Keir Starmer Told 'It's Over' After Losing His 'Brain' Morgan McSweeney
Keir Starmer will run the gauntlet on Monday night as he addresses the weekly meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Those gathering in Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons will include some of the prime minister’s fiercest critics, as well as his dwindling band of supporters.
The PM is expected to tell his MPs and peers that he is “angry and frustrated” over the Peter Mandelson which has triggered the biggest crisis of his time in Downing Street.
The disgraced former Labour peer, who Starmer appointed the UK’s ambassador to Washington a year ago, now faces a criminal investigation for allegedly leaking sensitive information to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Morgan McSweeney, the highly-influential No.10 chief of staff who advised the PM to give Mandelson the plum diplomatic role, paid with his job on Sunday afternoon.
“Keir has just lost his political brain,” observed one MP.
Few inside the Labour Party do not believe that Starmer himself will be next through the exit door.
One MP told HuffPost UK: “It’s over, but he has a chance of running this till Gorton is done.”
That is a reference to the Gorton and Denton by-election on February 26, where Labour is defending a majority of nearly 13,500 but face a monumental challenge to see off the challenge of the Greens and Reform UK.
Starmer will tell the PLP he is “beyond angry” with Mandelson and pledge to introduce a range of reforms to clean up politics in light of the scandal.
A senior government source said: “The Epstein scandal exposed a culture that didn’t value the lives of women.
“It is utterly contrary to what Keir Starmer stands for and the values at the heart of a government tackling misogyny in schools, halving violence against women and girls and overhauling how our criminal justice system serves victims.”
But left-wing Labour MP Andy McDonald told Radio 4′s Today programme that unless the PM admits his own mistakes, he is toast.
“If he comes tonight and simply says Peter Mandelson was horrible and he’s very nasty and I made a mistake to believe what he said and we move on and we carry on as we are, that’s not going to cut it,” he said.
“Everybody in the PLP knows it’s much deeper than that.”
He added: “It’s in his hands. If he doesn’t own the error he’s made and recognise the problem in front of him and tell us how he’s going to deal with it, then I’m afraid it is coming to an end, if not today then certainly in the weeks and months ahead.”