Starmer in ‘last-chance saloon’ unless he changes course, MPs warn

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, an exhibition shedding new light on the work of Pablo Picasso. There's lots of heavy intellectual stuff for you to get involved in if you want, but I would say that the main thing about this exhibition is just how exciting and alive it feels.

0:36But first, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has been given a stark warning from Labour MPs who have expressed public and private frustration with his leadership as he prepares to welcome US President Donald Trump on a state visit. This week also marks the first flight sending asylum seeker deportees to France under the one-in-one-out deal signed in July. But Starmer is facing mounting pressure regarding his handling of the sacking of the US Ambassador Peter Mandelson over his relationship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the resignation of Angela Rayner, who quit as Deputy Prime Minister following a tax scandal.

1:16Labour backbencher Richard Bergen, a long-standing left-wing critic of Starmer's leadership, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he would be gone if May's elections in Scotland, Wales and parts of England go badly for Labour. He added, It feels like we are years and years into an unpopular government, rather than a year into a government that's just got rid of the Conservatives. We're losing votes to the left, we're going to be losing seats to the right. Rosanna Allen-Khan, a former shadow minister under Starmer, suggested the Prime Minister had less than a year to turn his fortunes around.

1:51But speaking today on BBC Breakfast, Baroness Jackie Smith came to Starmer's defence, saying that he very quickly made the decision to sack Lord Mandelson. What's clear is, whilst there was some knowledge about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein at the point at which he was appointed and he'd apologised for that, the real detail, the real shocking detail about the nature of that relationship became apparent last, fully apparent last Wednesday afternoon. And the Prime Minister took very quick action at that point to remove him as our ambassador. Labour is trailing Nigel Farage's Reform UK in opinion polls and has lost a large number of council by-elections since Starmer won in a landslide at the 2024 general election.

2:38Joining us now is The Standard's Chief Political Correspondent Rachel Burford. Rachel, what do you make of Burgin's comments this morning? Yeah, there has been over the weekend and this morning a growing number of Labour MPs coming out and suggesting that the Prime Minister needs to change course significantly or he will not be the leader of the Labour Party going into the next general election for years' time. There has been a lot of suggestions that, you know, we've got local elections coming up next year in May in Scotland, Wales and large parts of England. Those are predicted to go quite badly for Labour at the moment.

3:15Richard Bergen is a prominent left-wing MP and he has been critical of Starmer's policies and the way the Labour government has been going for quite a long time. So it's not unusual for him to be speaking out against the leadership. There have been recent by-elections where Labour are losing seats on councils across the country to reform. Polling suggests that Nigel Farage's party are top of the polls and Labour has fallen into second or even third position in some of those polls. So there's a lot of discontent among some Labour MPs about the direction the party is going in at the moment and how they can combat that.

3:51Tell me a bit more about what Starmer is up against at the moment. He's got Donald Trump coming this week for his big state visit and overshadowing that is this whole sort of scandal with Mandelson having sacked his US ambassador over his relationship with Epstein. Obviously, Donald Trump has faced questions about his relationship with Epstein as well. So there is sort of, you know, how that is going to be handled, that's going to have to be handled very carefully. And it is something that is very much overshadowing this whole visit by the US president. The week before last, when Angela Reina resigned, Keir Starmer then went on a big sort of reshuffle of his cabinet.

4:24That included a bit of a purge of the Home Office particularly, where they swapped around a lot of the ministers that had been in that department. Immigration is a huge issue with the public and polls suggest it will be at the moment one of the big sort of issues of the next general election. Cracking down on those small boat crossings, which were record numbers, is a big deal for the government. They're hoping that this one-in-one-out deal with France does go down well with the public. Obviously, there is a lot of criticism of it in that it essentially is not reducing the number of people that are going to be coming to Britain.

5:00But there is a hope that the public will see that as something that is being done and also that it may deter people from making that very dangerous crossing over the Channel. Starbuck has always faced criticism from the left side of the party. So what can we expect from the Labour conference? There's going to be a lot of eyes on that. There's going to be a lot of suggestions about what they're going to do, particularly with immigration. It'll be the new kind of reshuffled cabinet will be unveiled. Dahmer is going to, he's tried to sort of reset his government when we came back from the summer recess.

5:33And that was all sort of overshadowed by Angela Rayner quitting and now this Mandelson scandal. So there's going to be a lot of eyes on what goes on at Labour conference and how that goes down and, you know, how the speeches from these new Secretary of States in their new positions go down and what they're going to say there, whether there'll be any sort of big new policies unveiled. Starmer has always faced criticism, you're right, about his position on certain things. When he took over from Jeremy Corbyn, it was a big sort of pull back to the centre ground for Labour from what was Jeremy Corbyn with his very left-wing values.

6:07There are still some Labour MPs that are part of that left wing faction of the party. Starmer was criticised when he first came in for sort of trying to purge them from their positions. There are still a few that are suspended for doing things like voting against the two-child benefit cap. And now they are making a lot of noise now that Labour are dropping in their poll position. Starmer came in with this huge landslide victory, but actually it was on quite a small percentage of the vote share. There was a significant portion of the public that did not vote for Labour. He's always had a bit of a fight going on with his left-wing Labour MPs.

6:39And they have been arguing for a long time now that Labour should embrace more left-wing values rather than chasing after the reform votes, which I think is what a lot of them see Stam as trying to do at the moment with this very sort of anti-immigration stance, not just trying to crack down on small votes, but also trying to crack down on legal migration as well and people coming in to work here as care workers and reducing the number of visas that are given out to foreign workers. This is seen by some as a way to show that they're trying to challenge reform, but there was a lot of people, I think, in the Labour Party and actually some Labour voters as well who are thinking we're not reformed.

