Fatal flaw: Keir Starmer’s leadership vacuum threatens to swallow him up

LONDON — Keir Starmer’s team believed he was the perfect candidate to be British Prime Minister when he took office in July 2024. But winning an election is one thing and running the country, it turns out, requires something else. 

Stuck in a months-long crisis over his appointment of Peter Mandelson as U.K. ambassador to Washington, Starmer is now stumbling toward what many on his own side fear is the endgame of his premiership, less than two years since leading his Labour Party to a landslide victory. 

While he rages at the failings of “the state” and fires officials for letting him down, many of those he has burned over the past 21 months are now turning on him.

And they are bitter. 

“Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth,” said one Labour insider. “Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.”

A dozen politicians, aides and officials — including some who have worked intimately with the prime minister in Downing Street — spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity, because the matter is sensitive, and described a leader defined primarily by his absence. 

Starmer, they say, has no ability to manage a team; an aversion to conflict; no guiding mission for power; no energy to drive change; little interest in people; and no interest in political strategy. While not all agree, some suggest Starmer just isn’t willing to do the tough work a prime minister must — perhaps because he likes his time away from the office more than he should.

So why did the former chief prosecutor for England and Wales ever want to be prime minister? “Because he is ambitious,” said a former official who worked closely with Starmer. “It was another profession he could climb to the top of.”

The crisis of faith threatening to end Starmer’s leadership springs from his ill-fated decision in 2024 to appoint Mandelson, a Labour grandee and former Cabinet minister, to be British ambassador to the United States, and thus a key conduit to the incoming Trump administration. This past September, Starmer fired Mandelson over his friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but damaging new revelations about the government’s handling of the episode are still coming to light. 

The Guardian reported last week that a vetting officer had recommended that Mandelson should be denied full security clearance — which would be a key bar to doing the job of ambassador — but the Foreign Office granted it to him anyway. Somehow, the prime minister himself was not told at the time about that critical security judgment, and did not find out about it until a few days ago. 

The scandal has cost Mandelson, the PM’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and last week the head of the Foreign Office Oliver Robbins — who is said to have overseen the vetting decision — their jobs. Opposition leaders are calling for the prime minister to resign, claiming he misled Parliament when he said all the correct vetting procedures had been followed. 

One thing not in dispute is that Robbins decided not to tell the prime minister about the vetting recommendation. Starmer’s allies argue fiercely, therefore, that this cannot be used as evidence of his incuriosity. But the extraordinary saga nonetheless dredged up long-running questions about the way Starmer governs. One government minister fumed after Robbins’ sacking on Friday: “Why aren’t there questions? Why isn’t there challenge? It seems like there is a bit of a theme.”

Starmer “was sold as the painstaking, methodical, ethical, principled lawyer,” said Hannah White, from the Institute for Government think tank in London. “Given what has now emerged about what was known about Mandelson, you could say that it’s surprising that somebody with all those characteristics would think that was an O.K. appointment to make.” 

Mandelson is pictured in London on June 23, 2024. | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Starmer didn’t know Mandelson had failed security vetting, and on Friday said he was “furious” with the civil servants who were involved. His allies rallied around that case over the weekend, including Cabinet minister Liz Kendall who told the BBC on Sunday: “If he had known … he would not have made that appointment.”

A government official privately emphasized that argument when asked to respond to the criticisms contained in this article. There is “no comparison” with discredited ex-prime minister Boris Johnson, who was found to have deliberately misled parliament.

But the prime minister remains in the danger zone. He is set to explain himself to MPs in Parliament on Monday. On Tuesday, Robbins is due to take questions from MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Either of these occasions could put another nail in Starmer’s coffin.

“I do think this is quite terminal for him,” said the former No. 10 aide quoted above. “I just don’t see how he keeps getting away with it.”

The frontman

The Mandelson saga marks a spectacular decline for a leader who won a massive landslide less than two years ago and entered government promising to restore trust in politics. 

Back in 2024, Starmer won praise for his center-left Labour Party’s highly disciplined campaign. His willingness not to interfere in the work of his talented election campaign team won him loyalty and credit from his own side and among analysts. 

“He’s a perfect candidate, because he’s a candidate — he doesn’t try to be campaign manager, or speechwriter or logistics manager,” one Labour official said, shortly after the 2024 victory. “He’s good at properly backing his people and making everyone understand that they have his support to do the job.” In other words, as the national election frontman he delegated a lot, and it worked. 

Against an unpopular Conservative Party which had been in power for 14 years, Starmer’s willingness to follow advice helped Labour win two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons. 

Of course, a prime minister needs to be able to delegate and trust their team. But the limits of that strategy have become clear in government — as the Mandelson episode confirms.

Starmer trusted his first-choice chief of staff, Sue Gray, to have prepared an oven-ready plan for power, which Labour would roll out the day after winning the election. It turned out no such plan existed. 

Starmer then replaced Gray with his election mastermind McSweeney, who had been serving in a political director role. McSweeney was given the power to provide political input on Starmer’s behalf into a huge swathe of policy decisions across government and, for a time, things improved. 

But a year and a half later, McSweeney quit over the decision to appoint the disgraced Mandelson as ambassador to the U.S. — paying the price for the advice his boss appeared consistently happy to take. 

Morgan McSweeney arrives in Downing Street in London on Oct. 6, 2025. | Leon Neal/Getty Images

“He delegates so much responsibility,” another former No. 10 aide said. “Yes, you delegate some stuff because you’re the prime minister and you can’t physically do everything, but you do have to have ownership and control.”

