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“I think the Prime Minister’s position is untenable”

Senior Conservative Alex Burghart tells @TrevorPTweets his party couldn’t win a vote of no confidence in Keir Starmer – unless Labour MPs turn on their leaderhttps://t.co/Y4GWnTeC08

📺 Sky 501 pic.twitter.com/Qtmr78IuLz

— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 8, 2026

Whatsapp and Signal are among the messaging apps that use end-to-end encryption (Alamy)

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Regulators equipped with powers from the Online Safety Act could require platforms to use scanning technologies to analyse or intercept content that would otherwise be protected by encryption.

End-to-end encryption is a common security feature for emails, messaging services and internet banking, which ensures that only the sender and receiver can access the contents of messages and files. Even the service provider cannot read encrypted content.

Prominent campaigners, including Russian human rights activist Olga Borisova, exiled Afghan journalist Zahra Joya and Uyghur activist Rahima Mamut, fear that weakening encryption could put the safety of activists at risk.

Borisova, who now lives in London after fleeing Russia, said weakening encryption would have immediate and serious consequences for activists working with people in authoritarian states. 

“If this new regulation starts working, then all our work will be paralysed,” she told PoliticsHome. 

“I speak a lot with people from Russia and Belarus… just the fact that these people could send some information abroad could be considered high treason, and there could be a criminal charge, and people could go to jail for it.

“Encryption helps us to learn about the human rights situation in those regions, and it’s crucial to our work. And in our case, encryption saves lives because Signal is used by people, for example, in Russia, contacting human rights defenders to help them leave the country, leave persecution, leave from being conscripted to the war. And it is crucial.”

Major tech firms, including Signal and WhatsApp, have threatened to leave the UK market or remove services rather than weaken end-to-end encryption to comply with the Online Safety Act.

“Human rights defenders based here in the UK will lose one of the few secure ways they have to communicate with people living under authoritarian surveillance,” Borisova said. 

“The UK is home to many exile activists and journalists like me, and if secure tools disappear here, the UK becomes a less safe place to do human rights work, not by intention, but just by technical design.”

While serious crimes, including child sexual exploitation, do take place in private, encrypted messaging spaces, Borisova said she believed that other methods, including targeted investigations, intelligence-led operations and lawful hacking would be more effective at tackling these crimes, rather than “blanket access to everyone’s private communications”.

“I don’t think the UK government is following an authoritarian tendency, I just think it’s a lazy solution,” she said.

Conservative MP John Whittingdale, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on media freedom, told PoliticsHome that weakened encryption in the UK could be exploited by hostile states. He said that the push to access encrypted material was being driven primarily by the Home Office in a drive to crack down on serious crime.

“Whilst we have assurances that it would only be used in extreme circumstances to detect terrorists, people distributing child pornography, or the worst kind of crimes, the problem is that as soon as you create the means by which that can be done, you weaken the security of the communication system,” he said.

“The ability to hack into it or to somehow break through the encryption is not restricted to UK law enforcement.”

Elements of the Online Safety Act have already been coming into force over the past year, including duties on platforms to tackle illegal content such as fraud, terrorism and child sexual exploitation.

Groups including Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Index on Censorship have been collaborating to highlight the risks of weakening encryption – including hosting an event in Parliament earlier this month, which was attended by cross-party MPs.

Ofcom is currently developing draft guidance on message-scanning requirements and the “minimum standards of accuracy” for such technology, which it will present to the Secretary of State Liz Kendall in April. 

However, Ofcom’s CEO told the Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee in October that it is not clear whether technology to scan messages without infringing on freedom of expression will exist, and conceded that these powers remain speculative at this point.

A government spokesperson said: “When carrying out its regulatory responsibilities, Ofcom must take account of users’ rights to privacy and freedom of expression. Services must also consider this when implementing safety measures.

“Ofcom requires services to take steps which are both proportionate and technically feasible to tackle child abuse material on their service. It is only right that we raise the expectations on online services to deal with this horrific illegal content.”

While Ofcom’s rules do not require private messages to be automatically scanned, whether they are encrypted or not, but in serious cases where it is “necessary and proportionate”, the Online Safety Act gives Ofcom the powers to tell a company to use or build specific technology to deal with that content.

Before those powers can be used, the government would need to approve and publish minimum standards of accuracy, following advice from Ofcom, and any technology would need to be formally accredited.

It has everything the media could want and the country could do without.

A paedophile sex trafficker, a big beast politician who has held high office and been sacked three times, possibly the Russians, countless victims of the first with horrific stories of abuse, a Prime Minister, Advisers, spooks and two former Princes: one once of the House of Windsor the other of ‘Darkness’

Political hacks, and I’ve been one, will occasionally play, for their own amusement, a game of who can come up with a scandal that has it all. This one, had anyone dared suggest it, fits the bill.

Many outside the media bubble are describing it as the biggest ever scandal in British politics, edging Profumo and Kelly out to allow the name Mandelson to overtake it. His former Lordship clearly felt his last two falls from grace were not sufficiently spectacular enough and he’s decided third time unlucky.

Only luck has nothing to do with it.

Despite his lucrative dismissal from the highest diplomatic position Britain has to offer, the choice to appoint in the first place was made in Downing Street, against warnings – and even David Lammy, the then Foreign Secretary who actually did the appointing, has let it be known he warned about it – as the PM’s rivals, sorry, colleagues, dive for cover.