7:17There were some Labour voters that were massively put off by this sort of more right-wing stance that the government is taking. Finally, is there anything else you want to add? The big news this morning is Danny Kruger, the Tory MP and shadow minister, has announced he's defecting to reform. Obviously, that's more of a blow to Kemi Badenoch than it is to Keir Starmer, but he is quite a prominent Tory figure. He's only been an MP since 2019. He previously worked for David Cameron. He worked for Boris Johnson before he got elected to Parliament. And he was a shadow work and pensions minister. And this morning said in his speech announcing that he was defecting to reform, he said the Conservative Party is over, which kind of now is seen as some, why some are cementing reform as the real opposition now.

8:02Although they don't have that many MPs, they are leading in opinion polls. And you've now got Conservative MPs and shadow ministers coming out and saying that party is over and joining Nigel Farage's team. I think although that's a huge blow for Kemi Baden-Ark, it does kind of cement this idea that they are now the opposition. With this defection, it perhaps might sort of spark this idea in number 10 that Labour does need to take more of an extreme stance on immigration and sort out cost of living because that is kind of driving voters towards reform. Let's go to a break. coming up in part two.

8:41Pablo Picasso was fascinated by performers and their ability to transform, and the Capitol has staged its own show to celebrate his artistic genius. We'll see you back here in just a moment.

9:02Welcome back. A new exhibition at the Tate Modern, Theatre Picasso, is offering viewers the chance to experience Pablo Picasso's works in a new way. He was inspired by the dancers, entertainers, and bullfighters he painted, and borrowed from them to create his own public persona, Picasso the Artist. Through his persona, Picasso cultivated a myth surrounding himself as both a celebrated artist and an outsider, and the exhibition space is transformed into a theatre for displaying over 45 works from Picasso. To find out more, I spoke to the Standards Head of Culture, Martin Robinson. Martin, what's the concept behind this exhibition?

9:45Theatre Picasso is a new exhibition taking place at Tate Modern, and it basically looks at the great artist's links to theatre and how he was informed by theatre. These little areas that you wouldn't normally know, but also looking at his theatricality as an artist, So looking at him as a performer, so not just someone who painted pictures, but someone who very much tried to feed his own ideas about what an artist should be. So this is the artist as genius, as sort of outsider. It basically looks at how he really paints pictures and ripping the rule books of art repeatedly. All this stuff is well known of what a dramatic influence he had on just reshaping art over and over and over again.

10:33But this is particularly looking at this idea of him as this great genius working in isolation and doing things that other people wouldn't do. And so the exhibition really looks at the way that he cultivated that. So he was very much about celebrating the idea of Picasso, which, of course, is a very theatrical thing too. And you visited yourself. So what did you think of it? The exhibition itself is really clever and interesting and fun without giving too much away. When you go in, the first thing that you see is Picasso play on a film, 16mm film, that was recorded by Man Ray, who's the other famous friend and artist from that time.

11:10And it's him dressing up as Carmen from the opera Carmen. So it's him pretending to sort of wear a wig and he's very sort of like funny in this moment. As you go through the exhibition, there's lots and lots of all time classic works by him, including The Weeping Woman, which everyone will know. and three dancers which is one of the key parts of the exhibition which is kind of like three figures just dancing in various states of abandon so it's called those but as you go through you realize that actually you are in some ways on a stage and there's kind of like a reveal halfway through as though exactly what that means so it's a very sort of like engaging and fun one I took my kids along they had an amazing time sort of being part of it that part of what the exhibition is looking at it's how a viewer is also a participant with Picasso and his work like you're responding to it and you're engaging with it and that's kind of what he wanted you to do he wanted you to be having some kind of big response to it yeah it's a really good fun one.

12:06So it sounds like you don't need to have much previous knowledge of Picasso to enjoy the show. Yeah I don't think you do I don't think you do probably most people are aware of some some parts of his work and you definitely get those bits. I mean, he was so prolific, it's absolutely astounding. But the exhibition isn't put together to tell the biography of him at all. It's kind of like a real mix of years and styles that are all muddled together. The idea is not to lecture you on Picasso or assume that you know every single part of his story and all of his paintings. It's rather to sort of like pull these things together that looked at the theatricality of Picasso.

12:45So literally his work with theatre, but also him just being this flamboyant sort of artist, god type thing, which he fully went for. So, I mean, there's a lot of brainy stuff going on. It was actually all staged by this artist called Wu Tsang, along with the curator Enrique Puertablancca. So they worked together on putting this together. And there's a lot of heady sort of descriptions about what they're aiming for and the performativity. Finally, how rare is it to come across such a prolific multidisciplinary artist? Someone like him, who did such a wide variety of styles and involved in film, sculpture, churning it out.

13:28That kind of stuff I feel like is quite rare. It's also, obviously, you have once in a lifetime, you only have a few people who are such geniuses that they can turn their attention to anything and make it really work and really exciting. Obviously, he's one of the few. Now, he is a very controversial character these days. I'm sure he was not a very nice man. There is also an undeniable artistic genius going on. Part of that, actually, is the value of this kind of exhibition. You can take it as it comes and engage it how it comes. If you want to look at Picasso as sort of a misogynist, for instance, there's plenty of material in here that will help fuel those discussions.

14:05But that's part of art. That's part of what makes it sort of exciting and part of why it keeps on becoming a talking point through the years and through the generations, because there's something in it that's really loaded. I can't imagine anyone coming out of that with the same ideas about what he was and their favourite thing in it. That's cool. I think that's a really nice thing that the Tate have done here.

14:31And that's The Standard. for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm we'll see you then