Starmer vows to fight on as Labour election fears intensify

Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership is being measured against one hard number: more than 5,000 council seats on the line across 136 English local authorities on 7 May, with one report saying a minister believed Labour would be “compelled to take action” if it lost more than 1,500 of them.

Starmer tried to draw a line under the speculation in an interview with The Sunday Times, saying he would “fight on and win the next election”. That defiant message has not stopped the pressure building inside Labour, where Angela Rayner has been reported telling MPs that the time to oust him is “now or never”.

The tension has been sharpened by a furious run of briefings and emergency planning sessions. Sky News reported that Starmer’s circle gathered at Chequers on Friday to wargame the coming weeks, amid growing doubts in Labour’s top tier over whether he will still be leader long enough to fight the next general election. The broadcaster said the Mandelson fallout has drained his authority and revived talk of possible successors.

The latest row centres on Lord Mandelson and a previously unrecorded 2025 meeting with Palantir. The Sunday Telegraph reported that Starmer did not log the meeting, despite a requirement for details of external meetings to be published quarterly. The paper said breaching the ministerial code is widely seen as a resignation offence. A government spokesman said ministers “engage with a range of companies as part of their international travel and Palantir is a longstanding investor in the UK”, while Palantir said the meeting was “a typical government visit to a UK employer, organised by officials in the usual way”.

The Mandelson affair has also collided with the sacking of Sir Olly Robbins from his senior Foreign Office role. Robbins gave evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee and was reported to have argued that civil servants, not secretaries of state, are responsible for vetting under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. Starmer has said he was “absolutely furious” not to have been told that Mandelson had failed security vetting. He was due to give a statement to MPs on Monday, with Robbins due before MPs on Tuesday, keeping the issue alive as the local-election campaign tightens.

That is why the coming vote has become more than a routine mid-term test. If Labour can limit losses, the noise around Starmer may settle back into Westminster chatter. If the party is hammered and the seat losses climb toward 1,500, the debate over his future is likely to move from speculation to an open leadership crisis.