Labour backbenchers are openly calling on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to step down — and they're using the words of his own departing chief of staff to do it.
Morgan McSweeney resigned Sunday, claiming "full responsibility" for advising Starmer to appoint Lord Peter Mandelson as U.S. Ambassador. The sacrifice was supposed to stop the bleeding. It hasn't. Within hours, Labour MPs turned McSweeney's exit into a template and pointed it straight at Downing Street.
The trigger: Starmer's admission in the House of Commons this week that he knew Mandelson had maintained a relationship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — after Epstein served prison time for child sex offences — and appointed him anyway.
Ian Byrne, Labour MP for Liverpool West Derby, told The Telegraph that one resignation wouldn't be enough:
"This will not stop with a single resignation. A true change in political direction must now come from, and be led from, the very top."
He wasn't subtle about the implication, according to Breitbart News:
"The Prime Minister must now reflect honestly on his own position and ask whether, for the good of the country and the Labour Party, he should follow McSweeney's lead."
Brian Leishman, Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, echoed the call almost word for word:
"There must be a change in political direction and that comes from the very top, so the Prime Minister must look at his own position and question whether he should follow McSweeney's lead one last time, and resign for the good of the country and the Labour Party."
The coordinated language tells you this isn't spontaneous frustration. It's organized pressure.
Then there's the anonymous Labour MP who spoke to the broadsheet and dispensed with the diplomatic phrasing entirely:
"He's a coward who refuses to take responsibility for his own actions. He is a moral gravity-well, from which neither decency, honesty or integrity can escape. A genuine disaster for this country and the Labour movement."
That same MP predicted Starmer would go down as the worst PM in Labour history. From a member of his own party. Not the opposition benches — his own side.
The scandal isn't just that Mandelson had ties to Epstein. Plenty of powerful figures did. The scandal is that Starmer knew Mandelson continued the relationship after Epstein's conviction and imprisonment — and still handed him one of Britain's most prominent diplomatic posts.
This isn't a failure of vetting. It's a failure of judgment so total that it raises the question of what, exactly, Starmer thought was acceptable. The man who spent years conducting a methodical purge of the Labour left — sidelining rivals, consolidating power — suddenly couldn't manage basic due diligence on an appointment that would define his government's relationship with Washington.
The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation this week after U.S. DOJ documents indicated Mandelson apparently provided Epstein with confidential government information during the 2008 financial crisis — information that could have been used to game the markets. A criminal investigation into a sitting ambassador, triggered by American government documents. The diplomatic implications alone are staggering.
McSweeney's resignation has all the hallmarks of a controlled demolition — sacrifice the aide, protect the principal. Downing Street moved quickly to frame this as accountability in action. A spokesman said:
"The Prime Minister recognises the need for government to address the issues highlighted by the Mandelson revelations."
And:
"Work began last week on this. The Prime Minister has instructed officials to move at pace to deliver change. He hopes to update the country as early as tomorrow."
"Move at pace to deliver change" is the kind of phrase that sounds decisive and means nothing. Starmer is expected to address the nation on Monday. What he can say that reframes "I knowingly appointed a man linked to a convicted pedophile" remains unclear.
The problem with the fall-guy strategy is that McSweeney can only absorb blame for the advice. Starmer is the one who took it. He's the Prime Minister. The appointment was his decision, made with full knowledge of the Epstein connection. No amount of staff turnover changes that sequence.
Lord Maurice Glasman, founder of the Blue Labour faction that argues for a return to working-class priorities, went further than anyone on Sky News Sunday. He said the party must "repent" of the "sin" of the "love of globalisation" and the "worship of success and money."
Then he delivered the line that will echo through Westminster for weeks:
"The Labour Party has to repent and reject New Labour as an alien body that took over the party. And this is where it leads: perversion and pedophilia."
Glasman also noted he had advised against hiring Mandelson — the longtime Labour operative and so-called "Prince of Darkness" who served as the power behind Tony Blair's throne. He described the New Labour approach associated with Mandelson as "Maoist Managerialism."
It's a striking moment. Labour's internal critics aren't just attacking a bad appointment. They're attacking the entire ideological infrastructure that produced it — the globalist, elite-networked, morally flexible project that New Labour represented and that Starmer, for all his talk of change, never actually dismantled.
Starmer spent this week trying to rally Labour against Reform UK, pitching himself as the last line of defense for the multicultural, pro-diversity globalist project. Reform has held a commanding lead in the polls over the past year. Nigel Farage's anti-mass migration movement has captured ground that Labour once considered its birthright.
The timing could not be worse. Starmer needed unity. He got a revolt. He needed moral authority. He got an Epstein scandal. He needed to project competence. His chief of staff just walked out the door.
Years of brutal internal consolidation — the purges, the sidelining, the methodical takeover of the party apparatus — were supposed to make Labour ungovernable by anyone but Starmer and his circle. Instead, they left him isolated. When the crisis hit, there was no deep bench of loyal allies willing to absorb the blow. There was McSweeney, and now McSweeney is gone.
The backbenchers calling for Starmer's head aren't political heavyweights. They don't need to be. The damage isn't in the weight of the voices — it's in the fact that they're speaking at all. A prime minister whose own MPs publicly suggest he resign over a moral failing doesn't recover by giving a Monday morning address. He recovers by being right, and Starmer was wrong on this from the beginning.
He knew. He appointed Mandelson anyway. And now his own party is telling him that one resignation wasn't enough.
