There was a story about Herbert Asquith, the dazzling barrister turned Liberal prime minister, which summed up his lawyerly detachment from the high feelings of the House of Commons. As Gladstone’s home secretary in the early 1890s, Asquith had ordered soldiers to suppress striking miners at a colliery in Yorkshire, at which two protesters were killed. Years later, while he stood at the despatch box as an unpopular PM, he was heckled by a backbencher who asked: “Why did you murder the miners at Featherstone in ’92?!” Asquith pursed his lips and responded with a glower: “It was not ’92, it was ’93.”
Some of that spirit appeared to possess our own lawyerly Prime Minister this month. He spoke precisely about the facts and the process of the latest twist in the Mandelson affair. The evidence is that he was genuinely in the dark about the vetting process. Yet the anger and resignation among Labour MPs are not really about facts and process. Like all strongly felt emotion it is messy and misdirected, which the PM perhaps struggles to understand. “The PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] is in a psychologically concerning place at the moment,” says one loyalist Labour MP. “We thought we were coming in to do great things and solve the mess the Tories left.” Instead, Labour MPs find themselves asked to defend a government that has now had more run-ins with officialdom than Boris Johnson’s. On top of that, they are facing electoral wipeout on current polling, and are being asked to vote against their instincts, for Shabana Mahmood’s immigration changes, and soon enough for a fresh crack at welfare reform.
The reason this story remains a living nightmare for Keir Starmer is that he did ultimately decide to appoint Mandelson as Washington ambassador. Labour MPs now struggle to trust his judgement on anything, despite him being widely praised for making the right call on the Iran war. If this week proved anything, it was that despite apologising once before (in February) and losing his chief of staff (Morgan McSweeney) in the process, the PM will have to keep saying sorry and offering sacrifices each time new revelations emerge about Mandelson. And they will keep emerging thanks to the fateful alliance of Kemi Badenoch and Angela Rayner, which got the humble address through the House of Commons in February (the next set of Mandelson files will be released soon).
The question of judgement returned after Starmer sacked the chief civil servant at the Foreign Office, Olly Robbins. The PM learned quickly that senior mandarins are more dangerous outside the tent when Robbins spilled all on the various schemes dreamed up in No 10 during his explosive Foreign Affairs Committee appearance on 21 April. But that was always part of the deal, and it’s why top officials are rarely sacked because of political stories in newspapers. We called this principle “ministerial responsibility”: that even when it seems unfair, the minister takes the rap for bad decisions.
Under Starmer, the notion of ministerial responsibility seems to have broken down on both sides. On the one hand, we have a Prime Minister – who has lost two cabinet secretaries, two chiefs of staff and now a Foreign Office permanent secretary – unwilling to remove underperforming politicians when he can criticise their officials and advisers. This is partly a hangover from the fact that he is, by background and temperament, a civil service official more than he is a politician.
On the other, we had Robbins taking what was in effect a highly sensitive political decision when presented with a borderline vetting assessment (it would have been just as politically sensitive if he had denied Mandelson his clearance). The conclusion might be that Robbins should never have been in a position to make that decision without ministerial oversight. This saga has renewed a desire among some Labour radicals for widespread reform of the system, which Starmer once contemplated but backed off from. “The distinction between political and non-political is now a nonsense,” says one insider.
More broadly this is an episode in Starmer’s struggle, as a politician who promised convention and calm, to deal with a restless world. In the first place, much of the haste from No 10 to clear Mandelson, Robbins also revealed, came from a desire to get the unorthodox new ambassador in place for the start of Donald Trump’s second term. So it was a scrambling attempt to mitigate Trump that led to this disaster, just as it is Trump’s war in Iran and its effects that are knocking the government’s economic projections into oblivion. And just as it is Trump’s success that’s encouraging the rise of Reform, which only started polling in first place after his inauguration. In 2024, Labour thought it would inherit the birthright of all new landslide majorities: a scattered opposition that wandered aimlessly while the government enjoyed its new power. Instead, they got a ruthless and focused new right-wing under Nigel Farage.
If this latest crisis, combined with Labour’s fading electoral fortunes in May, does conspire to remove Starmer, it could be said that the election of Trump a few months into the government was where it all started to go wrong for the Prime Minister. When historians look back at his ministry they might note that, like Asquith, this Prime Minister was a clever lawyer who embodied all the liberal certainties of his age just as they were dissolving before his eyes
[Further reading: The Mandelson affair: inside the scandal of a century]
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This article appears in the 22 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, All alone
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Subscribe here to commentFor all his failings Asquith’s legacy was at least as consequential as Attlee’s – something that Starmer is highly highly unlikely to have the opportunity to emulate
Starmer is wilfully blind over Gaza. That is his worst legacy.