Richard Holden Torn Apart For Trying To Attack Labour ‘Chaos’

A senior Tory MP was offered a bleak reality check after he tried to criticise chaos engulfing the Labour government right now.

Shadow transport secretary Richard Holden tore into Keir Starmer on Monday as the prime minister’s No.10 operation fell apart and the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called for him to resign.

But LBC presenter Ben Kentish reminded Holden of just how much drama unfolded under the last three Conservative prime ministers, too.

Holden claimed Starmer was at risk of being a “lame duck prime minister, not wanted by his own MPs, not wanted by his own leader in Scotland”.

Kentish replied: “You sound an awful lot like the last four years of Conservative governments – lame duck prime ministers, accused of ethnical misjudgments, not wanted by their own MPs, chaos for the country.

“You haven’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to this.”

Holden insisted that Rishi Sunak had plenty of backing and that Conservative MPs stood up to Liz Truss when “things were quite clearly going in the wrong direction”.

Holden replied: “Labour MPs don’t have the spine, because they’re people who are jockeying for position and they want to try and pin all the issues going forward on that.”

But Kentish hit back: “You defended Boris Johnson when he stood by [Owen] Paterson when he had broken lobbying rules, he kept Priti Patel in cabinet despite the fact that she had been found to bully civil servants, he broke his own lockdown laws and mislead parliament about it – and you went out there and said he’s still the right man for the job.

“So when it comes to Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson – I accept it’s an almighty mistake – but this kind of holier-than-thou, whiter-than-white approach, it reeks of hypocrisy.”

Their exchange comes after the prime minister’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his director of communications Tim Allan resigned within 24 hours of one another.

Their shock departures came as the scandal around Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US – despite his links to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – reached fever pitch.

After Sarwar urged Starmer to quit, there were fears cabinet ministers would follow suit – but, remarkably, senior Labour figures all publicly rallied behind the beleaguered prime minister.

Starmer also told Labour MPs that he was “not prepared to walk away” last night.