499. Is It Game Over for Starmer?

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1:15Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And we're doing this as a live, but this will also go out as this week's main episode because, Just to be absolutely frank, things are moving pretty quickly within the Keir Starmer world. Many of you will have seen the monologue I did last night on the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer's chief of staff and longtime senior aide. We've heard this morning that my former deputy a long, long time ago, Tim Allen, who went in a few months ago to try to improve communications as communications director, he's also gone this morning.

1:54Keir Starmer is going to be talking to the PLP this evening as the Parliamentary Labour Party, all the MPs and peers. And I suspect they will probably take some persuading that this show can be got back on the road. I think it can, but I can see why an awful lot of people are very, very, very jumpy. And we've had Kemi Badenock, the Conservative leader out this morning, saying that Keir Starmer should go. So we're recording on a morning where If you walk into the newsagents, most of the headlines in the papers are all repeating the same line, which is variations on 48 hours to save his premiership.

2:33Can Keir Starmer hang on? Is this the final death blow? Dead man walking, days numbered. The Daily Mail, for example, how long can Starmer hang on? The Express, are Starmer's days numbered? And they all echo the same stuff. Can we start maybe with that framing? What's going on there? Do you take that seriously? Is this Westminster bubble speak with journalists just endlessly quoting anonymous sources and trying to manufacture a crisis? I mean, how would you react if all those papers arrived on your desk? Well, it's definitely that, but it is also very, very serious. And sometimes it does take a sort of tipping point.

3:12And the Mandelson-Epstein relationship and the appointment and all the debate about who vetted and who didn't vet and who recommended and who didn't has sort of come at a point where Keir Starmer was already quite weak because of all sorts of mishaps that have happened, this by-election coming up and the Ferrari whether Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, should be allowed to stand. and you've got a lot of very, very angry Labour MPs who just feel the government has not been operating in the way that it should. And of course, just on the media point, as I said in my monologue, they can only do one volume and it has to be louder and louder and louder.

3:49And of course, we've had several years where part of the game, and I hate the way it is by so many of our journalists seen as a game, part of the game of political media is to keep going, try and turn a sort of problem into a scandal, a scandal into a crisis, and then get a scalp. That's the sort of game. The question is whether that's the right thing for the country and for the Labour government. And it was interesting, I mentioned Kemi Badenoch. I mean, I thought her, I heard her interview on the radio this morning, and she was very, very strong. And I do think she, as a performer, as a politician, has got a lot stronger in recent weeks.

4:25But I think where she was weak is on this idea that, you know, are we going to become like Italy, where you just keep changing your prime minister every time anything goes really wrong or if there's a scandal and i think the question on this is i guess in the end it is down to the mps and the cabinet to decide what they think is the best way forward and right now again sorry to repeat what i said last night but it's sort of it all did come from the heart i'm not convinced right now i've got my complaints about Keir Starmer. I've had a lot of complaints about Morgan McSweeney and about the government as a whole.

5:01But I think if Labour were suddenly to sort of lurch now into a leadership contest without any clear sign of where that would end, I think it could make things even worse. So where I think we are is that Keir Starmer, who is not Tony Blair, is not Barack Obama, is not Bill Clinton, but in a very, very difficult set of circumstances, is he's kind of, he's got some of the skills that you need to be the prime minister. He lacks others, no doubt about that. But I just worry that right now, even though, as you say, the media debate is this furore, the debate within the party and the PLP is this sort of, this level of intensity.

5:43I think there are people within the country just going to think, this is just, this is weird. And then ask the question, are we actually becoming ungovernable? But what do you think? Do you think he's kind of, are you with the sort of headlines that he's basically had it? Well, let's maybe circle back to that by just touching briefly on the substance, which we're going to have to get into more deeply. So the Mandelson appointment is very, very damaging because it's not just a lapse of judgment. It's appointing as your ambassador to Washington somebody who was tied in financially and in intelligence terms to an international criminal network, number one.

