Has the cabinet given up on Keir Starmer?

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0:33This is a Global Player original podcast. I think that there is an element of genuine fury about where Keir Starmer is. You think Cabinet is done. There is a very real conversation amongst Labour MPs about whether or not they'd be better off with someone else. A leadership challenge. That would be a pretty weird thing to do because it would ruin the UK economy. But you've cleverly shifted to another question, which is whether or not it would be wise to do. And there's only one candidate out there that might even improve Labour's rating, and that's... I do not think that you automatically have to have the succession plan in place for it all to fall apart.

1:11At any point in the last seven days, have you considered your position and thought about resigning? I think it's very important to see what's going on here. last week my political opponents were saying that there's no way a civil servant wouldn't have told me about the outcome of developed vetting the security exercise turns out my political opponents were completely wrong about that then they said that i was dishonest it turns out they were completely wrong about that they are now putting any allegation that they can and I'll tell you for why, they're opposed politically to what this government is trying to achieve.

1:49That is Keir Starmer this lunchtime, not quite answering the question about whether he thought about resigning, but it has been a horrid and torrid week.

2:01Sam Coates:We are a week on from that breaking news about the Mandelson vetting story. Has that changed everything or nothing? Welcome to the News Agents.

2:17The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. And the latest part of the drama was a lull, because today we had the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, Cat Little, giving evidence to Emily Thornberry's committee. And there were no bombshells. There were interesting details that emerged that perhaps we didn't know, some of which were kind of quite sympathetic to Ollie Robbins, some of which were very helpful to Keir Starmer, but it doesn't change the basic thrust of where we are. And realistically, nothing much changes now, in the absence of new revelations until next Tuesday, when we hear from Morgan McSweeney, who was Keir Starmer's chief of staff and the person who was instrumental in getting Peter Mandelson to be our ambassador in Washington.

3:10Sam Coates:I wouldn't underplay that, Quite so much, because to give you the context around this, Kat Little, who is the one speaking this morning, is the permanent secretary at the cabinet office. She is still in the job. She is a civil servant in the job. And her role is to basically put forward the prime minister's view, the prime minister's needs. And I think there was quite a lot of disquiet amongst civil servants and ex-civil servants about the fact that the Foreign Affairs Select Committee had called her in the first place. It was understandable that Ollie Robbins had been called. Ollie Robbins was the person who became the centre of this story because of his decision to take the vetting as he saw it and make a balanced decision that Peter Mandelson would nevertheless be confirmed in the role of ambassador to Washington.

4:04Sam Coates:So the idea that Cat Little was being called when she is somebody who's still in the job, who actually isn't meant to be public facing. None of these civil servants really are meant to be particularly public facing. The idea that she had to come forward essentially just to give the prime minister's perspective, whilst probably feeling quite jittery about the fact that one of her most senior and respected colleagues had been fired this time last week, I think was a pretty uncomfortable position. Of course, I don't disagree with that at all. I'm just thinking in terms of new revelations that have emerged that fundamentally change our understanding.

4:46Well, let's go through a couple. So she says... Well, let's just finish my point. The fact of the matter is that we've had the Ollie Robbins account of what happened and we've had the Keir Starmer account of what's happened. And this was sort of designed there to be more supportive, obviously, of Keir Starmer because she's a serving, cabinet secretary. And you're right. Look, this is the middle of a political dogfight. And in the middle of a political dogfight, you don't normally put up a civil servant to be part of that. They should be apart from the fray.

5:16Sam Coates:So what she does is she actually contradicts some of Robbins' evidence. And I think it's worth just taking through that, because one of the bombshells that we heard from Ollie Robbins was that the cabinet office weren't interested in vetting. They almost sort of threw the idea of vetting away. And she says that the Cabinet Office did not try to avoid Mandelson getting developed vetting, as Robbins had claimed. And she says she can actually produce the papers, the, you know, what we call the audit trail, essentially, to show that there was a debate between security officials and the Cabinet Office advised the Foreign Office that he should go through the vetting.

5:53Sam Coates:So immediately, we have got a discrepancy there at the top. Obviously, she's in the cabinet office. She has to support the role of the cabinet office. But she makes us question some of that evidence where he said, oh, they were pretty dismissive. There was never really a question of vetting. She also tells us, I think confirms for us something that has been in the press, that she found out the state of Mandelson's vetting in March of this year, March the 25th of this year. The prime minister, we now know, didn't know until Tuesday of a week ago. And so one of the questions for her was, why did you sit on all that stuff for so long without telling the Prime Minister?

