Watching Starmer’s Government collapse from the other side

Thursday, 12 February 2026.

Tom Skinner is a former political Director of Events for three Tory prime ministers. Here’s his take on what is happening in Downing St right now.

I’ve seen this film before. Multiple times, actually.

As political Director of Events for three Tory prime ministers, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and briefly Liz Truss, and the architect of two Conservative Party leadership elections, I developed an unfortunate expertise in watching governments implode. I was in CCHQ during several ‘dying days’, trying to ‘sustain’ leaders when the walls were closing in, when every morning brought fresh headlines, every WhatsApp group buzzed with panic, and every MP statement felt like another shovel of dirt on the grave.

And I’ve learned that we have a political system that’s designed to break its leaders. Once the collapse starts, it’s almost impossible to stop.

Watching Keir Starmer this week, I feel an odd mix of professional fascination and genuine sympathy, because I know exactly what’s happening inside Number 10 and Labour HQ right now, and it’s not good.

The resignation of Morgan McSweeney over the Peter Mandelson scandal is not only about one appointment gone wrong. It’s about the cascade of institutional failure that follows when a government loses its authority to govern.

If my experience (three times over) is being replicated inside Downing Street and Labour HQ right now, here is what I think is happening:

First, there’s the impossibility of thinking clearly. When we were trying to sustain Boris or Theresa during their final days and weeks, the media’s appetite for stories made it impossible to step back and make clear strategic decisions. You’re firefighting from 6am until midnight.

We arranged events at almost no notice, tough logistics when you’re dealing with one of the most protected people in the country, one time taking Theresa May to an EU election ‘rally’ in Bristol in which we lined up less than 10 activists to stand in a line next to the Prime Minister in an executive box at Bristol City Football Club. It looked (and felt!) like a hostage video and in 2022 I lost count of the number of times we took Boris to the D-Day Bunker in Uxbridge.

In the wider Government, officials can’t act without ministerial direction, so when ministers can’t make decisions because they’re being hounded by journalists and bombarded by messages from activists and backbenchers, the whole system is paralysed. MPs, understandably, get jittery. They’re being door-stepped, their WhatsApp groups are melting down, their local associations are demanding answers, and they feel forced to comment, to position themselves, to hedge their bets. In the centre, each comment, each interview, each carefully worded tweet becomes another story, another distraction, another nail in the coffin.

The whole system grinds to a halt and Departments freeze. Civil servants are also understandably glued to rolling news and X, waiting for guidance from their political masters that never comes. The Prime Minister, who should be running the country, becomes entirely consumed with political survival.

And all the while, the general public watches this circus, if they’re watching at all, and concludes, probably correctly, that politics is broken.

The Mandelson-Epstein connection has cut through in a way that most Westminster drama doesn’t. People know that name, they know what he did, and they’re rightly disgusted. But everything else, the vetting process, the timeline of who knew what when, the resignation of chiefs of staff whose names they’ve never heard, that’s Westminster bubble stuff. What people actually notice is simpler and closer to home. Their bins aren’t being collected on time, the NHS waiting list is still eighteen months, the potholes in their road still haven’t been fixed, the local school is still struggling, the list goes on. They might have a vague sense that “there’s chaos in Westminster again,” but the minute-by-minute drama that consumes political X? They couldn’t tell you about and frankly don’t care. What they know is that nothing ever seems to get better, whoever’s in charge.

However personally responsible he may feel, Starmer’s public defence has been to blame advisors. No doubt he feels absolutely terrible, but his political decision has been to try and shield himself by jettisoning chiefs of staff and Directors of Communication. This is a natural reaction and an understandable political tactic. I watched Conservative prime ministers try this, but it doesn’t work. It only cements a leader’s fate. And what happens next is also predictable, because we’ve seen it before.

