What the Tories see when they look at Starmer

“We don’t do betting in the Tory Party anymore,” quipped one shadow cabinet minister to me yesterday when asked about the odds of Sir Keir Starmer resigning as Prime Minister – an aside to bad memories of the gambling scandal at the last election.

Others were less restrained. One member of LOTO told me plainly: “He’s a dead man walking. He will be there for PMQs this week – but he may not be there for the next one.”

But there is a line for Kemi Badenoch to follow as Starmer’s leadership seems to unravel. “Kemi has to balance doing the constitutional role as Leader of the Opposition with not seeming to enjoy the Prime Minister’s discomfort too much,” they added, “it is delicate”.

But as one CCHQ source told me: “It is quite nice seeing it from the other side for a change.”

Some in the shadow cabinet had thought the Prime Minister might depart alongside his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. Politically amputated, with the vultures circling, Starmer might have been tempted to recognise where he had lost and call it quits.

Not quite yet. I would say he is fighting on, but that feels overly generous. From McSweeney’s resignation at 2pm on Sunday, Starmer went more than 24 hours without a single cabinet colleague offering public support. Even at the height of Boris Johnson’s collapse, half the Cabinet could still be relied upon to appear on air in his defence.

With cabinet silence still lingering throughout the morning, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar made his move with a public defenestration of Starmer, calling for his resignation. But it left him conspicuously alone. He jumped, but no one followed.

As yesterday wore on, the leadership contest that had seemed genuinely plausible at the start of the day began to fizzle. It had the feel of a Burnham moment: the senior figure safely outside Westminster making a bid for personal advantage – in Sarwar’s case, some distance from the poor Scottish Labour results expected in May – only to trigger a reflexive show of loyalty to the wounded leader from those at the centre of government.

“Honestly, how has Sarwar ended the day in a worse position than Starmer?” one Tory MP asked.

Eventually, David Lammy became the first cabinet member to break cover, tweeting: “Keir Starmer won a massive mandate 18 months ago, for five years to deliver on Labour’s manifesto that we all stood on. We should let nothing distract us from our mission to change Britain and we support the Prime Minister in doing that.”

A slow trickle followed. One by one, cabinet ministers – alongside the likes of Angela Rayner – posted strikingly similar messages on X about Starmer’s “huge mandate” and their “fullest support”. They had apparently been instructed to tweet them, if the curiously identical phrasing and forced language wasn’t already obvious.

Perhaps they had remembered that forcing Starmer out would resurrect an awkward archive. Over the past few years, nearly all of them – from Rayner to Cooper to Lammy – repeatedly insisted that a change of leader or Prime Minister must be put back to the voters via a general election.

“It would be a shame if someone had all those clips saved,” one CCHQ source tells me.

Just take a look at their Twitter. Rayner, for instance: “The Tories have crowned Rishi Sunak without him saying a word about what he would do as PM. He has no mandate… The public deserve their say on Britain’s future through a General Election.” Lammy, meanwhile, declared it “unacceptable” for Tory MPs to choose another Prime Minister, demanding a general election “NOW”.

Swallowing one’s own words, however, is not difficult if shame is in short supply. Starmer himself said in 2020: “When they made mistakes, I carried the can. I never turn on my staff.” One wonders what happened to that principle.

All eyes automatically look to May. The shadow cabinet minister who declined to bet on Starmer’s departure made the case that no prospective successor would want to inherit the leadership just ahead of an almost inevitable local election meltdown. And while it may feel far away, it is only seven weeks of parliamentary sitting time – but that is seven weeks of survival, certainly not the same as governing, still less the “change” Starmer once promised.

Nor is there an obvious heir. Streeting does not appeal to the membership; Rayner has tax affairs to settle; Burnham lacks a Commons seat. Meanwhile, Streeting has chosen to publish his own messages with Mandelson (can one leak oneself?), admitting the absence of a growth agenda, criticising the government, and recommending Matthew Doyle – another Labour figure dogged by awkward questions over a friendship with a convicted sex offender – do the US ambassador’s comms. And there is more to come: the Conservatives’ humble address last week all means further uncomfortable disclosures over the next couple of months.

“It was definitely comms that was the problem — not appointing a friend of a paedo,” one LOTO figure joked, after the resignation of Tim Allan yesterday made him Starmer’s fourth director of communications to depart.

Yes, there may just be seven weeks until May, but they may be punctuated by a slow drip of increasingly awkward revelations. Without his usual political svengalis around him, it may begin to feel as though the vultures are drawing ever closer – and the Tories will make the most of it.