Here’s how Keir Starmer battled to save his job – for now

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Earlier this week, I wrote a big piece diving into the arguments for and against keeping Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.

Countless articles have been written over the past few days on the case against the PM sticking around – the unrest, the backstabbing, the clandestine plots.

However, Labour MPs have clearly been convinced (at least for now) by the arguments in favour. Two days after Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called for his resignation, Starmer is looking astonishingly secure in his job.

So I thought it would be worth exploring one reason why that might be the case – one that I think has been curiously overlooked.

Of course, there’s the point that Labour figures simply did not want to face the total chaos that would accompany a resignation. In Ed Miliband’s dramatic words from Tuesday morning: ‘MPs looked over the precipice and didn’t like what they saw.’

But one of the other arguments I mentioned in my story on Monday focused on the one word Starmer wants people to associate with his premiership: change.

Now, it’s very easy to be sceptical when the Prime Minister comes promising a new start. Since the general election, he’s probably attempted a reset more times than he’s sneezed and it’s never made much of a difference to his or the government’s approval ratings.

There’s a big difference this time, though. Every other ‘reset’ will have been headed up by the PM’s all-powerful Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney. The latest one is centred upon his departure.

One of the common criticisms around McSweeney’s Downing Street was that the heart of it comprised a ‘boy’s club’, where women’s voices were marginalised.

In a Guardian article on Monday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting implied Peter Mandelson simply would not have been appointed ambassador to the US if a woman had been in the room.

Labour, famously, has a bit of a problem with women. It’s the only major party in the UK to never have been permanently led by a woman. (Harriet Harman stepped in as acting leader during leadership elections in 2010 and 2015.)

No doubt seriously rattled by Monday’s events, Starmer appears to have gone for a major backstage overhaul at No 10. And, at least for now, all the vacant roles – including Chief of Staff, director of communications, and reportedly soon cabinet secretary – are being filled by women.

Many Labour MPs will be hoping this signals not just a change of personnel, but of culture.

The obvious question is, after a week as dreadful as this, will anyone even notice a difference? And that goes for you, reading this now, as much as for anyone in Westminster.

We may be about to find out. At yesterday’s PMQs, Kemi Badenoch went hard on Starmer’s decision to appoint his ex-communications chief Matthew Doyle to the House of Lords.

Doyle, believe it or not, took his seat in the Lords after it was reported he had previously campaigned for a friend who was charged with child sex offences.

The new peer has had the Labour whip removed, but the Labour Party chair Anna Turley suggested he should be booted out of the upper chamber altogether. Will the Prime Minister take her advice?

If Streeting was right, this is exactly the kind of situation that a Downing Street with a changed culture won’t find itself in. How Starmer responds to it now will tell his MPs a lot.

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