Most senior Labour figure so far demands Starmer’s head | Politics | News
Starmer even faced calls to resign from members of his own party (Image: Getty)
Labour’s most senior official ever has reportedly left the ranks to demand Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation, declaring that the Prime Minister has made his position impossible by refusing to admit he was wrong.
Maurice Glasman, the political thinker who founded the Blue Labor Movement, is understood to have said Sir Keir had backed him into a corner from which there was no escape.
He reportedly said: “If you can’t own up to your mistakes, you can’t move. All he had to say was ‘we made a mistake’. But he stuck with saying he didn’t do anything wrong, so it can’t be brushed aside. It’s actually that simple.”
It was claimed that Lord Glasman, who was pressured on whether the Prime Minister should go or not, was clear. “It is no longer possible for him to continue as a reliable Prime Minister. This is because he cannot say ‘I made a mistake, I am sorry’.”
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review scandal
The intervention comes as Sir Keir faces growing anger over revelations that intelligence officials did not recommend that Lord Mandelson be formally given security clearance before he was appointed Britain’s ambassador to Washington, The Telegraph reported. The Prime Minister stood firm in his claim that he was never informed that the review process had led to an adverse finding.
This position aroused suspicion within their own ranks. Sir Keir also admitted he went ahead with the Mandelson appointment despite already being aware of his colleague’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein; This concession only deepened the questions surrounding his decision-making.
The timing couldn’t be worse. A leadership fight was already being openly discussed ahead of local elections, which are now less than three weeks away, with predictions suggesting Labor could lose up to 2,000 seats on 7 May.
Lord Glasman is not the most senior member of the Labor ranks to publicly call for Starmer to go. (Image: Chris McAndrew / UK Parliament)
Ignored warning
Lord Glasman had tried to get through the crisis months before it exploded into public view. He put his concerns in writing in early 2025, sending a note directly to Morgan McSweeney (who was Sir Keir’s most senior aide at the time and would later step down over the same scandal) laying out the dangers posed by Mandelson’s Epstein associations and calling on both men to abandon the candidacy altogether.
His verdict on his then-peer was clear: “Wrong man, wrong place at the wrong time.”
His warnings were ignored. In his speech on Sunday, he made clear that he believed the consequences were now inevitable.
“So how critical is the situation? [Sir Keir] He’s still messing around with all this but it’s not going anywhere. May 7 will be another fiasco. I can’t see how it will continue after the May elections.
“It may limp by the summer, but the point is, we’re doing all this while there’s a war in Iran, there’s a war in Ukraine, and where’s the political leadership?”
Downing Street on Sunday recalled Sir Keir’s remarks in March in which he accepted personal responsibility for the Mandelson decision. The Prime Minister said at the time: “I was the one who made the mistake… and I’m the one who apologized to the victims of Epstein.”
The significance of Lord Glasman’s call for resignation extends beyond his personal views. His public break with the Prime Minister as the architect of Blue Labour, a movement that has repeatedly pressured Sir Keir to take tougher action on welfare, defense spending and immigration, signals a rupture that extends far beyond the village of Westminster.