6:25Number two, Starmer's record as prime minister has been very disappointing. We've talked about his net popularity rating, which is catastrophically low. The complete absence for proper growth narrative, these incredible tactical mistakes on things like Winterfuel, where he does something in U-turns and comes back. And then we've got the whole question of a very unhappy Labour party in Parliament. the question is with that backdrop first see is this just like a i don't know banderia in the in the in the in the bull in the spanish ring that it's not necessarily on its own the thing that brings him down because of course on its own as you've pointed out there's an incredible irony if if starmer was brought down by epstein when trump was a good friend of epstein's and you know had private parties from at Mar-a-Lago and all this, and Starmer, as far as one knows, never met Epstein.

7:24So that would be very odd. But the only reason one could understand it is in the context of all the other mishaps and this just being the final thing. So I don't know. And I think because it's quite difficult getting rid of a Labour leader, I mean, you said it's about the MPs in the Cabinet. Of course it is. But we also saw with Jeremy Corbyn that that wasn't enough to get rid of him, even when the majority of MPs turned against him, if the leader wants to just dig their heels in and stay, they can. It comes down to the very odd question of psychology. I mean, in the end, Liz Truss chose to resign.

8:00Boris Johnson, Theresa May, they chose to go. Now, in Johnson's case, it had become catastrophic because the whole cabinet basically was right. 56 ministers had resigned. But in the end, the Prime Minister has to choose to go. And I think on that, I think that People do sort of talk about his thick skin and his resilience and what have you. I think he has had a few dark nights of the soul in recent days. And we know that he had those in the past when Labour lost in opposition, lost the by-election in Hartlepool. and he you know we all know he seriously thought about whether he could do this whether he was ever going to be able to lead the Labour Party into government of course he did that with this landslide and I think was disappointed so many of the MPs and don't forget a lot of these people as you know they they don't know that much about politics they've never really been through all the tough times that you have to go through in politics they're new MPs who came in this wave a landslide.

8:54God, we've got a landslide. We can now do so much. And I think one of the things that they have found difficult, I don't think they felt terribly respected by number 10. I think that the, and perhaps this might be a point to talk about the specific issue that sort of created this frenzy last night about Morgan McSweeney. Keir Starmer clearly owes him a lot in terms of Keir Starmer. He's been a lawyer. He's been the director of public prosecutions. He decides to become an MP relatively late in life. And he hires this guy, Morgan McSweeney, who gets to know Morgan McSweeney, who I guess he sees as having political skills on the organisational and the campaign side that maybe he feels he doesn't have.

9:38My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that McSweeney did four things for Starmat. He's credited with helping him win the leadership in the first place. He's credited with having purged the left from the party. He's credited with having designed the election strategy and finally with having run number 10. Is that right? Well, credited is a very interesting word. I think one of the points I was going to make is that, do you remember we said at the time when the book about the Labour campaign was published called Get In? Yeah. And I said at the time, I think this is a really damaging book for Keir Starmer because it gives the impression that he's what we used to call in, And I remember we used to sometimes refer to candidates as legal necessities.

10:26And it's like, you know, it's almost like he's been put in there, but actually it's these guys over here, and particularly Morgan, who are running the show. That is terrible for a leader. And so when you say credited, who's giving the credit? Even today, I notice on the radio and the television, I notice allies of Morgan McSweeney say this was a terrible decision. Can you interpret that for me? Most of us don't understand what the hell that means. um when media says allies the morgan mcsweeney says that's a terrible position what sort of person i'm not asking to name names but what kind of person has a journalist talked to and has morgan encouraged him to say it and what's going on when that story happens well it's not impossible that it's morgan mcsweeney gotcha it's not impossible that is people who work for morgan mcsweeney who will feel very very sad and unhappy and you know hacked off that he's this person to who they feel has been so central as, if you like, being pushed out as a sacrificial lamb.

11:25But there's another one. Every time you listen to the news at the moment, it says, the BBC, ITV, Sky News, we understand that Peter Mandelson does not think he has committed a crime and da-da-da. That is the same thing. That's code for Mandelson himself, probably. Yeah. Saying it off the record. Yeah. Correct. Or certainly somebody that the media knows is close enough to be able to, to be authoritative. And so Patrick Maguire, one of the authors of that book, has a big piece in The Times today, which essentially is saying, posing the question that, oh, well, we're not sure that Keir Starmer can actually cross the road without Morgan MacSweeney.

