The Prime Minister lives to fight another day. But he has so much work to do to rescue his premiership from life support.
Tuesday night’s Commons vote on whether Sir Keir Starmer should face a formal investigation into claims he lied over the vetting of Peter Mandelson to be our man in Washington showed he has not entirely lost control of his party.
Labour’s working majority of 165 was cut to 112, but he was far from losing the vote – pushed by Kemi Badenoch and other Opposition leaders – with just 15 Labour backbenchers supporting the motion and another 53 of Starmer’s MPs abstaining, although a number of them will have been given permission in advance to be absent.
The obvious contrast is with Boris Johnson, who was unable to stop a near-identical motion forcing him to face a privileges committee investigation into his behaviour over “Partygate”. The committee’s verdict, when it came, ended Johnson’s career as an MP – and he had already long been forced out of No 10.
So Starmer is not in such dire straits – at least, not now.
Starmer needed a little help from Labour power-brokers
But there are reasons he cannot rest easy any time soon. His margin of victory in this vote looks impressive; to get there, however, he needed a big helping hand, not just from his Cabinet but from other Labour power-brokers including deputy leader Lucy Powell, her predecessor Angela Rayner, and Gordon Brown who is probably the single most respected person within the party.
None of those – or the other notable backbench supporters of Starmer in the Commons vote such as Dame Meg Hillier and Dame Emily Thornberry, both chairs of influential select committees – owes the Prime Minister anything, and any one could withdraw their support whenever they feel like it.
And the 15 MPs who defied the whip to back the Opposition motion went beyond the diehard opponents of the leadership to include more low-key, albeit staunchly left-wing, figures too.
It seems likely that at least a couple of dozen of the abstainers were deliberately making a point about refusing to swallow the Prime Minister’s line, while avoiding siding with the Conservatives either.
Nearly everyone in Labour still agrees that Starmer made a big blunder in appointing Mandelson, and most think that it points to a persistent failing in their leader, who too often hides behind “process” to explain his mistakes rather than owning up to risky decision-making.
Reprieve measured in weeks, not months
The conversation in Westminster will now move away from the question of whether the Prime Minister will fall in the coming days. But his reprieve is measured in weeks, not months: if Labour takes a battering at the local elections on 7 May, as most expect, leadership chatter will almost certainly resume.
Authority in British politics is closely tied to the question – what can you do for me next? As Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak all eventually learned, wielding the power of the prime minister ceases to impress or intimidate colleagues once they come to believe that that power is going to be time-limited.
Starmer remains in the political departure lounge. The only way he can regain his authority is a big shift in the underlying dynamics, either through some major crisis or – more cheerfully – through some concrete evidence over this spring and summer that his policies really are bearing fruit, making voters’ lives easier in ways that they recognise and appreciate.
MPs often point out that members of the public do not tend to raise the Mandelson scandal with them when they are knocking on doors. But for as long as the issue is sucking up oxygen in Westminster, Labour will struggle to escape its shadow, and the Prime Minister’s flaws will remain dangerously visible.
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