Starmer tells No 10 staff politics can be ‘force for good’ and says government moving forward ‘with confidence’
Keir Starmer has delivered a message to Downing Street staff telling them that he believes politics can be a “force for good” and that he wants the government to go forward “with confidence”.
From the extracts released by Labour, Starmer gave no indication that he intends to resign. But he did not seem to have a striking new message either, and he did not mention the departure of Tim Allan.
Here are the key quotes, from the briefing supplied to journalists.
The thing that makes me most angry is the undermining of the belief that politics can be a force for good and can change lives.
I have been absolutely clear that I regret the decision that I made to appoint Peter Mandelson. And I’ve apologised to the victims which is the right thing to do.
Starmer also told staff that they were united in having “public duty” as their “driving purpose”.
-
Starmer paid tribute to Morgan McSweeney, saying he would not have been able to change Labour and win the election without his former chief of staff. He said:
I’ve known Morgan for eight years as a colleague and as a friend. We have run up and down every political football pitch that is across the country. We’ve been in every battle that we needed to be in together. Fighting that battle.
We changed the Labour party together. We won a general election together. And none of that would have been possible without Morgan McSweeney.
His dedication, his commitment and his loyalty to our party and our country was second to none. And I want to thank him for his service.
In just a few months, we start the work of lifting half a million children out of poverty. A massive thing to do in this country because that means that lives will be changed.
For decades to come, children who otherwise wouldn’t have fair chance and fair opportunity. Poverty holds children back like nothing else on earth. And so getting rid of child poverty opens up opportunities for so many.
We must prove that politics can be a force for good. I believe it can. I believe it is. We go forward from here. We go with confidence as we continue changing the country.
Key events
No 10 claims Starmer ‘positive, confident and determined’, despite resignation of two key aides within 24 hours
The No 10 lobby briefing has just finished. Here are the main points.
-
Keir Starmer is “positive, confident and determined”, the PM’s spokespeson told journalists. He said:
The prime minister is getting on with the job of delivering change across the country. That was the tone and the content of his address to staff in No 10 this morning.
Asked about the PM’s mood, the spokesperson said:
He was upbeat, confident in his speech to staff this morning. He spoke about how he’s driven by the values of public service. He talked about how that was what brought him into politics later in life after a career, most recently as director of public prosecutions … [He was] positive, confident and determined.
When it was put to the spokesperson there were reports saying Starmer was very depressed at the end of last week, and that he was even contemplating resigning, the spokesperson replied:
That’s not the prime minister who appeared in front of staff this morning.
The question was referring to stories like this one in the Times on Saturday, which said: One cabinet minister predicted that Starmer could quit on Monday after he had taken the opportunity to reflect on the events of recent days with his wife, Victoria.
-
The spokesperson played down suggestions that Allan was sacked, pointing out that Allan said in his statement (see 11.15am) he had decided to stand down.
-
The spokesperson played down suggestions that Allan may have quit because he is worried about embarrassing messages between him and Peter Mandelson being released as a result of the humble address motion passed by MPs on Wednesday. It is understood that the process of finding information that will have to be disclosed has only just got underway.
The Conservatives are urging Labour MPs to replace Keir Starmer. In a statement about the resignation of Tim Allan, Matt Vickers, the Tory deputy chair, said:
The rats are abandoning the sinking ship that is Keir Starmer’s premiership.
Labour MPs should stop moaning and put him out of his misery. The country deserves so much better than this weak, chaotic government.
Jason Groves from the Daily Mail says he is surprised cabinet ministers have not been speaking in public today to defend Keir Starmer.
Distinct lack of cabinet ministers taking to the airwaves this morning to defend the beleaguered PM in his hour of need. Happy to leave it to unelected junior minister Jacqui Smith to try and put a positive gloss on things…
Where are the Cabinet? Not a peep out of any of them in public in the last 24 turbulent hours apart from Pat McFadden arguing there was ‘no point whatsoever’ in Morgan McSweeney resigning, shortly before he did
What commentators are saying about Starmer’s plight
You can read all the Guardian’s coverage of the crisis in No 10 here.
