Tim Shipman

This is not the end, but it’s well past the beginning of the end, or even the middle of the end. It feels, with six days until the Makerfield by-election is expected to return Andy Burnham to Parliament, that we are at the beginning of the end of the end. It is also well past the point of no return for Britain’s credibility on the world stage. Like the clockwork toy which goes off just as you have drifted off to sleep, Keir Starmer weathered an interview with the BBC on the departure of two ministers from the Ministry of Defence (and two ministerial aides) only to get an Exocet in the guts from the Americans. Elbridge Colby is one of the Washington hawks, but he also has a respect for Britain.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard two things in recent months. Serving and retired military commanders, ministers and former ministers, strategists, advisers and MPs parrot the line that the defence of the country is the first duty of any government. They also complained that John Healey was too polite, too much of a Labour man to march over the road and demand the money that is needed. This was only half right. The Defence Secretary has resigned with a devastating parting shot at Keir Starmer after the Prime Minister failed even to secure a derisory sum of money that he had demanded from the Treasury and the cabinet.

There was a moment backstage, before I interviewed Kemi Badenoch for a Spectator event this week, when I felt like John Sergeant with Margaret Thatcher bearing down on him as he pronounced her leadership in difficulty. I suggested to Badenoch that she was a rare example of a politician I had changed my mind about. ‘You mean you were very negative before?’ she said, fixing me with the full alpha female glare. I muttered something placatory, but the truth is that a year ago I thought she was rubbish – and that was the mainstream view in her own party. She was arrogant, flat-footed, absenting herself from a stage that was being dominated by Nigel Farage, resistant to advice, convinced she was great at PMQs when even Keir Starmer was wiping the floor with her.

When he appeared on Question Time yesterday evening, Andy Burnham said the quiet bit out loud – he does intend to run for the Labour leadership, though he incorrectly stated that Wes Streeting has already triggered a contest. In fact, it might be on Burnham to do so if he wins the Makerfield by-election on 18 June. Those who have headed to the mean streets of Makerfield recently have found Burnham awkwardly bestriding the fence and talking up his local roots, as well as his achievements as mayor of Manchester, without looking like he’s measuring the curtains in Downing Street.

Darren Jones has become the government’s Walter Model, the general known during the second world war as ‘the Führer’s fireman’ for his deployment to shore up any position which appeared lost. In that capacity, Britain’s first Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister had the thankless task of presenting the government’s case to the House of Commons on Monday following the publication of 1,500 pages of documents relating to Peter Mandelson. Jones himself was spared direct embarrassment because none of his exchanges with the disgraced peer came to light in the trawl of memos, emails and WhatsApp exchanges.

Nothing illustrates the challenge facing Reform UK better than the strained interview Danny Kruger gave to the Today programme on Monday morning. Kruger, a former Tory MP who defected to Reform last September, has been charged by Nigel Farage with preparing the party for government. He clearly wanted the interview to be a high-minded examination of the intricacies of the Whitehall machinery. Instead, he had to deal with more pungent street politics. The interview quickly descended into questions about Robert Kenyon, the ‘plucky plumber’ and Reform candidate in the Makerfield by-election. Kruger, a thoughtful Christian, was clearly uncomfortable answering questions on sexual comments about Carol Vorderman which Kenyon had shared on social media in the past.

When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the centre-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known names like Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his rush to grab the glory. There was a notable absentee that day. ‘Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,’ a witness recalls. ‘If he had been there, he’d probably have grabbed the ball and there might have been a tussle.’ Instead, Andy Burnham said: ‘This is mine,’ and calmly slotted it into the corner. ‘It was a perfect penalty.

What a week. A prime minister on the skids. A pretender to the throne resigning. The favourite putting his career on the line on what is likely to be, without question, the biggest by-election in British political history. Never has there been a straight-up contest to decide the next prime minister, with the most popular mayor up against the best political campaigner of the age, Nigel Farage, trying to run interference. Most of SW1 is already studying train times to Wigan. That hurdle cleared, the only question is who will be prime minister by the time of Labour’s party conference? And I have to tell you, Keir Starmer is not the outside bet here.

Josh Simons, the MP for Makerfield, has decided to stand aside and resign his seat so that Andy Burnham can fight a by-election and return to Parliament as a candidate for the Labour leadership. Burnham has just confirmed that he is seeking permission from the ruling National Executive Committee to stand. This is a high-stakes gamble for everyone involved. But then, in Labour politics right now, everything is Makerfield sits next door to Leigh, the parliamentary seat Andy Burnham used to hold. But it is far from safe territory. Simons won it at the last general election with a majority of only around 6,000 over Reform. Nigel Farage's party will contest this seat with all guns blazing. Most of the recent MRP superpolls put this down as a firm Reform win.

These feel like the most significant local elections for a generation. It was a potentially historic day for Reform and Plaid Cymru, with a few caveats. It was a good day for the Greens and the SNP, but not as good as it might have been. It was a disastrous day for Labour, without caveats; a pretty bad day for the Tories, but with some caveats; and a low-key day for the Lib Dems, which will both encourage and infuriate them. Here’s what we have learned: 1. Reform is in pole position to form the next governmentNigel Farage saw last year’s local elections as proof of concept that he could build a credible electoral force. He saw this year’s as a way of emerging as a national party. By any measure he cleared the hurdle.