12:02It's almost like that. Now, that is a construct that has been developed over time. And look, I think Morgan MacSweeney does have an awful lot of talent, an awful lot of skill. I don't think it's a secret. I didn't think it was necessarily that those skills lend themselves to being the chief of staff of the G7 economy. So you would say that you'd meet with Keir Starmer on Hampstead Heath and you'd talk to him and presumably you would talk about Morgan McSweeney. You haven't on this podcast openly come out and called for McSweeney to step down, I presume because you've got, you know, you have discrete conversations with Starmer which you don't want to share.

12:40But if you were making those arguments what would you have been saying well no but also i have discrete conversations with tim allen with jonathan powell with morgan mcsweeney with and i think as i said last night i think that i hope that our listeners and viewers understand that sometimes you are we are one is it's the same for you if you're talking to people in different governments that we're talking about and you actually know things that i might ask you and you just you have to finesse it i would have said, and I have said this in the past, I think, maybe not in these terms on the podcast, but if your strategy is not working, then that ultimately is down to you, the leader.

13:21You have to have absolute clarity about what you're trying to do. But if the person who is credited is identified as the main strategist and the strategy is not working, that is a real problem. Alistair, to be really blunt, if I were to read your diaries in 10 years' time, you've basically been sitting there for months saying Morgan McSweeney should go. This is not good. I have been saying for months that I think there is a fundamental problem inside that operation. It's not just about Morgan McSweeney. It's about, I think the big thing is about, and we've said this so many times, do we really know what Tony Blair used to call the big picture is?

13:59What is the compelling narrative that Keir Starmer is telling the country about who he is, what he's trying to do and how that's going to benefit the country? We get snatches of it. And I thought one of the strongest points that, again, Kemi Badenow made this morning is, you know, we've had resets and missions that were missions, then they're not. So that's a problem. And that's a problem for the operation as well. You have to have somebody in there who is driving that. so I would have certainly said that I'd have said I'd also have said I think that that when I was doing the job that I did I had a lot of attention but partly that's because my job was to talk to the media all the time I may have done it I think I did do it pretty well but I may have overplayed my hand a few times but I I was never there wanting people to think that I was running the whole show.

14:52In fact, that was, I knew was a terrible negative for Tony Blair. And by the way, let me just, I sent you a photograph this morning when I was listening to all this stuff about, oh, well, Keir Starmer's bound to flounder without Morgan McSweeney, he can't tie shoelaces without him, et cetera. And I sent you the front cover of Private Eye from the week that I resigned in 2000 and whatever it was. And it was a collection of photographs. And the one that I thought was most relevant to this was a picture of david frost legendary bbc interviewer interviewing tony blair and david frost says how will you manage without him and you've got a smiling tony blair with a completely blank speech bubble as if he won't be able to say anything without that of course turned out not to be true totally untrue the sun i can remember that somebody reminded me this morning the sun headline was blair loses his brain so the point is and this is a point i was trying to make last night is ultimately we have so much focus in this kind of soap opera political world on advisors and sometimes like cummings they generate that for themselves peter when he was an advisor was a little bit like this they want it to be about them and ultimately it is about the politicians the politicians have to show that they have it and so i think when keir starmer goes in to see the parliamentary Labour Party tonight, what they're going to want is not, you know, oh, I'm ballzed up on this and I wish I'd done that and Tim Allen's gone, but I'll replace him with this.

16:26They want to know that he's got it within him to understand the scale of the crisis facing him and to get out of it and ultimately to direct a better government. And I was talking to one of the cabinet ministers last night who is, I would still, still very, very supportive of Keir, doesn't want him to go, and who said, if Keir plays this right, it could be liberating for him, but it has to be based on the fact that every time the public see him from now on, they think they're seeing him, his values, his approach to politics, and he's not just somebody who's being pushed out there to read a script.