6:34Sam Coates:This bombshell has just hit you. Why aren't you immediately going to tell people? And what she says, I think, reveals just how much pressure and how much concern there is over this whole issue. She went to get legal advice first. She had to get her legal ducks in a row. She had to go to her line manager first before the Prime Minister could know. So I do think that sort of takes you into the heart of something that for most people feels arcane. It's not about the cost of goods. It's not about the war in Iran. It's not about our standing on the world stage. It's not about, you know, sort of terrorist attacks around North London.

7:12Sam Coates:So you could be sort of forgiven for saying, well, what's all this about? I think it's about the deterioration of relations between Keir Starmer and his civil servants. And I also think it is allowing the cabinet around Keir Starmer to try and work out how grave this is for him and therefore for them. Are they willing to move? Do they think this is, in other words, terminal? Because he is acting like he's not going to go anywhere and he's not going to go anywhere because they're not going to push him out. But at some point, do they decide this is actually pretty bad? Well, let's speak now to Sam Coates from Sky News, who joins us in the studio.

7:57And it's great to have you here, Sam. Look, you were the person who was on pool duty last week where you get to ask the questions of the prime minister and it's made available to all broadcasters immediately afterwards. and you did put this question to him which seemed to get to the nub of it. Resign when they mislead the public and mislead Parliament. Are you considering your position? That I wasn't told that Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting when he's appointed is staggering. That I wasn't told that he'd failed security vetting when I was telling Parliament that due process had been followed is unforgivable.

8:40Not only was I not told, no minister was told. And I'm absolutely furious about that. What I intend to do is to go to Parliament on Monday to set out all the relevant facts in true transparency so Parliament has the full picture. Prime Minister, why do you always end up sounding like the passenger in this government rather than the driver? Are you really expecting us to believe that a senior civil servant off his own back without any sort of direction about the importance of Peter Mandelson being ambassador, unilaterally overruled security vetting to approve a political appointment. And they made clear it was political.

9:19I was not told that he had failed security vetting. No minister was told that he'd failed security vetting. Number 10 wasn't told that he'd failed security vetting. That is completely unacceptable.

9:33Sam Coates:The passenger and not the driver is a metaphor that's really kind of lasted. Sam, when you met him, there's been a lot of talk about his faux outrage. Did you think it was faux outrage or did you think he was actually furious? I think that there is an element of genuine fury about where Keir Starmer is. But we can't see behind those eyes. and I did wonder whether the outrage was solely at that ex-head of the Foreign Office, Ollie Robbins, who he'd sacked the night before we had that interview, whether it actually was about something a bit wider, whether it was more to do with that sense that there is at the moment that nothing is going in his direction and that the government that he wanted to lead and the tone that he wanted to set hasn't ended up being where we quite evidently are.

10:28So I suppose my answer to that is, yes, he was cross, and I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't all aimed at Ollie Robbins. Do you find him a slightly unknowable character in the sense that there have been other prime ministers who get a very strong sense of what their personality is and what kind of makes them laugh or whether they're gossipy? and I get the impression from people who serve with him that he keeps himself to himself he doesn't speak to anyone very much he reads a lot of papers but doesn't engage so can I be completely honest on one level I think that's slightly unfair like I've known him on and off for you know over a decade before he was leader of the Labour Party he can be chatty and he can be warm He could be much more warm than Theresa May, for goodness sake.

11:21You had somebody that you could engage on a human level. Like, I struggle a bit with people who are so obsessed by football. It's just not something I do. But there's a limit to it. And I was most struck by this on a journey back from India last autumn. And the Prime Minister, at the conclusion of a trade delegation to India, came to the back of the plane. and he had the fortune or misfortune depending on your point of view of suddenly being stuck with me um for a bit of chit chat and i asked him about id cards because genuinely i'm fascinated by this big policy area it wasn't clearly evidently wasn't going that well and i just asked like there is a country you've just been to you were talking about how india does it and and i was just like what what did you pick up from being in that vast country just interested in that debate and essentially he just said oh for goodness sakes i am just stop working go and sit down go and have a drink you're always you're always on and so to the answer to your question about his character i have got a sense that what motivates other politicians doesn't necessarily motivate him i mean i think if you were looking at a blair or a brown or even a cameron that There's a burning passion around policy and direction that you could sniff, that you could feel radiating off them.

12:42That's the thing I've never got from Keir Starmer.