And here are extracts from articles by other journalists and commentators published overnight or this morning. These are all articles filed before it was announced that Tim Allan had resigned.
All that said, there are very few people near the top of this administration who respect the voters as McSweeney does and who dragged Starmer out of his soft-left, legalistic mindset to get tough on immigration or consider welfare reform, and what follows is much more likely to be a wishy-washy Old Labour tax-and-spend trend with Starmer, or whoever replaces him.
There is a parallel here with Theresa May and her twin ‘chiefs’, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. After the 2017 general election, where May surrendered David Cameron’s hard-won majority, the cabinet demanded their heads. May was a creation of ‘Nick and Fi’ every bit as much as Starmer was a creature of McSweeney’s design. Removing the aides who gave her a vision and purpose did nothing for May, who stumbled on, disastrously for Britain, for two more years, shorn of purpose or political skills.
Any Labour MP who thinks they are in a better place to win an election or win over the voters now than they were yesterday needs their head testing. One way of replacing McSweeney would be to bring in Jonathan Powell as chief of staff, the role he performed for Tony Blair, but my understanding is he’s happier running foreign affairs.
Cabinet ministers believe the move will ultimately leave the prime minister “weaker” even if it buys him some time with furious Labour MPs.
“It’s his last card,” one said. “He can only do this once. He is so much weaker because he doesn’t have Morgan to bail him out any more.”
Another cabinet minister said: “We’re asking the question of whether he will be there at the end of the week. There’s a feeling he could stand down at any moment. The next 48 hours is going to be crucial.”
Confusion endures over what McSweeney, who joined Labour in 1998 after being inspired by the Good Friday agreement, truly represented. The man described to me by Blue Labour’s Maurice Glasman as “one of ours” is also cast as the protégée of Mandelson whose New Labour project was yesterday damned by Glasman as “an alien body that took over the party”.
But this apparent paradox is easily resolved: the long war against Corbynism and the Conservatives had the effect of uniting Labour’s right in a tactical alliance. As a consequence, tensions and contradictions went unresolved. A campaigning project was never developed into a governing one. There is no better proof of this than the government’s tax lock, a New Labour-inspired device that left it struggling to raise scarce amounts from pensioners, farmers and pubs, undercutting McSweeney’s supposed communitarian impulses. The appointment of Mandelson similarly reflected an administration better at restaging the past than at inventing the future.
-
Rachel Sylvester at the Observer says, although the resignation of McSweeney offers Starmer a chance for a reset, it is probably too late.
This could be the chance for a “reset” if Starmer dares to take it, an opportunity for the prime minister to define his leadership on his own terms. He is also being urged by senior Labour figures to replace Chris Wormold, the cabinet secretary to improve the performance of the government.
It is unlikely to be enough. The Labour leader may have bought a little time by sacrificing McSweeney but he has also highlighted his vulnerability. Last week one former Cabinet minister told me: “If Morgan is in trouble then Keir is in trouble. Morgan created Keir and Keir is totally dependent on him, if he gets rid of Morgan it’s game over.”
Already MPs are asking why, if the chief of staff has resigned over his advice to appoint Mandelson, the prime minister is not quitting for actually taking the decision. “Morgan had to go,” one Labour peer said. “He’s been a disaster, everyone thinks he’s a genius but he’s been a third rate Mandelson, not nearly as clever as people think. He should have gone ages ago. But it’s not going to be enough to save Keir.”
-The extraordinary thing is Labour has decided to bury Starmer without any plan for a replacement or any credible successor. Rayner is seen as the frontrunner but Labour figures predict a free-for-all, tipping at least six others to go for the job, from Miliband to Shabana Mahmood and Yvette Cooper. It says it all that Al Carns is on runners and riders lists.
-An ally of Starmer warned that if Rayner or Miliband take over Britain would face a market and economic shock. They said if Starmer is ousted a new PM should call an election as they would have no legitimacy to lead the country.
