Keir Starmer has entered the anger stage of his premiership. As much was made clear by his response to Ed Davey at yesterday’s PMQs. After the Lib Dem leader, with a reasonable but wounding tone, accused Starmer of a “catastrophic lack of judgment” over the appointments of Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle, the Prime Minister snapped back that Davey “should take accountability and responsibility” for austerity. That might have worked as a riposte to a question over public spending but it fell short given Davey’s subject was links to paedophiles.
The latest story concerns the case of Sean Morton, an ex-Labour councillor twice convicted of possessing indecent images of children. Doyle, Starmer’s longest-serving director of communications, campaigned for Morton – who stood as an independent candidate in May 2017 – even after he had been charged (Doyle says he accepted Morton’s claims of innocence and has apologised). The Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund reported as much on 27 December 2025 but it was not until Tuesday of this week, as the Mandelson scandal swirled, that Doyle had the Labour whip withdrawn. For now, as the party investigates, he retains his peerage (Lucy Powell, Lisa Nandy and party chair Anna Turley have called for its removal).
It is Starmer’s judgment that is once again the central question. The Prime Minister did not know that Doyle had campaigned for Morton but he did know that he had been “supportive” of him. Five days before Doyle’s peerage was announced, Scottish Labour’s Pam Duncan-Glancy resigned as the party’s education spokesperson over her close friendship with Morton, making the Prime Minister’s decision to proceed even stranger.
But had Starmer kept his word he would never have been in this invidious position. Back in 2022, he told Labour peers that he would strip politicians of the power to make appointments to the Lords, vowing to “restore trust” after Boris Johnson stuffed the house with “lackeys and donors”. Starmer was right: peerages, doled out as a reward for factional allies or a bauble to potential foes, are an inevitable source of scandal.
Yet in office the temptations of patronage have proved irresistible to Starmer. And so Britain’s unelected second chamber – the largest in the world after China’s National People’s Congress – continues to swell (with only hereditary peers set to be removed).
There is a complacent view in Westminster that subjects such as Lords reform are the preserve of constitutional obsessives, a distraction from the “bread and butter” of politics (in 2009, David Cameron privately described Lords reform as a “third-term issue”). But the elevation of those with links to Epstein and Morton has seen Labour, in the words of Emma Lewell MP, branded the “paedo protectors party”. Starmer is certainly right to be angry – but principally with himself.
[Further reading: Why you hate Keir Starmer]
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