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Politics Home | Keir Starmer Says He Will Keep Fighting “As Long As I Have Breath Left In My Body”
(Alamy)
3 min read
Keir Starmer has said he will not “walk away” from Downing Street as the Prime Minister looks to strengthen his position among Labour MPs.
Addressing the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday night, the PM said he had “won every fight” he had been in and would keep fighting “as long as I have breath left in my body”.
Starmer appeared before a packed room of Labour MPs on another rocky day for his premiership amid the ongoing Peter Mandelson scandal.
Earlier in the day, Tim Allan resigned as No 10 director of communications after just five months in the role.
Later, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar used an unscheduled press conference to call on Starmer to resign as prime minister, saying: “The distraction needs to end and the leadership in Downing Street has to change.”
Starmer told Labour MPs that he had consistently proved his critics wrong, pointing to how he reformed both the Crown Prosecution Service and later the Labour Party, leading the latter to a landslide general election victory in 2024 following a crushing defeat five years earlier.
“People told me I couldn’t do it. And then they gradually said, ‘you might just get over the line.’ We won with a landslide majority. Every fight I’ve been in, I have won,” he said.
The PM added: “I have had my detractors every step along the way, and I’ve got them now. Detractors that don’t want a Labour government at all, and certainly not one to succeed.
“But I’ll tell you this. After having fought so hard for the chance to change our country, I’m not prepared to walk away from my mandate and my responsibility to my country, or to plunge us into chaos, as others have done.”
Starmer, who was surrounded by members of his cabinet, apologised to Labour MPs for appointing Mandelson as US ambassador.
He also paid tribute to Morgan McSweeney, his former chief of staff and close ally, who resigned on Sunday over his role in the decision to appoint Mandelson despite awareness of his links to Jeffrey Epstein.
Multiple Labour MPs have told PoliticsHome that Starmer’s speech was well received and had successfully lowered anger levels within the PLP.
The Prime Minister promised to take a more inclusive approach to government, with his administration having regularly been accused of paying too little attention to the views of Labour backbenchers.
According to Labour backbencher Chris Curtis, who spoke to reporters after the meeting in Parliament, of 44 interventions from Labour MPs, just 4 were negative.
“He appreciated the scale of the challenge. Everyone in that room looked at him and knew he was the right person for the job,” Curtis added.
One backbencher who was in the room said the Prime Minister’s speech had “bought time”, but added “I don’t know how long”.
A minister told PoliticsHome that they thought Starmer was “stronger than he was at the beginning of the day”.
They described this month’s Gorton and Denton by-election, where Labour is at risk of losing to the Greens and Reform, and the May elections as “trigger points” for his leadership, but ones that are “already baked in, to large degrees”.
The meeting also demonstrated the tension between Labour in Westminster and the party in Scotland following Sarwar’s call for Starmer to quit.
Rachel Taylor, Labour MP for North Warwickshire and Bedworth, called the Scottish Labour leader’s intervention earlier in the day “selfish”, PoliticsHome understands, and said the party “needed to come together for the good of the country”.
Meanwhile, Johanna Baxter, the Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire in Scotland, was in tears as she told the room that she had never known such treachery like Sarwar’s, PoliticsHome understands.
Additional reporting by Matilda Martin, Harriet Symonds, Adam Payne and Sienna Rodgers
