The Prime Minister faced a moment of peril yesterday after the Conservatives secured a vote on whether to refer Starmer to the Privileges Committee following accusations he misled parliament over the Mandelson affair. In the end, the Labour benches backed him: only 223 MPs voted for the Tory motion with 335 voting against.
The debate ahead of the vote was long and arduous. I popped in to watch it from the Press Gallery yesterday afternoon. Though the Labour benches were sparse, the government had called its MPs back to parliament urgently, demanding they vote against the motion under a three-line whip.
During the day, No 10 called in back up. Ahead of the vote, cabinet ministers rang round backbench MPs, urging them to vote down the motion, and on Monday night, Gordon Brown put out a statement backing the PM.
In the end, only 15 Labour MPs rebelled, many of whom are members of the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group (SCG). But opposition to the government wasn’t limited to this group of what Housing Secretary Steve Reed has called the “usual suspects”. At the start of proceedings, Emma Lewell, the MP for South Shields (who isn’t a member of the SCG), told the Commons she would be voting for the motion. “The way today’s vote has been handled by the government,” she said, “smacks once again of being out of touch and disconnected from the public mood.”
Later that evening, Lewell’s north-east colleague and member of the Blue Labour caucus Jonathan Brash said he too would have voted for the motion. In a Facebook post for constituents, Brash – who was unable to make the vote due to a “longstanding commitment” in his constituency – described the government’s decision to whip MPs to vote for the motion as a “a serious misjudgement and deeply unfair on [MPs]”. (It should be noted that Brash called for the Prime Minister to resign last week live on GB News.)
Defying a three-line whip can be very serious for an MP. It can result in them being suspended from the Labour benches. A number of those 15 MPs who rebelled last night were among the seven who were suspended in 2024 for voting to remove the two-child benefit cap. They are no strangers to confronting the government. When I asked one MP who was planning to vote for the motion whether they had been told by government whips what the consequences might be, they said that despite not knowing what the whips might do, they couldn’t in good conscience back the government.
Though Starmer has navigated a moment of jeopardy, the discontent on his back benches remains. (The use of a three-line whip makes it difficult to see this as an outright win for the Prime Minister.) A tricky set of local elections are now a week away, and Labour MPs are already thinking about what comes next.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Seven things we learned from Morgan McSweeney’s committee grilling]
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