-The Labour right is flailing as it tries to stop Rayner. Once upon a time they’d have backed Wes Streeting, but they’ve all fallen out and Streeting is now tainted by his own close links to Mandelson. Several suggested John Healey should take over. One pitched him as the only sane person left in the Labour party and the only one with any international credibility.
Starmer tells No 10 staff politics can be ‘force for good’ and says government moving forward ‘with confidence’
Keir Starmer has delivered a message to Downing Street staff telling them that he believes politics can be a “force for good” and that he wants the government to go forward “with confidence”.
From the extracts released by Labour, Starmer gave no indication that he intends to resign. But he did not seem to have a striking new message either, and he did not mention the departure of Tim Allan.
Here are the key quotes, from the briefing supplied to journalists.
The thing that makes me most angry is the undermining of the belief that politics can be a force for good and can change lives.
I have been absolutely clear that I regret the decision that I made to appoint Peter Mandelson. And I’ve apologised to the victims which is the right thing to do.
Starmer also told staff that they were united in having “public duty” as their “driving purpose”.
-
Starmer paid tribute to Morgan McSweeney, saying he would not have been able to change Labour and win the election without his former chief of staff. He said:
I’ve known Morgan for eight years as a colleague and as a friend. We have run up and down every political football pitch that is across the country. We’ve been in every battle that we needed to be in together. Fighting that battle.
We changed the Labour party together. We won a general election together. And none of that would have been possible without Morgan McSweeney.
His dedication, his commitment and his loyalty to our party and our country was second to none. And I want to thank him for his service.
In just a few months, we start the work of lifting half a million children out of poverty. A massive thing to do in this country because that means that lives will be changed.
For decades to come, children who otherwise wouldn’t have fair chance and fair opportunity. Poverty holds children back like nothing else on earth. And so getting rid of child poverty opens up opportunities for so many.
We must prove that politics can be a force for good. I believe it can. I believe it is. We go forward from here. We go with confidence as we continue changing the country.
Here is our story, by Peter Walker and Pippa Crerar, about Tim Allan’s resignation.
Allan’s resignation leaves Starmer in need of his 5th No 10 communications chief since election
Keir Starmer now has to find his fifth No 10 communications director since he became prime minister. Before Tim Allan, he also had: Matthew Doyle, who is now a peer, but embroiled in a controversy about his support for a Labour friend who had been charged with having indecent images of young girls; James Lyons, a former journalist who had worked in comms jobs for NHS England and for TikTok; and Stephanie Driver.
The communications director job at No 10 is a political post, held by Labour figure.
Starmer also has a civil service spokespeson who briefs the lobby every day. And last year Starmer appointed the former Sun editor David Dinsmore as head of government communications, another civil service post.
Tim Allan says he is leaving Downing Street ‘to allow new No 10 team to be built’
Tim Allan said he was standing down to allow Keir Starmer the opportunity to build a new team.
In a statement, he said:
I have decided to stand down to allow a new No 10 team to be built.
I wish the PM and his team every success.
Tim Allan, who worked as Alastair Campbell’s deputy when Tony Blair was in opposition and after he first became PM, only joined Downing Street in September last year. It was a surprise appointment because Allan had been out of government for more than 25 years, mostly running his own PR and corporate affairs company.
Here is a profile about him that Rowena Mason wrote in September.
Clearly, in his five months in No 10, Allan was unable to achieve any decisive improvement in Keir Starmer’s ratings.
Starmer’s communications chief Tim Allan quits No 10
Tim Allan has left his post as director of communications at No 10, Pippa Crerar reports.
EXCL: Tim Allan, Keir Starmer’s director of communications, steps down from Downing Street role. “I have decided to stand down to allow a new No 10 team to be built. I wish the PM and his team every success,” he said.
Tim Allan is Starmer’s fourth director of comms to go since taking office 19 months ago. Suggests the problem isn’t the communications team…
Robert Jenrick, the former shadow justice secretary who recently defected to Reform UK, told Sky News this morning that he thought the Labour government under Keir Starmer was becoming as dysfunctional as the last Tory government was. He said:
The government appears to be collapsing into chaos. Now the prime minister has no authority. There’s an outright revolt against him from his own members of parliament and the cabinet.