12:46Sam Coates:Yesterday, on your own podcast that you host with Anne McElvoy, you laid down a gauntlet to four cabinet members, or should we say, potential pretenders to the Starmer throne. And you, I think you were talking to their spads. You said, look, Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, Shabana Mahmood, Wes Streeting, tell me if you think the Prime Minister is still doing an excellent job. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing. Please get in touch if you think that, because from everything I've heard, and we all know how we work, we get quiet texts and conversations and chats and all the rest of it. And people tell you things that allow you to sum up the mood.

13:33Sam Coates:You'd summed up the mood. You think Cabinet is done. Is that right? So I was joining in a pylon. So what was going on yesterday morning? Pylon. Is that electricity pylon? Let me explain. There was a stunning article. Stunning because I think it probably will have quite a lot of significance. In the New States when the cover was written by the editor, Tom McTague. and he was the one that was reporting and he is an incredibly well-sourced thoughtful guy and he was reporting that those four or three cabinet ministers and the metromare of manchester basically have lost confidence in uh keir starmer in private but but a sort of heavering about what to do and and and he had some strong language about um you know condemning the country to to maybe two three more years of keir starmer his words um now like you guys have been around the block or not and a fair few times and those names can I just say did not surprise me so I thought I would throw the challenge out there on behalf of me and on behalf of Tom if I was a special advisor I would advise myself to say oh I didn't hear your podcast and nobody got in touch and they will say we never heard it and I will say well funny that and we'll never quite know But I think the big point is there, which is you are not hearing people make a sustained, coherent, passionate case in public or private for this prime minister.

15:04And the biggest lessons in politics I've learned over the last 25 years, particularly when politicians are in trouble, can be heard in the silences, not in the comments.

15:15Sam Coates:Except, Sam, what I would say is it felt very similar to those Gordon Brown months before the 2010 election where you had these sort of putative putches and they came to nothing and people looked like they wanted to act and couldn't. You thought that David Miliband was going to act and he didn't. We thought that Jeff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt at that time were going to act and that fell by the way. Starmer may not be sort of celebrated within his cabinet right now, but he's also no closer to being removed for all the reasons that have sort of stared us in the face for the last six months. But Emily, don't you think that politics is just so much more broken than it was in the late 2000s?

16:04The bottom line is that we're in a fragmented, now multi-party situation where the bonds between political leaders on Labour and the Tories, as we saw time and time again, a much looser combination of Brexit, which severed the bonds within our political, you know, it created big divides within political parties that leaders couldn't unite and heal the wounds. I think social media, WhatsApp, creates these little pockets of dissent within political parties. Political parties are just harder to manage. So I wonder whether the conditions in late 2000s might not have been much more serious for Gordon Brown if they'd happened now.

16:44What I think about...

16:45Sam Coates:Practically, I suppose, is where we get to. Practically. Yeah, and practically, look, there are much more recent historical parallels that we have to draw on, which was the defenestration of successive Conservative prime ministers. And what I'm watching for are the patterns and the similarities to see whether we get there, right? And there are similarities, right? that the ability to govern is there is a very real question on that the ability of the of the prime minister to command a majority in the house of commons over key pieces of legislation is under question he has not been able to do that repeatedly over the last year that is a key precondition now in place not in not in place in the late 2000s the ability to drive through cabinet decisions that are difficult again under under threat under fire uh whether it's migration uh whether it's uh whether it's the descent even over over obscure things like hillsborough there is there is significant cabinet dissent and there is a very real conversation amongst the labour mps about whether or not they'd be better off with some of that so i do think the conditions are different it's not prediction but but some of the preconditions for exit have i mean sam look you know you from the johnson years and when johnson was in eventually felled you know he talked about that phrase about when the herd starts to move it becomes sort of unstoppable and irresistible isn't the problem we've got at the moment is the herd is sort of like the wildebeest on the Mara river waiting for the migration and they're standing there and they can't decide who they want to follow to cross the river and so although the situation has deteriorated for Starmer in the past week has been bloody awful they still haven't resolved who they want to follow across the river and therefore probably for the moment Starmer is safe.

18:35So can I agree and disagree? Do whatever you like. Okay, well, let's put a bit of that in the bin. I do not think, sorry, I do not think that you automatically have to have the succession plan in place for it all to fall apart. Why do I think that? Because that's what we watched. That's what we watched when Boris Johnson was defenestrated. That's what we watched when Liz Truss was defenestrated. Now, you might say Labour is different. I think politics is different. and if people are hanging on this idea that Labour parties don't dethrone their leaders, I just point to the bigger change political circumstance.

