PA Wire
The prime minister has had a political near-death experience – and survived, for now at least.
At various points, he looked like he might be done for and imminently.
If Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s desire to dislodge Sir Keir Starmer had had public accomplices, that could have been it.
There was a crucial pivot point on Monday afternoon when things could have gone in one of two ways.
If others had said Sir Keir should go, he might not have got to the end of the day without announcing his departure.
But instead, there was a rallying of support from the cabinet and from various wings of the Labour Party.
Let’s be clear: missives of loyalty from cabinet ministers towards the prime minister shouldn’t be newsworthy and they only become so when the opposite seems feasible.
The sheer volume of social media posts only served to underline just how perilous Sir Keir’s position had been: he needed political scaffolding to prop him up from wherever it could be found.
But that support did come and he has seen off, for now, the moment of maximum danger for him.
It is, though, also true that this has been a deeply wounding week for Sir Keir and he is weaker for it.
And jeopardy peppers the diary ahead for him.
There is the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester in just over a fortnight.
Then there are the Scottish and Welsh devolved elections, and English local elections, in May.
If either or both of those dates are doomladen for Labour, who gets the blame?
I detect a sense, taking a step back, that while concerns within the party about Sir Keir have been notching up remorselessly for months, the sheer horror of the Lord Mandelson revelations repulsed so many, so quickly, things quickly accelerated to a crunch point – is it time to change leader?
The party has blinked and thought better of it, for now. The recurring sentiment I pick up isn’t a sudden conversion to gushing support for Sir Keir Starmer, but deep concern about being the authors of yet more spectacular political turbulence: bundling out an (albeit deeply unpopular) prime minister with a mandate from the electorate and picking someone between themselves who has no such public mandate. Or, as one Labour figure put it to me, “behaving just like the Conservatives did”.
That, Labour MPs have collectively concluded, is too big a leap, for now.
As the prime minister attempts to reset, again, and set out what his government is all about, we expect an announcement that the country’s most senior civil servant, Chris Wormald, is to leave his job.
And what has happened at Westminster in recent days will continue to ripple through our politics in the days, weeks and months to come.
In time, Parliament voting for the publication of no end of documents and messages prompted by the Lord Mandelson scandal could yet provoke embarrassment and diplomatic headaches with Washington.
One man, noted for his prime ministerial ambitions, has decided to get ahead of that.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s transparent attempts to cleanse his reputation, after years of association with Lord Mandelson, by publishing their text exchanges, is a reminder of the job he quite fancies after the one he is doing now.
And it is a reminder that the story of the consequences of recent days is far from over.