If he’s given a few days, Starmer will try to “reset.” Loyal cabinet ministers will continue to post on social media, he’ll scramble a new team, try to land on a new message, but his private meetings with MPs will be brutal. Labour MPs are under pressure and frightened, just as many Conservative ones were in 2019 in the wake of the local and EU elections, and again in 2022 in the aftermath of Liz Truss’ mini-budget. They are only human. They’re looking at polling showing Reform UK at 29% and the Greens taking voters from their left flank, they are hearing commentators saying that Kemi Badenoch is starting to turn things around for the Tories. They’re staring at the Gorton and Denton by-election, a seat Labour should win comfortably even in the deepest of bad times, but which has now become a referendum on Starmer’s leadership. They’re dreading May’s local elections, fearing it will shred their local activist base.

The gap between what Westminster obsesses over and what matters to ordinary voters has never been wider. Ask any constituent what they think about the Gorton and Denton by-election and you’ll get a blank stare, ask them what Reform’s polling numbers are and they’ll shrug, but ask them if they trust politicians and you’ll get an earful.

Some MPs will rally around Starmer out of loyalty, a desire to protect the perks of their ministerial role, or lack of an alternative. But as Starmer’s rivals gain momentum, the whispers of leadership challenges will turn to more active briefing. You can sense this when you’re at the centre close to the PM. The briefings will turn to anonymous quotes, the anonymous quotes will turn to open criticism, and at some point, maybe this week, maybe after the by-election loss, maybe after the May elections, someone will break.

When Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet within minutes of each other, that was the end. It wasn’t the end because Boris couldn’t survive without them, but because they demonstrated to others that cabinet ministers could resign with dignity and break from the Government cleanly. That triggered the cascade of resignations that brought Boris’ premiership crashing down. If he’d held on for two more weeks, the summer recess would have provided him with a summer of respite and history may have been very different.

Here’s what I learned from my front-row seat to three Conservative implosions:

First, once the authority to govern is gone, it doesn’t come back. The cabinet can tweet their support, you can reshuffle some ministers, you can try a reset, you can give a speech or two, but if your MPs don’t believe in you, if the media smells blood, if the public has moved on, no amount of “drawing a line under it” will save you.

Second, the media cycle becomes self-perpetuating. When the resignations begin, which they no doubt will when they are given their orders from the person they’d like to succeed Starmer, each generates more stories, which generates more pressure, which generates more resignations. Journalists know the pattern and try to accelerate it, each hoping to ‘scoop’ the next ‘big beast’ resignation. Journalists start asking “When will you resign?” instead of “Will you resign?” and, as we’ve seen over the past few days, the tone of coverage shifts from crisis to deathwatch.

Third, civil service paralysis is deadly. When officials don’t know if you’ll be there in a month, they stop implementing anything and slow down on the initiatives being driven by ministers and special advisers. This is totally understandable, they know political priorities will change and Departments begin to draft contingency plans for a Minister’s successor. The machinery of government runs on certainty and terminal leadership doesn’t give the system the political drive it needs to function.

Fourth, your enemies pile on the pressure. I never held any resentment towards those ‘playing politics’ with these situations. Opposing parties demanding resignations, calling out chaos when they smell weakness and keeping the Government under pressure is, for right or wrong, all part of politics. We’ve seen that this week from the Conservatives, Reform, Greens and Lib Dems. They all know that for now they don’t need to be an effective opposition, they just need to keep up the pressure, sit back and be patient.

Fifth, your friends desert you. This is infinitely more painful than anything your political opponents can inflict. At first ministers will tweet their support, but will brief anonymously that you’re now “weaker” and “could stand down at any moment,” and that soon turns to MPs, many of whom owe a PM their careers, starting to talk about “the good of the party,” hoping to keep their local activists on side, whilst appearing to be loyal. Many will profess “regret” at how it’s ending up. And this is how it always ends.

