"To have one Labour peer with a close association to a child sex offender may be regarded as a misfortune: to have two looks like carelessness. This was never going to be an easy prime minister's question for Keir Starmer. The opposition was spoilt for choice. The peers in question Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle as well as the topics of Morgan McSweeney, Tim Allan, Wes Streeting These were just some of the crisis points of the past seven days."
"But even the losers get lucky some time. Starmer knew he was in for a rough half hour. You could see it in the anxious glances he flicked towards the opposition benches. You could hear it in the forced cheers from his own MPs. The weary opening gag about having had more ministerial meetings than usual this week. And yet it wasn't the bloodbath Keir and his colleagues had anticipated."
"When he feels the whole world is against him, he is lucky to find himself up against Kemi Badenoch. A woman who believes she is dictating world events. You could put her on a fairground ride and she would still think she was in control of where she was going. Her latest delusion is that she has masterminded the recent crises inside No 10. Without her interventions, none of us would be any the wiser about Mandelson's links to Jeffrey Epstein."
Keir Starmer faced a brutal week of political crises involving two Labour peers with close associations to a child sex offender, alongside controversies involving Morgan McSweeney, Tim Allan, and Wes Streeting. He expected a damaging Prime Minister's Questions but sustained only minor damage compared with a previous PMQs disaster. Starmer showed visible anxiety and received forced cheers from his MPs. Kemi Badenoch pressed the issues and claimed credit for exposing links and prompting resignations, despite repeating information already published in a newspaper. Her assertive performance influenced perceptions and limited the scale of Starmer's collapse.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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