17:05So that's the kind of thing you'd get a flavour of that. I think the reason I'm a bit gloomy, if I'm going to play my role of being a bit of a critic of Labour. If he hasn't done it yet, I can't see that he's going to be able to do it because I've been bewildered like you have by these endless changes. It was about growth and then it wasn't about growth. It was probably one of the most dramatic ones, but all these sort of different missions and objectives. And what's completely bewildering about that is it's as though he had decided before the election this is what he believed this is what he wanted to do and then a few months after the election he was like okay no now i've really thought about it i was i was wrong there actually this is what i believe and this is what i want to do now i can imagine that happening once maybe if you're a very inexperienced prime minister you might think listen i've been doing this job for five six months and i was naive and actually this is the big issue but the fact is he's done that a third time a force time.

18:04And that's really weird. I mean, being Prime Minister has got to be the most difficult job in the world. But if I think about my own life as a prisons minister, I can recognize that when I came in, I thought the problem was drugs. And then six months on, I thought, actually, look, this thing is about violence. It's got to be about safer prisons. And the system could somehow handle that. If I was very clear, we want prisons that are safe for prisoners, prison office families, and that's what we're going to do for the next year. Everyone can get behind it. If you change it again, people are going to begin thinking, what are you at?

18:39And the advantage of, I'll finish my pompous lecture, but I guess the advantage of Margaret Thatcher, for example, was that every junior minister knew what Thatcher thought about the world. And it wasn't very difficult for them to answer the question, or any civil servant to answer the question, what would Mrs. Thatcher be doing in this situation? And I can't see how Starmer's going to get there because presumably you've been talking to him on a Hampstead Heath, Tim Allen's been sitting with him, Morgan McSweeney's been sitting with him, Mandelson's been sitting with him, and goodness knows who else have been going and trying to help him do this again and again and again and again.

19:18And many of you actually have spent years outside government learning how to do this with political leaders all over the world. I mean, you're very practiced now. It's probably half a dozen of you who are very, very, Blair probably does it with him too, very practiced at how you sit down with a political leader and say, okay, who are you? What do you want? What's it going to deliver for the country? And if you haven't managed to do it yet, I cannot believe that he's going to be able to find that for the PLP in the future. The concept and the issue that you're speaking to, which is something that I do talk to other leaders around the world about, is the importance of this thing that I call the reputational currency bank.

20:00How much currency do you have in your reputational bank? So if you think about something like Peter Mandelson, so there's Peter, very tricky character, without all sorts of ups and downs, but pretty effective in lots of different ways when we were coming through opposition into government. He sort of agitates to get a senior a job. He gets into the cabinet. We have his first resignation. And off he goes into the wilderness for a little bit, but he's got enough currency in the reputational bank. Tony brings him back. He then goes off and he does something stupid again, and he resigns again. And he goes off and licks his wounds and rebuilds.

20:40And he's still got a bit of currency in the bank, and he goes off to be a commissioner in Europe. And then Gordon Brown, no friend of his, no fan of his who'd sort of the number of times i've had gordon brown in my ear telling me about if i always do what he did like peter because he called him mendelson rather than mandelson and he you know but even for gordon he's got enough currency in the bank what you've seen what's happened over this epstein stuff is all the currency is gone okay now with kia what you're saying is that he had the reputation of being a good DPP. He had the reputation of coming to politics fairly late and seeming to know how to do politics.

21:23He was a pretty effective spokesman in really difficult times for Labour on Brexit. Not always getting to the position I'd like him to, but remember when we interviewed Michel Barnier, he said, as soon as I met Keir Starmer, I thought this guy could be prime minister. So he's got reputation building. He then wins an election. He wins an election. And you don't get more reputational currency in British politics or any politics. Look at the Japanese prime minister today. Her reputational currency has gone soaring because she's just won a landslide. Kia won a landslide. And what you're saying is that since then, I would argue there's been lots of good things he's said, lots of good things he's done.

22:00There is progress that's being made. I think the country is on many levels better than it was. but there've been you mentioned some of them but you know winter fuel the farmers um some of the scandals that you know benefit to charge our benefit the u-turns the sort of playing around in europe so i think that where i would say he's at is that the reserves are running low um he to to refill that currency reputational bank he has got to give the plp starting today the sense he knows how to get a grip and you know we shall see we shall see and then i add in the second question which i alluded to last night that for a political party and of course this it may just be that we're going through one of these weird periods of history where both the main political parties that we've all taken for granted royal lives as sort of really an existential peril.