My prediction, based on bitter experience:

1. Starmer limps through this week. The PLP meeting will have been difficult but not fatal. The vetting files for Mandelson will come out and will be embarrassing but not disqualifying. He survives February.
2. Then comes the Gorton and Denton by-election at the end of the month. If (when) Labour loses, the pressure becomes almost unsustainable.
3. May 7th is the real danger zone. Local elections in England, Scottish Parliament elections, Welsh Parliament elections. If (when) Reform and the Greens make significant gains, if (when) Labour gets hammered in Scotland and Wales, if (when) the local results show 20-point swings against them, then someone makes a move. This move is far harder for Labour to pull off than for the Conservatives, and this, at least, does play into Starmer’s hands. When I was in CCHQ we were as in the dark as everyone else about how many letters of no confidence had been submitted to the Chair of the 1922 committee. The power of anonymity gave MPs the ability to play the system, safe in the knowledge that no one would find out who had submitted a letter against the Leader. Labour MPs don’t have that luxury, which is to the PM’s advantage.
4. The end will come when a cabinet delegation tells the PM it’s time. For now they’re remaining loyal, but eventually there will be contenders ready to launch their leadership challenge and something will break. A delegation will go and see the PM and his exit follows shortly afterwards.

The alternative is that Starmer somehow stabilises and limps on for a few months while those with eyes on the top prize continue to plot. The PM will be hoping for some seismic event that shifts people off the topic of his leadership. For Boris this was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It buys you time but eventually a fresh, or manufactured, scandal will become the catalyst for Starmer’s rivals to finally and fatally move against him. But I’ve never seen a prime minister recover from here.

The conclusion I’ve reached after a decade and a half in Conservative politics and now watching Labour self-destruct in remarkably similar fashion is that we have a political system that’s designed to break its leaders. 24/7 news is no longer enough. The media now feeds off minute-by-minute content. Social media amplifies every mistake instantly. MP and activist WhatsApp groups create echo chambers of panic that regularly spill over. MPs are bombarded with messages from party members who are increasingly removed from ‘ordinary’ people (News Flash: it is not normal to be a member of a political party!) Nobody in Government has time to think, to plan, or to actually govern and so we lurch from crisis to crisis, from prime minister to prime minister, from reset to reset.

Watching Starmer, who was supposed to be the serious, grown-up alternative, make exactly the same mistakes we made shows that political incentives reward short-term firefighting over long-term strategy and that political survival trumps policy delivery. The media cycle moves faster than any government can react, so maybe no prime minister can succeed in the reality of the system we currently have?

So rather than watching the Starmer government collapse and feeling vindicated as a Tory, I find myself deeply worried. If Labour, with a massive majority, 18 months in office, and no immediate economic or security crisis like the 2008 financial crash or COVID to deal with, can’t govern effectively, what does that say about British democracy?

If every government sooner or later descends into factional warfare, senior staff departures, and crisis management, what’s the point? If Reform wins in 2029, which is looking increasingly likely, on a platform of “burn it all down,” can we really blame voters for wanting to try something different?

I spent a decade working closely with Conservative Party leaders, starting with Cameron, ending with Sunak. Each was a good person trying to do their best. I watched them all fail in a system that makes failure almost inevitable. Something will almost always bring you down. Now I’m watching Keir Starmer fail in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons.

Those of us who are Westminster insiders, MPs, journalists, special advisers, party activists, are all consumed by this drama. We live it, breathe it, obsess over every detail. We think it matters enormously who’s up, who’s down, who said what to whom. But out there, beyond the bubble, people are just trying to get through the day. They’re worried about paying their energy bills, getting a GP appointment, the standards at their children’s school. Yes, the Mandelson-Epstein scandal has broken through, people know enough to be disgusted. But the rest of it? The staff reshuffles, the statements of support, the leadership speculation? That’s just more proof that Westminster is consumed with itself whilst their lives stay the same.

The crisis isn’t Morgan McSweeney’s resignation, it’s not Anas Sarwar (who almost no one will have heard of) saying the PM must go, it’s not organised expressions of support from the Cabinet towards the PM, it’s not even whether Keir Starmer survives until May. The real crisis is that we’ve built a political system that’s impossible to lead a government in, and the people the Government is supposed to be serving have stopped paying attention because they’ve stopped believing it can ever work for them. It’s going to take something quite dramatic to turn that crisis around.