Scapegoat strategy 

Delegating of course requires having some trusted lieutenants to delegate to. Unfortunately, Starmer has largely failed to hold together a team of advisers and top officials who can drive through his government’s plans. The churn in senior personnel is remarkable. 

It is a common observation among officials and MPs that leaders who are successful and stay the course in office, like Labour ex-PM Tony Blair and Tory former premier David Cameron, keep a stable team of talented loyalists throughout. 

In the short time since becoming premier, Starmer has had three chiefs of staff, five directors of communications, three cabinet secretaries to run the civil service, and two principal private secretaries in charge of his office. 

“He self-evidently cannot build a functional team,” one former official said. “It’s not a serious operation.”

“He is absolutely unable to run a team either in Downing Street or in cabinet or across the wider government and it comes back to the fact that he is fundamentally pretty uninterested in people.” 

It has now become a problem of trust. In government, Starmer has become known for ducking responsibility, according to another former official who worked with him. “His team don’t trust him because he throws other people under the bus.” 

The decision to appear on Friday as the familiar figure of a man “furious” with his own government machine for failing him went down poorly, Whitehall officials told POLITICO. “He’s furious with the state? Well, bad luck,” one ex-colleague of Starmer’s. “You are in fact in charge of the state.”

No vision, mate 

Starmer doesn’t like to take difficult decisions or to arbitrate between Cabinet colleagues who clash, according to several of the people interviewed for this article. For example a dispute between Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Defense Secretary John Healey over military budgets is stalled. If Starmer wanted to, he could solve it at a stroke, the people said. 

Instead, problems are left to drift, and announcements are made but not followed up because the PM won’t use his own authority to drive through change.

Even as they strode into Downing Street, Starmer’s team worried privately that their leader’s passive nature could be a problem in power. He could be too reactive, too slow to respond to problems, they feared, and too reluctant to get on the front foot and put forward his own positive vision for the country. He set out “missions,” “milestones” and a “plan for change,” but many of his MPs craved something more.

Anyone still hoping for a Starmer vision should give up now, according to his former colleagues. “He doesn’t have an ideology that anchors him and his government, which means that they don’t have a guiding vision or destination,” one former government official said. “Without ideology or governing vision, you have no frame of reference for taking or explaining tough decisions.”

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pictured at an event in Taipei, Taiwan on Aug. 5, 2025. | Ritchie B. Tongo/EPA

“He is fundamentally uninterested in political strategy,” a Labour insider added. “Some people just think in those terms all the time — what does this event mean? How can we turn it to our advantage? But his brain doesn’t work that way.” 

That lack of a guiding vision and a distaste for political scheming contribute to the biggest flaw of all: the prime minister’s tendency not to be there when he is needed. 

Many of those who spoke to POLITICO described a lack of “curiosity” in the PM. “He just doesn’t ask questions, on policy, politics or apparently propriety either,” another former official said. Some ministers agree. 

A current government official described Starmer’s approach to interrogating policies and other decisions as “hear no evil, see no evil.” The official added: “You can’t claim to be this meticulous lawyer, this micro-manager, this mandarin and then not care for stuff like this.”

Boris Johnson vibes  

One bizarre example of his passivity is that Starmer apparently does not even express a strong preference about how he wants to spend his own time. “He is so hands-off about his diary,” another former No. 10 official said. Referring to Jill Cuthbertson, a top aide who used to run Starmer’s diary, this person said: “It’s kind of like, ‘what has Jill put in my diary today,’ and then if it was something he didn’t enjoy doing, someone else would bear the brunt of it, but he’d never be involved in the front end of ‘here’s how I would like to spend my day.’”

There is one famous exception: Friday evenings. In the final days before the 2024 election, Starmer made a point of saying he had a rule that he would not work after 6 p.m. on Fridays because he wanted to protect family time with his teenage children. Predictably, his political opponents claimed at the time that this was evidence the Labour leader would not work hard enough if he won power.

Plenty of people in Starmer’s team — including otherwise critical ex-colleagues — say the charge is unfair. And it is certainly true, for example, that Starmer frequently calls world leaders and attends many meetings on international crises such as Ukraine and the Middle East, at all hours of the day and week. 

But some former officials still see problems. In the end, the job “demands” constant work and a willingness to spend every waking moment strategizing about politics, one said. And senior government staffers could find the premier eerily quiet outside normal office hours. “He certainly isn’t bombarding colleagues with ideas or thoughts about events over the weekend or in the evenings,” another added.

Part of this is down to Starmer’s history as a civil servant leading the Crown Prosecution Service, argued the former No. 10 official quoted above on his diary. “It’s not that he doesn’t care,” this former official said. “He’ll have wanted to share decision-making; he’ll have wanted people to buy into decisions. And unfortunately politics … is more dictatorial than that, and he never quite got that.”

A close ally of Starmer acknowledged he is less driven by ideological debate than past prime ministers, but insisted that is still a refreshing trait in British politics. “It’s unfair to call him incurious,” this person said. “The questions he asks are more how, what and when, rather than why.”

In recent years the U.K. has experienced another leader who campaigned with rare success but was unable to keep a team together or deliver a coherent agenda in office — Boris Johnson, who was finally ejected after three years in office when his Conservative Party colleagues ran out of patience after an unending stream of scandals and missteps. 

His failure to get a story straight on how much he knew about sexual misconduct allegations involving one of his friends triggered the final wave of cabinet resignations that forced him out. 

Starmer despised the way Johnson handled himself in office and promised to restore trust in politics when he took power in 2024. Now, like Johnson, he stands accused of misleading Parliament over how much he knew about a scandal that threatens his downfall. 

“It stinks,” one of the former officials said. “The man is as rotten as Boris. He just dresses it up differently.”