The Prime Minister needs to decide how he will go, The House Magazine, Monday 2nd February 2026

Come the May elections, Keir Starmer will be gone. I suspect even in Number 10 there are few people who doubt this now.

While the Mandelson Scandal will prove to be the final nail in his political coffin, I’m afraid that it is only a symptom of the real issue: poor political judgement. The public has seen this clearly in the form of regular u-turns and the constant ditching of policies first leaked to the press, while incoherent party management has alienated the Prime Minister’s natural supporters.

The situation has got so bad that last week Number 10 was forced to pull their own amendment when they realised too few Labour MPs had sufficient trust in their own Government to support it.

When the trust is gone, there can be no recovery for the Prime Minister. You cannot relaunch when the fundamental problem is one of judgement and the longer this goes on, the more the many fantastic things this Government is delivering in office are being swamped out by psychodrama, with the party’s polling trending towards zero.

As is widely-known, the one lifeline which has enabled the Prime Minister to survive so far has been the lack of a candidate willing to put themselves forward and until the May elections no one will want to step up and take the political hit the party will likely suffer at the polls. This leaves Mr Starmer with a choice.

He can wait until May and force the country to endure the chaos of removing a sitting Prime Minister followed by months of the governing party focusing entirely inwards or he can act now and announce his departure in May.

Doing so would provide continuity for the country, avoiding the need for an interim Prime Minister, and enable Mr Starmer and his team the opportunity to prepare for the end of his ministry. For candidates it would remove the one obstacle currently preventing them from setting out their stalls and giving them time to pull together the people and the ideas necessary to hit the ground running in office.

Unfortunately for the party. internal campaigning will inevitably prove a distraction from electioneering, but given the central role the Prime Minister plays in the party’s current unpopularity, a deadline on his departure would at least enable canvassers to honestly sell the belief that genuine change will follow after the May elections.

The decision is, for now, entirely up to the Prime Minister. Whatever his mistakes, I believe Keir Starmer is a good man, who has made considerable sacrifices to enter public office. The fact he has proven poorly-suited to the role of Prime Minister is not his fault, the role suits almost no one. While he no longer has a choice when his ministry will end, he can still decide how it will end, offering the country the stable transition the Conservatives so regularly denied us.