Politics has calmed down again after a week of rare frenzy, even by the standards of the past decade. Next week promises a few more dramas before MPs head into recess for the local elections, which once more look like they could be the most consequential for a generation.
Sir Philip Barton, Olly Robbins’s predecessor as top mandarin at the Foreign Office, is giving evidence at 9 a.m. on Tuesday to the foreign affairs select committee, with Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, also appearing on the same day.
Barton is bound to be asked about how much pressure he was under to clear the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US and in what ways he had to lean on the Cabinet Office even to get the vetting under way. McSweeney will doubtless be quizzed about what pressure he brought to bear and why there doesn’t seem to be any minutes of the meeting in which Starmer decided to appoint Mandelson and what the rationale was at the time.
Most journalists are hopeless clairvoyants: our ability lies in detailing what really happened and revealing things the political class do not want people to know. But when the obituaries are finally written about the Starmer regime, I believe this will be seen as a significant week.
With the cut in winter fuel allowance and freebiegate, right at the start of his administration, the Prime Minister began the process of losing the public. The welfare rebellion last spring was the moment he lost his backbenchers. Deciding to fire Robbins over the vetting of Mandelson is, I think, the moment Starmer lost the civil service and convinced cabinet ministers to stop concealing in public what they have long let slip in private – that they regard him to be pretty hopeless.
There are weeks as a political journalist when you scrabble around for information, no one answers the phone and you have to divine what is going on from the half-truths and evasions people share. Then there are weeks like this one, where your WhatsApps buzz like Samantha Niblett’s handbag during the summer of sex, where sources who have never previously made themselves available, or who have been playing hard to get, suddenly speak with blunt frankness about what they really think.
Leaving officials, who have broadly gone on strike, wondering why they should take risks or try very hard for a man with no plan, is highly significant since it suggests that, even if Starmer survives for months ahead, nothing much will be achieved.
Losing ministers is the most serious situation, since it is the resignations of members of a government which actually bring premierships to an end. None of this means that Starmer will be gone on 8 May. It could take months. His premiership may not end for some time. But to all intents and purposes it feels like it is already over.
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