmer’s chief of staff. Once Tony Blair’s chief of staff, he had an inside seat on Mandelson’s chequered career. Friends suggest he didn’t share Morgan McSweeney’s enthusiasm for appointing Lord Mandelson Washington ambassador and may be considering leaving his cabinet post.
One question that continues to puzzle me is whether the prime minister personally, forensically grilled Mandelson before appointing him or left that to others. You might have expected Starmer – as a former DPP – to have taken it upon himself given the sensitivity involved. But when you scrutinise his various statements, it’s unclear.
As one senior former minister put it: “The line that Keir was lied to or misled and didn’t know the full facts just won’t wash any more with the public. For a man who makes great play of being the former director of public prosecutions, voters will increasingly ask themselves: Is he incurious, incompetent, gullible or something worse? Genuine achievements by the government are being drowned in the muddy waters surrounding Keir’s personal judgement blunders. If we not only lose the traditionally safe Gorton and Denton seat next week, but finish third as some poll suggest, the pressure can only increase exponentially’.
Wednesday’s front pages offered a modicum of relief for the prime minister with several titles opting to focus instead on the widening police investigation into how much the UK - and UK private airports – had featured in Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking operations. Against this backdrop, the Mail is now effectively campaigning on the grounds that a “full police inquiry” into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is “the only way to restore trust in the monarchy”. It rather echoes former PM Gordon Brown’s public fury over both Andrew and Peter Mandelson’s Epstein history.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s public call this week for Andrew to follow her and Bill’s decision to testify to the US congressional inquiry can only up the pressure on King Charles to persuade his unwilling sibling to do the honourable thing.
So, let’s finish this column where it began with the final paragraph of Andrew Rawnsley’s Observer column on Starmer the day before Monday’s election volte face: “Labour should brace for a shellacking at the May elections. Until then, he will remain Schrodinger’s prime minister, precariously poised between life and death.”
The odds on ‘death’ seemingly shortening by the day.
Stop press:
An explosive week became even more extraordinary at 8am on Thursday with the unprecedented police raid and arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, on his 66th birthday, at his new home on his brother King Charles’s Sandringham private estate. Followed by a statement from the King, who had received no advance warning of his sibling's arrest, offering support for the investigation into alleged misconduct in public office.
It is the first arrest of a senior royal since King Charles I who ultimately lost his head, a fate Andrew at least won't face if he is eventually prosecuted and convicted. The alleged offence carries a potential life sentence although legal experts say a prison term between 5 and 10 years would be normal.
Inevitably, the arrest triggered global headlines as Thanes Valley detectives questioned the arrested former Duke of York and officers searched his Norfolk home and former palatial home on the Windsor estate. Police are also expected to search Andrew's former office and living quarters in Buckingham Palace itself.
Interviewed by GB News, I could only say that as a lukewarm monarchist, I wouldn't celebrate predicting this was likely. In a book and on air at the time of the coronation, I warned that the then Prince Andrew's toxic relationship with Epstein was the "ticking timebomb" threatening the future of the monarchy.
Meanwhile, good sources tell me to anticipate the arrest within days of Peter Mandelson also on misconduct in public office allegations.
Potentially, it raises the prospect of both the man who was once second in line to the throne and the man who was once de facto deputy prime minister being in prison.
Both Mountbatten-Windsor and Mandelson deny wrongdoing.
Ironically, if convicted the pair would owe their downfall to their mutual friend, the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein's obsession with keeping detailed records of their connections and dealings.
Andrew's arrest will also up the pressure from the US Congressional Epstein Investigation on both King Charles and Starmer to facilitate him testifying.
Meanwhile eight UK police forces are continuing to investigate separately Mountbatten-Windsor's potential links to Epstein's international sex trafficking operation.
Somewhat eclipsed by the historic royal drama was the decision by Keir Starmer to defy some prominent critics and appoint Antonia Romeo cabinet secretary, the first woman to hold Britain's top civil service role.
Stop press extra:
The Royal Family will now be bracing themselves for the next opinion poll on the monarchy in the wake of Andrew's arrest.
Although there is sympathy for the King, it won't be lost either that over the years, there have been countless media stories (I was involved in some) about Andrew’s dubious conduct as a globetrotting taxpayer funded UK trade envoy. Conduct that alarmed diplomats and officials who would have reported back to London.
It is hard to believe that those alarm bells didn't reach the Palace but no action was taken. The alleged misconduct happened during the late Queen's reign and she is well known to have indulged her favourite son, including that infamous £12m settlement with Virginia Giuffre. But no one in royal circles doubts that the then Prince Charles was consulted in the decision to make the payoff to avoid a US court battle. The ticking timebomb ticks on for the embattled House of Windsor.
