To hear British Prime Minister Keir Starmer tell it, he has been an unwitting victim of circumstance.
He was lied to, he says, by Peter Mandelson, the man whom he made ambassador to the United States and later fired for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender. He was never told that security vetting officials had denied Mr. Mandelson top security clearances. And he was kept in the dark by unnamed bureaucrats who granted the clearances anyway.
It was not his fault, Mr. Starmer insisted on Friday, that he repeatedly gave Parliament incomplete information about the Mandelson affair. In fact, he said, he’s “furious” about the whole thing.
“That I wasn’t told that Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting when he’s appointed is staggering,” he told reporters less than a day after firing the top civil servant at the Foreign Office. “That I wasn’t told that he had failed security vetting when I was telling parliament that due process had been followed is unforgivable.”
The question now is whether Britons will forgive him.
Victimhood is not a good look for Mr. Starmer, who has been struggling to command the respect of Britain’s population since taking office almost two years ago. The Labour Party’s election victory in 2024 delivered him to No. 10 Downing Street with a large majority in Parliament.
“Keir Starmer can’t win out of this,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “Either he has to admit he misled, let’s put it kindly, Parliament, or he has to effectively argue, ‘I know very little about what goes on inside my government, so I couldn’t have known this.’”
Mr. Starmer’s popularity has sunk to the lowest levels of any modern British prime minister, dragged down by a sluggish economy, rising prices and the sense that he has not delivered the change he promised. His usual answer is to blame the Conservatives, who governed for 14 years before he took over.
Now, his political opponents have seized on his claims of helplessness to call for his resignation.
Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said Mr. Starmer is overseeing “total negligence and incompetence right at the top of his government.” Nigel Farage, the head of the right-wing populist Reform U.K. party, accused the prime minister of having “willfully lied to the country.” Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, said Mr. Starmer should “stop blaming the vetting” and get on with quitting.
“The Prime Minister needs to do the right thing and resign,” she told the BBC.
Mr. Starmer on Friday brushed aside questions about whether he would do that, and Darren Jones, one of his senior ministers, told the BBC flatly that the prime minister and his aides had not even discussed the possibility.
On Friday, as the political attacks intensified, Mr. Starmer was in Paris, co-hosting with President Emmanuel Macron of France a meeting of allies to discuss reopening the Strait of Hormuz. In recent weeks, Mr. Starmer has seemed energized by a new willingness to stand up to President Trump, refusing his demand that Britain join the war against Iran.
During the Paris gathering, Mr. Trump announced that the strait was open, a fact that Mr. Starmer cautiously hailed as good news.
But in the longer term, Mr. Starmer’s political troubles are far from over.
In less than three weeks, voters will go to the polls in Scotland, Wales and in local elections across England. Mr. Starmer himself is not on the ballot, but he and his political advisers are expecting his Labour Party to be walloped in historic fashion — perhaps losing around 2,000 council seats.
That could convince the prime minister’s rivals in the Labour Party that it’s time to oust Mr. Starmer before he drags the rest of the party down ahead of national elections that must be held by 2029. Several Labour politicians came close to mounting a leadership challenge earlier this year but backed down in the end.
”Starmer will probably — repeat, probably — get yet another stay of execution,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, “courtesy of the President of the United States’ Middle East misadventure and the fact that no one contemplating a leadership challenge wants to take over before the blood bath” in May.
“Once those contests are over,” Mr. Bale added, “it’s difficult to see him lasting much longer.”
Supporters of the prime minister say that reports of his political demise are premature. They argue that there is no evidence that the potential challengers inside the Labour Party would find it any easier to please British voters who are angry about the cost of living — set to rise further thanks to the Iran war — and the decline in public services after a long period of underinvestment under the Conservatives.
They also note that the Conservatives did not benefit when they switched out a series of prime ministers, one after another. Keeping Mr. Starmer in office could be safer, politically, for now than the chaos that follows a wholesale upheaval of the government.
Still, the political damage from Mr. Starmer’s handling of Mr. Mandelson’s appointment is not yet over. Earlier this year, Parliament demanded that Mr. Starmer’s government hand over every document related to the decision to appoint him as the country’s top diplomat to America.
So far, only a few hundred pages of thousands of documents have been released. Officials have said they expect more documents to be made public over the coming weeks and months. Among them could be details from the vetting report that caused this week’s controversy.
“The Mandelson mess won’t be the only, or even the main, reason that Starmer has to go,” Mr. Bale said. “But the latest revelations do appear to have finally snapped the patience of a fair few of those Labour MPs.”
Michael D. Shear is the chief U.K. correspondent for The New York Times, covering British politics and culture and diplomacy around the world.
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