Nothing is going to happen now. Government will be brought to a standstill. I’ve seen this up close in previous Conservative governments. There’ll be no agenda. The issues that people are facing in their daily lives – whether it’s wages, energy bills, crime, immigration, the NHS – are all just going to go into stasis now and the public are going to be let down very badly in the weeks and the months to come.
Emily Thornberry welcomes McSweeney’s resignation, saying it creates ‘opportunity’ for Starmer
Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told the Today programme this morning that she was glad that Morgan McSweeney had resigned. She said:
I’m glad to see that the person who was the architect of Peter Mandelson’s appointment has taken responsibility and has gone … Morgan had become quite a divisive figure.
There were a couple of things that everyone agreed on, one was that he was brilliant, but I think the other one was that people felt he was in the wrong job, so I think it’s right that he’s gone, and I think it’s an opportunity.
Thornberry said that Keir Starmer was a “decent man”, but that he needed to “step up a bit more than he has” and that he neeed a “reset” offering “clear leadership”.
John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, has said that he thinks Keir Starmer is in a position of “complete weakness” as PM. Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Swinney said:
All that’s happened in recent days demonstrates an appalling judgment by the prime minister in appointing Peter Mandelson as the ambassador to the United States.
Although Morgan McSweeney might have resigned, the person that took the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was the prime minister and his position is a demonstration of his complete weakness as prime minister in the aftermath of this terrible decision.
Labour MP Andy McDonald says it will be ‘end’ for Starmer if he does not ‘own the error he’s made’
The Labour MP Andy McDonald told the Today programme this morning that it would be “the end” for Keir Starmer’s leadership if he failed to persuade backbenchers that he will change the way he operates for the better.
McDonald said:
If [Starmer] doesn’t own the error he’s made, and recognise the problem in front of it and articulate it and tell us how he’s going to deal with it, then I’m afraid it is coming to an end – if not today, but certainly in the weeks and months ahead.
He’s got to convince the PLP tonight that he’s got it and a change is necessary.
And the change that he promoted was no other than to purge the left, and it’s got us in this terrible mess that we’re in now.
McDonald said he wanted to see a change to a “more pluralist, democratic socialist agenda”.
McDonald, who served in shadow cabinet under Jeremy Corbyn, has been one of the MPs most critical in public of way Labour has been led by Starmer and Morgan McSweeney. In part he feels aggrieved because he was suspended from the party for five months for using words “the river and the sea” at a pro-Palestine rally, supposedly on the grounds that this was anti-Israel (it has echoes of a chant criticised as antisemitic), even though McDonald specifically said he wanted to see “Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea … [living] in peaceful liberty”. Labour’s decision to suspend McDonald was criticised as excessive, and that is partly why he is so critical of the purges of the left overseen by McSweeney.
Badenoch says Starmer’s position now ‘untenable’
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has said that Keir Starmer should resign given his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington.
In an interview on the Today programme this morning, Badenoch said:
[Claiming] ‘I was badly advised’ is not a good excuse for a leader. Advisers advise, leaders decide. He made a bad decision, he should take responsibility for that … this man said that he was the chief prosecutor for the country, when did he start believing everything that people told him?
Peter Mandelson had been sacked twice for unethical behaviour. [Starmer] is allowing someone else to carry the can for a decision that he chose to make. But the real problem is that this country is not being governed.
Keir Starmer promised a government that would be whiter than white. His position now is untenable, because if he thinks that bad advice is enough for Morgan McSweeney to go, then, yes, I think that makes his position untenable.
Skills minister Jacqui Smith says she is sure Starmer won’t resign
In interviews this morning Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, insisted that Keir Starmer will carry on as PM.
She told Times Radio:
I think that the prime minister absolutely is determined to [carry on]. He’s determined and has taken responsibility for the mistakes made in appointing Peter Mandelson.