Dear wannabe leaders of Britain. What a lot of you there are! I’ve been writing about leadership and the craft of politics for 25 years and I’m sick of watching the same mistakes repeated. I’m keen to help. So listen up Nigel, Kemi, Zack, Ed, Ed, Andy, Angela and Wes – and you Keir, it’s never too late to learn. 1) TL;DR: If you have no time for impertinent journalists, here’s the executive summary. You need a plan, plus strategy and tactics to deliver it. You need a narrative to explain it to voters. You need the charisma and application to take your party, the civil service and the country with you. And you need to build a team to do the bits that you cannot accomplish alone.

Keir Starmer has now been Prime Minister for one year and 300 days, which puts him 43rd in the list of Britain’s longest-serving prime ministers. Whether he survives the seven weeks (otherwise known as ‘a single Truss’) he needs at the helm to overtake the Earl of Aberdeen will be shaped, in part, by the local election results next week. Those who have spent much time on the doorstep will know that Starmer is personally political kryptonite for many voters MPs are in recess but as they pound the streets and bang on doors, they know these may be the most significant local elections for a generation. By next Friday, we will have much more idea what fate – and the electorate – has in store for our political class.

When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence on Tuesday to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Mandelson affair, a senior Labour figure remarked: ‘What really did we learn from all this? That Keir made a bad decision, wants someone else to blame and didn’t really know what was going on in his own government. Fancy that!’ The fact that 14 Labour MPs voted to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee (the body which forced Boris Johnson from the political stage) – and a total of 53 recorded no vote in his defence – is far from a ringing endorsement of his leadership. But the significance of the Mandelson hearings has been misunderstood.

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.

Somewhere in the vast array of documents the Cabinet Office has gathered on the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington, there is a text message which Keir Starmer sent the night before he made the announcement. ‘You’ll be brilliant in challenging circumstances,’ he told Mandelson. ‘And after many years of our discussions, we get to work together side by side. I really look forward to that.’ The message was leaked after one of Starmer’s most difficult weeks in charge, a week which senior civil servants believe proves, once and for all, that the Prime Minister himself will never be brilliant in challenging circumstances.

The government keeps telling us that they are desperate for economic growth and keen to attract overseas investment in UK plc. But a case at the High Court last week casts some doubt over that. It all goes back to a case brought by Richard Desmond, the owner of the Express newspapers (and retired pornographer), who sued the Gambling Commission over their decision in 2022 to award the National Lottery licence to Allwyn. Allwyn is a company owned by Karel Komarek, a Czech businessman with interests around the world. They’re the biggest lottery operator in Europe and have the licence to operate in the US states of Illinois and Michigan. Desmond's case was that he should have been awarded the licence, not Allwyn. He lost and now faces legal bills of £70 million.

I have just been contacted by a source who knows much more about what happened with Peter Mandelson’s vetting. It supports the case that I made in my summary of the case last night and Sam Coates made in his thread yesterday that the crucial decision was Keir Starmer’s political decision to appoint him. In essence, Oliver Robbins was rubber stamping a decision which had already been made. Things are much less clear cut than Downing Street has been claiming for the last three days I have heard too from an ally of Mandelson who believes Robbins’ dismissal was ‘egregious’ for exactly the reasons which follow. Some in Whitehall naturally objected to a political appointment from the outset but by no means everyone in Whitehall did so.

The sacking of Sir Oliver Robbins over the vetting of Peter Mandelson is a complicated affair, so I’ll try to break down what we know, what we don’t know and what conclusions we can draw. WHAT HAPPENED What we know:  – Keir Starmer has said he accepts responsibility for the ‘mistake’ of appointing Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US, and insisted that the correct process was followed. – On 5 February, in Hastings, the Prime Minister said ‘there was then security vetting carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise, that gave him clearance for the role.’ – The Guardian reported yesterday that the independent UK Security Vetting organisation had not passed Mandelson.

When John Healey was asked, on stage at the London Defence Conference, whether the armed forces were ‘ready’ for war, the Defence Secretary replied: ‘Yes.’ One of those present says: ‘That was greeted with near incredulity in the room.’ Another attendee compared Healey’s plight to someone ‘playing French cricket’, with critics from all sides hurling balls at his ankles while he tried to bat them away. ‘You can’t score any runs in French cricket.’ George Robertson, Healey’s most respected Labour predecessor and a former secretary general of Nato, was not present; he was in Scotland celebrating his 80th birthday. But he returned to give a withering interview to the FT and a speech.

Someone in Brussels has a sense of humour. One of the euro elves let it be known this week that the deal which the UK hoped to sign this summer has stalled over migration rules. Keir Starmer and his minister--negotiator Nick Thomas-Symonds are seeking a deal on food and agricultural products in exchange for one on youth mobility. However, the number of young people coming to the UK, Thomas-Symonds insists, has to be capped. Cue, with exquisite chutzpah, a leak that the EU is instead prepared to offer Britain an ‘emergency brake’ on the arrival of under-30s if the numbers get too much. Sound familiar? An emergency brake on free movement was exactly what David Cameron asked for in his 2015 negotiations (and even Tony Blair had talked of wanting an emergency brake before that).