19:11And so I don't know. It looks to me as if the edifice of this government is quite rotten because it cannot get the governing functions through. And I think that there is a chance of some kind, you know, if this had happened, the events the last week had happened, the other side of May, I think we might be in a much worse situation because the local election is the only thing that keeping MPs in place. And I think where the herd comes in, and that's you're absolutely right, is that politics is emotional. And there are just moments, that means, where sentiment takes off against a prime minister and bang, even if you don't have a succession plan, it can be all over.

19:46OK, let me just push back on one thing, because someone said something very interesting to me, who's worked with Starmer, which is that when the Johnson coup happened, the cost of borrowing was next to nothing. We're now selling on the bond markets of something like 5 % or whatever. It's hugely expensive. To have a kind of a leadership challenge, which then kind of sends guilt costs going through the roof and the cost of government borrowing through the roof, that would be a pretty weird thing to do because it would ruin the UK economy and people might pull back because of that. Oh, but you've cleverly shifted to another question, which is whether or not it would be wise to do.

20:26I'm just talking about whether or not it might... whether or not they might. And I think the question of whether or not they're wise to do it is a really fascinating one because I look at the polls like you do and there's only one candidate out there. The money might, might even improve Labour's rating if you ask them. And that's Andy Burnham. And you look at Angela Rayner, you look at...

20:46Sam Coates:I mean, Burnham, who is the one person who literally technically cannot be. And you look at the rest, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner, you know, Shabana Mahmood, like voters as a whole, the people that would elect or not elect Labour MPs next time around, are going, less sure about them even than the Prime Ministers. You're starting where most of the cohort could... Their starting ground is the public going, ooh, not sure about that. And then you get onto the question of the markets, which I think is absolutely fundamentally one of the biggest crises that Labour could face if there is a challenge and a sense of challenge.

21:21But I come back to a sentiment. like whether it's the markets whether it's political journalists or whether it's Labour MPs MPs as a whole the move can go up it can go down and when the herd moves it moves

21:34Sam Coates:and it ain't always for great reasons Let's do a moment of sort of post-facto rationalisation for his own survival the smartest thing that Keir Starmer has done all year I would argue was block Andy Burnham from Stanley and Gorton and Denton because presumably if Andy was now the MP there, that would be the kind of lightning rod for change, wouldn't it? Whatever happens in May. Quite possible. I think I would adopt the government official spokesman position. Oh, don't do that. We've had enough of those. Position of, my head can't cope with that counterfactual. Yeah, yeah. I've seen Andy Burnham campaigns before.

22:14But no, you're right. I think that was a defining moment. And that was probably a call that means he's still sitting where he is today, probably.

22:22Sam Coates:Because what you're essentially saying is people will need to ferment chaos and have the appetite for chaos to get rid of the man who is their current prime minister on a huge mandate. I mean, you guys remember what it's like when you get rid of a prime minister. It's like standing behind the jet engine of a massive jumbo jet. You can feel the force coming at you, the sort of the very foundations of the Houses of Parliament shake. It's an incredible feeling. I mean, ferment is a good word. Chaos is a great word. It is that sense that just bang, the collective have decided to go for something. And we haven't been quite there yet.

23:02We haven't like there's still several gauges, DEFCON stages to go before we've we've been there. But the rotting inability to get things done, coupled with evident serial mistakes that just embarrass Labour MPs. The other side of an election where, you know, some of the polling projections, Stephen Fisher suggests that Labour may win only just 15 percent of the seats where they put up a candidate. You know, those are the kind of conditions where might, might, might.

23:29Sam Coates:So a bad result would be enough as a trigger. I don't even think it's enough. I think there needs to be another error on top of a terrible night, I suspect. Thanks, Sam. In a moment, we'll be speaking about Royal Protection officers, particularly the officers around the then Prince Andrew with Andy Hughes of the Crime Agents.

23:54Sam Coates:From a range of trusted voices and award winning journalists. Good morning, I'm Nick Ferrari. It's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. There is also a judgment I made that was wrong. I should not have appointed Peter Mandelson, and I apologize again to the victims of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who were clearly failed by my decision. The pendulum has become turbocharged over the last few days, swinging hither and thither with gay abandon. So where is it now regarding the Prime Minister? Listen on our free Global Player app or the LBC app. LBC leading Britain's conversation.

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