It isn't just Starmer's weakness we're seeing, it's the Labour Party's

The Mandelson affair is a fit of madness, the latest of many

It’s been one of those hyper news days when most of the population will be blissfully unaware that anything happened at all, because in a very real sense, nothing did. After all of the breathlessness, Keir Starmer started the day with his back against the wall and he ends it in the same way. In between, in that liminal space between political everything and nothing, it looked for a moment as if it were all over—and then, just like that, it wasn’t. The Sarwar speech came and went. The world kept turning.

The weirdness of the overall situation can be summed up as follows: much of the Parliamentary Labour Party wants Keir Starmer to go. They have worked themselves into such a frenzy that he might. And yet, deep down, they are not sure they want him to go over this. My instinct is that the public feel much the same. I spent much of the day popping in and out of the LBC studio, in between podcast recordings and re-recordings. Producers told me—and were struck—that the overwhelming number of callers and respondents wanted Starmer to stay in office, and thought it unjust that he should fall over Mandelson.

I can well understand that impulse. I wrote at the end of last week about the hypocrisy of the Mandelson affair. I noted how, FT aside, I could barely find a scrap of Fleet Street copy objecting to the appointment on the basis of his links to Epstein, which were known to all. Since then I’ve checked Hansard. Imagine my surprise to learn that not a single MP rose in the House of Commons to object to the Mandelson appointment on those grounds. Indeed, as far as I can see, there are only two references—in any select committee or parliamentary moment about Epstein—in either House between 2022 and September 2025, when the first of the files dropped. Starmer is judged for looking the other way—yet so did Parliament.

The last week has therefore been, in my view, a fit of collective madness. There is no doubt Starmer should be held to account for appointing Mandelson—a grave error of judgment that a better prime minister might not have made. But unless he misled anyone about it, he should clearly not resign over it. It is another example of the Westminster media-political complex, including the PLP, being addicted to the crack cocaine of minute-by-minute politics which has dominated since the Brexit years. If it’s not OMG!, it’s just not a week worth living.

And though the Sarwar moment has fizzled, Starmer is far from safe. This story will get worse before it gets better. The documents from the “Mandelson files” will be released soon, and they will be deeply embarrassing, full of OMG! moments aplenty. Even if that is survivable, the Gorton by-election looms, and there is May after that.

Perhaps the most depressing thing for the Labour Party is that its problems are not contained to Starmer. The party is institutionally weak all round. The election victory, much feted, rested on a micro share of the vote. That lack of legitimacy has hollowed out the Starmer government from the start. The PLP is weak because it has no idea what it really wants—and in the absence of that, it wants a quiet life. The future is weak because the party does not have a challenger who isn’t, in some way, compromised. Streeting has Mandelson; Rayner has HMRC; Miliband has 2015; Mahmood has her reputation; Burnham has, well, not being an MP; Carns has his quiet beverage. Even the executioners have blades above their heads. And the intellectual life of the party is weak too, having developed no coherent political economy since the Corbyn years—or even New Labour.

Ultimately, this flows from Starmer himself. I’ve long written about his distaste for ideas, and the problems that poses. We are now seeing those problems reach their inevitable conclusion. First, without any sense of an end point—any vision to which to cohere—the Labour Party reverts to its worst unthinking reflexes, its mushy middle mind palace. Second, every crisis is amplified, because nothing larger exists to put it in perspective. Third, in this minute-by-minute media environment, with noise everywhere, strong ideas have never been more important. And finally, without them, all that is left is a focus on probity and competence.

That approach has now been tested to destruction. Starmer is neither as proper nor as steady as he promised he would be—or probably ever could have been. Consequently, scandals like Mandelson seem especially devastating. In 2026, however much Starmer might abhor it, politics is a battle of ideas. His distaste for them leaves Labour fighting without weapons.

If he can survive this week, he might have a few months to put it all on the table—to reveal what, if anything, lies beneath. He should replace the Cabinet Secretary, dismiss his enemies, introduce a raft of anti-corruption measures, remind the media that it is his government which elevated the fight against violence against women and girls, and do his utmost to sketch out what years three, four and five of a Starmer premiership might actually look like.

But I fear that coherence will not emerge, because he himself does not know. From the welfare vote onwards, as his authority dwindled and the PLP took control, the Starmer government has gradually moved towards a single objective: survival. For good or ill, it feels as though we are now in the endgame of that process. It simply remains to be seen how many squares on the board remain.