Sir Keir Starmer is now the Black Knight of British politics. Like the mutilated pugilist of Monty Python, he stumbles around the Westminster battlefield, blustering and boasting while desperately trying not to totter over. Starmer and his team have spent most of the day trying to defend their decision to hand a peerage to Matthew Doyle, No. 10’s former communications chief. Doyle was appointed to the House of Lords last month – despite having campaigned for a friend charged with child sex offenses.
The subject dominated Prime Ministers’ Questions this lunchtime and the subsequent briefing for journalists. Downing Street’s claim that Doyle’s peerage could not be withdrawn after the nomination stage has been contradicted by House of Lords clerks who say that ‘a peerage is created when the letters patent are sealed’. There were 12 days between the first newspaper report about Doyle’s links and the confirmation of his peerage, during which time no action appears to have been taken to halt the process.
The forces which threatened to remove Starmer on Monday appear to have subsided somewhat
After the Peter Mandelson scandal, the Doyle row strikes at the heart of Labour’s sensibilities. Starmer addressed a meeting of the women’s parliamentary Labour party this afternoon; one reportedly told the Prime Minister that this was the worst week she had ever had in Westminster. Starmer promised to do more to respect female talent in his party in future, amid calls for more ‘women in the room’. One idea doing the rounds is a female First Secretary of State or a cabinet-level position to look at misogyny across government. It has thus been another difficult day for the PM in which he has been forced, in the colourful words of one of his MPs, ‘to eat shit for his errors’.
Yet if there is any consolation from today, it is that the forces which threatened to remove him on Monday appear to have – at least temporarily – subsided somewhat. Various senior members of Starmer’s party have been out making supportive noises. This evening it was the turn of Starmer’s deputy, Lucy Powell, who declared on LBC that ‘I think Keir Starmer ends the week – or we’re nearly towards the end of the week – much stronger than how he started it.’ Clearly, ‘much stronger’ is a deeply subjective term – but Powell is right to note that 48 hours ago, Starmer was not assured of making it to Wednesday.
As he and his team try to work out how to navigate the next few days, loyal Starmerites can take comfort from the fact that no minister is yet to follow Anas Sarwar over the top and call for the PM to quit. In a humiliating U-turn, the Scottish Labour leader was forced this afternoon to say that Sir Keir and his team were ‘welcome’ to ‘come to Scotland and demonstrate that they’re delivering for Scotland’. Starmer might be the Black Knight – but in a party where no one is willing to finish him off, he is able to stagger on.
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