Keir Starmer is sacrificing his own team to cling to power — it won’t save him — Tom Harwood

GB News Reporter
Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:51:44 +0000
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Wow. What a week. Testimony after testimony has put the Prime Minister’s judgement in doubt. A cross party coalition has called on Sir Keir to face a Privileges Committee investigation. And the first Labour MP of the 2024 intake called for the Prime Minister to go, live on our GB News PMQs discussion programme.

It really does have the feeling of those days through late April 2022, when then-PM Boris Johnson was referred to be investigated by the Commons Privileges Committee. He announced his resignation on 7th July.

Could we be looking at a similar head of steam building up behind calls for today’s Prime Minister to resign, again in late April. The parallels are spooky.

Back in the dying days of the Boris premiership I spent many hours stalking the Parliamentary corridor outside Committee Room 14 as crisis meeting after crisis meeting was held amongst Conservative MPs. This year I have found myself outside the same Committee Room, but instead because it was hosting crisis talks of Labour MPs, hearing from their own embattled Prime Minister.

For a man who once claimed to “carry the can” for the mistakes of his staff, he has turned on a remarkable number of his staff. Back in 2020, the then Labour Leadership contender declared “I never turned on my staff. You should never turn on your staff!”

Strange then, that in the wake of the mistake he admitted he himself made over Mandelson’s appointment, he has sacked his Chief of Staff, Communications Director, Cabinet Secretary, and now Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.

Starmer’s staff have been ordered to fall on sword after sword to save his own skin.

Sir Keir now claims no pressure was placed on the Foreign Office to approve Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US Ambassador. But top mandarin Olly Robbins says “constant pressure” was applied. Both of these things cannot be true at once.

It’s hard to disagree with yesterday’s verdict of MP Karl Turner - elected as Labour but now sitting as an independent - that “there are evident inconsistencies between statements made during PMQs, and the evidence given by Oliver Robbins.”

Perhaps, as Hartlepool Labour MP Jonathan Brash told me live on GB News this week, for the Prime Minister it is now “not a case of if, it's when.”

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