22:59But he's got the by-election coming up, which is obviously going to be very, very difficult, made more difficult by what's gone in recent days. We've got the local elections, the Scottish elections, the Welsh elections, which are going to, May the 7th, they look really, really difficult. So he's got all these things coming up. We've got the economy not quite motoring. And I think that goes to the heart of what you said. I've got to say one thing I would do if I were him, I would come out straight straightaway and actually say, we did talk about growth. We should have stuck with that. Here's the growth strategy.

23:31Here it is. And make it a huge thing for the country. And also, the other thing, this is the Labour Party, because a lot of these MPs, who, as I say, don't really know what tough times are like in terms of, you know, just what politics is like. I think that they need to know that if Labour is going to win again, it's got to face up to the tough things that need to be done. Otherwise, we just morph into a sort of soft left mush that isn't going to make the change. It's just going to make people feel better about being a losing Labour Party again. Just to try to work out what happens now. So let's say people feel, and definitely some of my friends who are still in Parliament feel, that they don't want a leadership election.

24:18They think that both West Streeting and Angela Rayner, who are the main contenders, would be too divisive. Some of them are now a bit regressing that Andy Burnham didn't come in as an option, but the options they've got, they feel, would be a little bit too divisive, one, two left wing, one, two right wing. They're worried that Angela Rayner, because of the problems that she had with her tax and mortgage payments. It's not an ideal time for her at a moment of scandal, and it's not an ideal time for West Streeting, who's seen as very much being part of the sort of Morgan McSweeney-Mandelson universe.

24:52So I suppose the best case scenario for them might be Starmer remains in place, but then he really gives space to Secretary's estate doing radical and impressive things. So I'm more on the right of this argument. So I would like to see West Streeting really unleashed to do brave, difficult reforms to the NHS. I'd like to see Peter Kyle as Biggs and Secretary completely rethinking how to get rid of regulation, get rid of red tape, get entrepreneurship going, get businesses growing, make Britain really grow. I'd like to see the chancellor be braver and tougher on getting public spending under control.

25:35I think if you got even those three things going, maybe I might like to see someone like Al Kahn's in a more senior position bringing a bit of charisma and shape and energy to the labor projects. And maybe you might think at some point of bringing back a voice like Angela Rayner to push on with planning and housing. And you do it under Sama, but you do it not, maybe this is too romantic. Not in the way that McSweeney did, which was very central controlling, we control the narrative, we're a campaigning machine, we can barely be bothered to speak to a lot of these ministers half the time, but actually go for a first amongst equals model and really get behind these people.

26:11We can argue about some of the specifics that you talk about, but as a general approach, I totally agree with that. And that probably doesn't mean at some point, if he does get through this period, that he does have to think about a reshuffle that is more significant than the last one where it was a huge fuss and in the end only one person and one person left and she became deputy leader of the Labour Party Lucy Powell um and I and I think this point about you know some of the stuff I talked about last night that this sense of all the way that politics is talked about in the media the way that the short-termism in our politics the sort of the the kind of levels of of dissonance in our public debate the the way that social media and the media more generally, this is all about rage, what have you.

26:57I think he's got to, whoever's prime minister in the modern age has got to take that on. Takeuchi. I'm afraid this is one of the lessons from how Trump came back. You've got to fight all the time for what you actually believe in. Instead of thinking you can play a bit of way, well, let's go this way on that policy, this way on that, a bit of left, a bit of right. You know, let's keep the reformed people happy, but let's you know let's let's also lean over here it doesn't work like that anymore you've got to be absolutely clear about your core and i think that's what the mps want to see they will say right look you've been elected thank thanks to you and the changes you made in the labor in opposition a lot of us are now mps we want to see it and that's without that you just limp on from i said last night you know the the the worst thing thing that really depresses me is that when somebody says to me, oh, it's just looking like the last lot now, it's hard to argue against that when you go from one bad thing to the next.

27:59Well, let's take a very short live break. And then I think as we come back, let's look at the bigger questions around Epstein, Maddelson, and also Epstein in the US.

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