Sometimes the most important political moments happen in a micro-expression. The twitch of an eye, a furrowed brow, an involuntary grimace.
Ed Miliband offered an example of this for the ages during an interview on Good Morning Britain this week. He had come to talk about his plan to cut the link between electricity and gas prices – a crucial development in British energy security. Of course, he was barely asked about any of this. His agenda in the Department for Energy has been overshadowed by the never-ending procedural gibberish of the Peter Mandelson saga.
“I’m not sure what else anyone needed to tell the person at the top of government about this individual that would have made it clear it wasn’t just risky, it was wrong,” host Susanna Reid said to the Energy Secretary. “What else did you need to know at that moment?”
Miliband put his finger under his chin, raised his eyebrows, thought for a moment and then seemed to slide down his chair, as if wishing to disappear into another reality.
“Look,” he said, visibly exhaling, “it’s a fair point. It’s a fair point and he shouldn’t have been appointed. That is right.” It was as if you had watched the precise moment he decided to prioritise his long-term reputation over his short-term popularity in Downing Street.
He wasn’t alone. A briefing on the Cabinet meeting yesterday to the Financial Times sounded like it was describing a funeral: “People had their heads down, looking at the desk. [Starmer] was met with virtual silence.”
This week, it feels like we can all see Keir Starmer’s authority oozing from his body, like blood spreading across the floor of a crime scene. The circumstances are specific to this case, but the dynamics are extremely well established.
One of the key mechanisms by which prime ministers lose authority is through inconsistency.
Each morning, a minister is sent out to do the broadcast round. They’ll pop up on breakfast shows on ITV, the BBC and Sky and perhaps do a 10 minute interview on the Today programme. They will have to defend whatever it is the government is doing, regardless of what they really think of it.
Most of them are happy to do this. Collective Cabinet responsibility is the price they pay for power. What they ask in return is that they are not made to look like fools. But this is precisely what happens when a prime minister is inconsistent.
In 2025, Starmer gave an anti-immigration speech warning of an “island of strangers”. Some people were outraged by it. Afterwards, his ministers went out to support him. But then, a few weeks later, he said he regretted the speech and he took back his words. Those ministers were hung out to dry, having sacrificed their reputation on a point the Prime Minister was unwilling to maintain.
You can afford to do this a few times as Prime Minister, but you can’t do it very often. And yet Starmer has kept on going. From welfare reform to winter fuel allowance, tax rises to ID cards – Labour policies now come so fast and are reversed so rapidly that it is barely worth learning what each one entails.
Each time, a minister was sent out to defend it the policy only to watch No 10 later change its mind. And each time, they will have lost some of their willingness to do so in future. This is the public-facing failure which comes with prime ministerial inconsistency.
There is also an internal administrative failure in the Prime Minister’s relationship with his team.
In the primitive emperor-like structure of British politics, people’s social and professional status is defined by how intimately they know what the Prime Minister is thinking. Starmer will therefore make a decision and his team will go out and tell civil servants, special advisers, ministers and journalists what he plans to do.
What happens when the prime minister then changes their decision? They cut the legs out from their own operation. They lower the status of the people who are most loyal to them, whose reputation will be most susceptible to the perception that they are no longer an accurate source of the prime minister’s intentions.
Part of the reason that the atmosphere around the Cabinet table is dire is because Starmer’s current approach to the Mandelson story typifies this type of fecklessness and indecision.
Quite apart from any of the process questions around the Robbins sacking, the entire psychological and emotional profile the Prime Minister is exhibiting is a disaster. He has spent the week telling everyone how angry he is that no-one stopped him doing the thing he wanted to do.
It is childlike and obviously pathetic. But it is also symptomatic of someone who will decide something, send people out to bat for him, change his mind and then sacrifice those who initially tried to support him. It is a managerial disaster.
This week felt perilously similar to the tail end of the Boris Johnson administration. That is because several of the same mistakes are being made.
Johnson would often send out loyalists with one message about what he was doing, then chat to someone else, change his mind and undermine the credibility of his team.
During the Barnard Castle episode and “Partygate”, ministers would go out each morning and dutifully trot out Johnson’s nonsense. They would have to say the most preposterous drivel – for instance that having a party during lockdown was within the rules, or that a sane man would test their eyesight by putting the family in the car and going for a drive. And then later, when those positions had to be walked back, they would look like fools.
This is what we’re seeing now. The same process playing out all over again. It is less absurd this time, less clownish, but it operates according to the same principles. Starmer keeps on changing his mind. He keeps on shifting his position. He keeps on sacrificing the standing of his allies in order to preserve his own. And now he survives by lambasting those who tried to help him for having the temerity to do what he wanted.
This is how prime ministerial authority vanishes. It is happening now, in front of our eyes. Once it begins, it is almost impossible to stop.
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