LONDON — Keir Starmer appears to be losing his dressing room.
Amid the bitter fallout of revelations that Peter Mandelson did not pass security vetting — yet was still appointed U.K. ambassador to Washington — some of the PM’s top team are now qualifying their support for the boss.
Starmer’s decision to appoint Mandelson is seen as his worst political judgment yet after he was forced to sack the ex-Labour peer last September over his continued friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
From the initial decision to appoint the scandal-hit Labour bigwig, to the PM’s snap decision to sack top Foreign Office official Olly Robbins for not disclosing Mandelson had not passed vetting, Starmer’s ministers have failed to offer their resolute support.
Cabinet backing is crucial for any prime minister. History suggests that once ministers lose confidence, a U.K. leader’s departure is only a matter of time.
POLITICO runs through the times the U.K. prime minister’s supposed allies did not ride to his rescue … just this week.
Pat McFadden
The U.K.’s work and pensions secretary is usually a safe pair of hands on the morning broadcast round at times of peril for the PM.
But the shrewd political operator — once an aide to ex-PM Tony Blair — wasn’t keen to personally back the PM’s sacking of Robbins when he spoke to Times Radio on Wednesday morning.
Asked if it was fair for Starmer to fire Robbins, McFadden would only say “it’s the prime minister’s judgment,” and he thinks “very highly” of Robbins.
On a separate Robbins revelation that No. 10 Downing Street wanted to get Starmer’s ex-Director of Communications, Matthew Doyle, a “head of mission” job, McFadden did not pull his punches: “I don’t think that would have been the right thing to do. I don’t think he was appropriate to be appointed as an ambassador.”
Ed Miliband
The energy secretary knows the trials and tribulations of running Labour, having led the party between 2010 and 2015.
Pressed on Tuesday about the known risks of appointing Mandelson, Miliband echoed Starmer’s contrition that Mandelson “shouldn’t have been appointed.”
Mandelson is pictured as he walks his dog near his residence in central London on April 20, 2026. | Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty ImagesBut Miliband, who insists he’s not angling for the top job again, went a step further when speaking to Sky News.
“I steered well clear of Peter Mandelson when I became Labour leader in 2010,” he bragged. “People make mistakes” and PMs “are human,” he conceded.
Keen to show he hadn’t kept his concern the whole appointment could “blow up” to himself, he told the broadcaster that then-Foreign Secretary (and now Deputy PM) David Lammy was “worried about it too.”
Yvette Cooper
The U.K.’s current foreign secretary was keen to remind MPs she wasn’t running the Foreign Office when the seeds of the Mandelson saga were sown.
Asked about the Doyle revelation in the House of Commons Tuesday, Cooper said: “Obviously, I was the home secretary at the time that I understand that took place, so I was not involved and do not know the circumstances.”
Robbins told MPs earlier Tuesday that he was “under strict instruction” from No. 10 not to discuss the possibility of Doyle’s posting with Lammy, something Cooper said she was “extremely concerned” about.
For good measure, she added Doyle would “not have been an appropriate appointment.”
Darren Jones
There are few ministers closer to Starmer than Jones, but it appears even the PM’s chief secretary has his limits.
During an interview with POLITICO’s Anne McElvoy, Jones pleaded ignorance when quizzed over accusations from Robbins that there had been a culture of fear inside Downing Street around Mandelson’s appointment.
“I wasn’t in the building at the time, so I can’t speak to it contemporaneously,” Jones said Tuesday at the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate.
He insisted: “I just don’t recognize” that the current No 10 culture is one of “fiefdom or fear.” If only he had been chief secretary at the time Mandelson was appointed.
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