Last Wednesday Kemi Badenoch fired the potential kill shot.

She simultaneously proved that whilst strong performances at PMQs are not enough to make someone Prime Minister, on occasion they matter enormously, and that when you disprove naysayers who complain you weren’t good enough at it, being consistently better and better is seemingly never enough.

The impact of forcing this Prime Minister to damn himself at the dispatch box in one word was nothing short of seismic.

Part of Badenoch’s personal revival has been built on an impressive collection of scalps. Hitherto it’s contained a gaggle of Ministers, a deputy leader and deputy Prime Minister, the infamous Mandelson himself, and now she’s going for the big  two. The Prime Minister’s chief of staff and the PM himself.

Downing Street this weekend is seething with anger and resentment. Starmer has been swinging between enough foul-mouthed fury to fuel a power plant, and a sense of bitter betrayal that is souring dealings with a cabinet that have concluded Labour would be better off following the Tories past example and swapping horses mid race.

That there is ‘no way back’ for Sir Keir is now old news. He may still cling on, his own fall is not a done deal, but he can’t ‘turn it around’ now. When he answered Badenoch’s question whether security vetting had mentioned Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, post-conviction with a hesitant ‘Yes’ he confirmed what everyone felt they knew. And so did he, but appointed him anyway.

As someone who has gone through that vetting process, it is hard to see how Mandelson ‘lied and lied again’ with much success. Starmer habitually looks for others to blame, and has called for an immediate tightening of vetting procedures. Well without going into detail, they seemed pretty ‘tight’ to me!

Four hours with a quietly persistent inquisitor who ran through practically every aspect of this story but applied to me. Questions, however intrusive and unexpected on sex, money, substances, abuse, nothing is off limits where they are not judging, but seeking, as I suspect Epstein did, for anything that could make you susceptible to blackmail or ‘Kompromat’. There’s only two bits of advice you get whispered to you beforehand by those who’ve endured it already: ‘don’t lie, and if they ask a question they probably already know the answer’ they just want to see if yours matches the ones they have.

I can see why there are questions about how someone like Mandelson could possibly have got through, but we now know there were warnings in there that the PM was informed of, and decided to take the risk anyway.

It’s that, more than anything, that’s blown this up in Starmer’s face. As one shadow Cabinet member told me:

“Think of all the people, like Gove, Marr and Finkelstein, and some of your colleagues in the lobby who wrote the risk was worth taking, a ‘bold and clever move’. That’s the point with risk – if it pays off you look a genius, if it doesn’t you look a fool. Starmer was urged to, and took, a massive risk, ignoring other people who were up to the job, and it didn’t pay off. The consequences however are all of his own making. If Mandelson was right that Epstein is ‘like dog mess’, Starmer’s just rolled and rolled in it”

That the story has moved to ‘who replaces Starmer’ not just in the media but the Labour party shows he too can’t get rid of the smell. Beaten and bruised in the way he most despises, his ‘integrity’ called into question. The immediate outlook for Labour is bleak.

So the Conservatives must be feeling pretty good, right?

Reform have not made the running on this. As the Telegraph’s front page interview with Badenoch this weekend is subtitled – and remember the months where the Tories struggled to get a hearing at the bottom paragraph of a page 5 filler:

“Both in the Commons and out on the road, the self-assured Tory leader shows that she is no longer finding her feet – but setting the pace”

After a year of wondering where the promise of Renewal 2030 had got to, Badenoch has shown herself, particularly dealing with big betrayals in her own Tory ranks, to be tough enough not only to shore up her own position but wreak havoc on the Government in the process.

So champers all round then? Any Conservative tempted should cork it.

If the narrative today is that Starmer is at serious risk post May local elections which are now, if they weren’t already, a referendum on his premiership – and he hasn’t gone already – make no mistake the risk of brutal results for the Conservatives has not gone away.

Badenoch may have seen off any post-May Jenrick challenge, and will now survive a battering, it will make something stark. A personal win and improved public standing is great for a leader to have, but it doesn’t mean the brand is back. And Reform if they do as expected will be there screaming that from the roof tops.

She can push as hard as possible for renewal of Tory fortunes, but it is not a given that they will match her own. She can be seen like some doggedly determined fighter pilot of yore, an impressive tally of scalps painted on her plane, and still face watching the party fail to take off.

Sticking with the economy, where Reform is still weak – as the Shadow Chancellor will explain for readers tomorrow – stick to opposing Government relentlessly as the official opposition should, is all good strategy, but the Conservatives – not Badenoch – are still struggling for a hearing.

Too many of the public have moved from anger and rejection to indifference towards the Party. Liking the ‘cut of Badenoch’s jib’ doesn’t mean they’ll vote Conservative, yet. Or again.

We still need more policy to chew on from the promised ‘red meat’ restaurant, more fighting contribution from the ‘team’ the leader is always keen to promote, more sense that ‘business as usual’ has been firmly discarded and that the ‘as usual’ bit has been confined to the past, with genuine contrition for what was bad.

Mandelson may end up dragging Starmer down with him, and I for one won’t cry for his loss, but on the ground, on the doorstep and in the streets of places far from the drama of Westminster, no committed Conservative must think this alone will put them back in play.