Morgan McSweeney’s departure pushes Keir Starmer a step closer to the exit

The prime minister is running out of things to throw overboard to try to keep himself afloat, writes John Rentoul

There is an obvious problem for Keir Starmer with Morgan McSweeney’s resignation statement. If it is a resigning matter to give the advice to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador, why is it not also a resigning matter to act on that advice? Advisers only advise; ministers decide.

That is why I thought Pat McFadden, the cabinet minister giving broadcast interviews this morning, was wrong to say, when asked about the chief of staff’s possible resignation, “I don’t think that would make any difference at all.” Not that he could have said anything else.

And it may be true that it would have been wrong for McSweeney to stay, even if his departure does little to postpone the end of Starmer’s premiership. But it is beginning to look as if the prime minister is running out of things to throw overboard to try to keep himself afloat.

He blocked Andy Burnham’s return to the Commons. He gave in to Angela Rayner’s demand that an independent committee decide which Mandelson documents can be withheld to protect national security. Now his chief adviser has taken on the role of scapegoat.

It won’t work. The demands from Labour MPs for McSweeney to be sacked were really aimed at Starmer himself. It has ever been thus – that it is easier and looks more loyal to criticise the king’s advisers – but it has also always been the case that leaders take responsibility for the advisers they hire, and they take responsibility for the decisions they make.

Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, has taken responsibility for recommending Peter Mandelson to be the UK’s ambassador to Washington (Picture Agency/Shutterstock)

When McSweeney in his resignation statement says, “in public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient,” that applies to the prime minister just as much as it does to his chief of staff. In fact, the wording of McSweeney’s statement almost suggests that he intends to take his boss down with him.

Advisers are like lightning rods for criticism, but when they are gone there is nothing to protect the top person from the wrath of the skies.

It won’t wash for Starmer to imply – he couldn’t say this directly – that he was given bad advice. That sounds weak, just as his claim that Lord Mandelson “lied and lied and lied again” to him sounds weak.

As a Labour former special adviser said, when breaking the news of McSweeney’s resignation to me, Starmer gives the impression when things go wrong that it is “always someone else’s fault”.

Thus we enter the endgame of Starmer’s premiership. If Labour comes third in the Gorton and Denton by-election in 18 days’ time, as seems likely, that will trigger the final moves.

At that point, Starmer might try one last device, known as the Tony Blair gambit. He might copy Blair, who bought himself time after the curry house plot by Tom Watson and other supporters of Gordon Brown to try to force him out in 2006. Blair announced that the imminent Labour annual conference would be his last, in effect putting a 12-month timer on his time in No 10. He actually left office nine months later, in June 2007.

I do not believe that Starmer is ready simply to give up, so it is possible that he will respond to Labour’s defeat in the by-election by saying that he will leave office in a year’s time, to give the party the chance to organise a “stable and orderly transition” – the ridiculous phrase of the Blair-Brown handover.

That would buy him another year in office – if the party would let him. He has to try something, because the alternative is simply to allow Rayner to dictate what happens next. Unless Starmer accepts that he is going and sets the timetable himself, he will be at the mercy of whichever Labour MP is the 81st to sign Rayner’s nomination papers, triggering a leadership election at a time not of his choosing.

McSweeney was his penultimate line of defence. Now that has gone, Starmer has only desperate measures left.