On the Today programme Nick Robinson told Smith that Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, gave an interview yesterday morning saying it would be pointless for Morgan McSweeeny to resign. Only a few hours later McSweeney did just that. He asked Smith if she could be sure that Starmer too wasn’t about to resign.
Smith replied: “I am sure, yes.”
But when Robinson asked her if Starmer had told her that personally, Smith said she had not spoken to him directly. “I don’t believe he will [resign], I don’t think he should,” she said.
Good morning. One of the staples of political journalism these days (for better or for worse) is the “how damaging?” question. With Westminster preoccupied with the question of how long Keir Starmer can last as prime minister following the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, yesterday in the light of the Peter Mandelson/Jeffrey Epstein scandal, here is a summary of how long other prime ministers were able to stay on after key advisers quit.
-
Margaret Thatcher stayed in office, after the resignation of Alan Walters, for one year and one month.
-
Tony Blair stayed in office, after the resignation of Alastair Campbell, for three years and 10 months.
-
Theresa May stayed in office, after the resignation of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, for two years and one and a half months.
-
Boris Johnson stayed in office, after the resignation of Dominic Cummings, for one year and 10 months.
None of these are exact parallels. Most of these advisers were forced out because of pressure from MPs in the PM’s party, at least one (Mirza) was admired and her departure was a shock, but with McSweeney the picture is mixed. Many Labour MPs are glad to see him gone, but others credit him with winning them their seats and worry how the PM will manage without him.
The Cummings precedent is similar in some ways, because Cummings was the mastermind behind Johnson’s 2019 general election victory. McSweeney also gets credit for the Labour’s 2024 landslide. But only last night Prof Jane Green, who runs the British Election Study project, said “the major factors that contributed to the unique seats-votes outcome were outside Labour’s direct control” and the claim that McSweeney’s decision to focus on appealing to former Tories was a crucial factor has been shown by election analysis to be wrong. Besides, unlike Cummings, McSweeney remains hinged.
In some respects McSweeney is more similar to Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. They were decisive in enabling Theresa May to become PM, just as McSweeney was instrumental in showing Starmer how he could win the Labour leadership. But Timothy and Hill were even more dominant in No 10 than McSweeney ever was. And they were forced out because they wrote a manifesto that lost an election, whereas McSweeney did the opposite.
In short, there is no way of knowing how this will turn out. But previous experience suggests that even a damaging resignation like McSweeney’s doesn’t make the PM’s resignation imminent.
But we have got an inkling of what might happen today. Starmer is due to address Labour MPs this evening and Jacqui Smith, the former Labour home secretary who is now a peer and skills minister, has been giving interviews this morning. Speaking on Times Radio this morning, she said Starmer deserved credit for “taking responsibility” for the Mandelson appointment.
The prime minister is taking responsibility. He took responsibility for the decision that was made about Peter Mandelson, although to be clear here it was of course Peter Mandelson that, in consistent lying and engagement with Jeffrey Epstein, let down the party and the government and the country. And I think that will become clearer as the information around the appointment is put out into the public domain.
According to Sam Blewett and Bethany Dawson in their London Playbook briefing for Politico, Labour First, the right-leaning Labour group that supports Starmer, has been urging its MPs allies to make this point at tonight’s PLP meeting. They say:
One riled MP forwarded Playbook a message the right-leaning Labour First faction has sent to backbenchers it reckons are loyal to Starmer, urging them to speak up in support at the PLP meeting. Talking points include how the PM “accepts his mistakes and apologises,” compared to the carousel of Tory leaders forced from office … and how the government is delivering on “many areas of incremental change.”
Here is our overnight story by Pippa Crerar summing up all yesterday’s developments.
And here is an analysis by Kiran Stacey.
Today we will be focusing mostly on this crisis. Here is the agenda.
Morning: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit in Surrey.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
3pm: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, gives a speech in Birmingham.
6pm: Keir Starmer addresses Labour MPs at a private meeting of the PLP in Westminster.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
#Starmer #tells #staff #politics #force #good #McSweeney #Allan #resignations #live #Politics