Keir Starmer's authority collapsed in the House of Commons this week, and it will not recover. This video explains why his judgment failed, why sacking aides will not save him, and why Labour is now a hollowed-out party with no credible future leadership.

But this crisis goes much further than Starmer. It exposes systemic failure in Labour, growing paralysis in government, and deeper institutional rot that threatens the Union and the monarchy itself.

This is not a scandal. It is an executive collapse in slow motion.

This is the audio version:

This is the transcript:

Keir Starmer is finished. Let's be honest. His time as Prime Minister is over after the events of this week,   but there's something more important than that.

The whole of the Labour Party is rotten to its core; that's what we've seen, and stick around to later in this video because I think the consequences spread well beyond the future of one political party in this country.

Keir Starmer suffered a day of mayhem in the Commons on Wednesday. The Tories had him over a barrel over his appointment of Peter Mandelson as our ambassador to Washington in 2025. And the mood changed when Starmer admitted that he knew of Mandelson's continuing links with Epstein when he appointed him. His  own backbenchers and Angela Rayner, quite significantly, turned on him.

The question is: can Starmer survive this, and who else might fall? There are others in the firing line. We are heading into an era of unknowns in British politics, and the ramifications are big.

What we know is that Keir Starmer made clear his lack of judgment when standing before the House of Commons on Wednesday. He said he knew how flawed Peter Mandelson was when appointing him as ambassador to the USA, and he carried on anyway. He did not act in ignorance; he lacked judgment. He thought a fixer, like Mandelson, who'd known a fixer, like Jeffrey Epstein, would deal with a fixer, like Donald Trump, and his judgment failed him as a consequence, and judgment is at the very core of leadership.

The consequence was very clear. It was obvious that Starmer had lost all his authority in the Commons. He stood there, quite literally shaking at the Despatch Box because he could not handle the stress that he was under. A debate that should have been routine collapsed into chaos, so bad was his mismanagement of the day. He looked, quite literally, overwhelmed, and that is fatal for any Prime Minister.

And after all this, the Labour machinery moved into action. The defence is being offered that it wasn't Starmer's decision to appoint Mandelson, but that Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff in Downing Street, persuaded him to do so. But that is no defence. Starmer appointed McSweeney. Responsibility cannot be delegated. Judgment still rests with Starmer, and McSweeney was Starmer's choice and as bad a choice as Mandelson.

All the commentary made one thing clear: McSweeney's departure will not save Starmer. There are cabinet ministers telling political commentators that this is the case. There are MPs standing in front of television cameras saying that this is the case, and we have seen this before. Liz Truss sacked Kwasi Kwarteng in 2022. It was a desperate attempt on her part to blame her Chancellor for the problems that she had created in a matter of weeks. It did not save her. Sacking an aide does not fix terminal leadership failure, and that's what Truss suffered, and that's what Starmer is suffering.

The result is obvious: Starmer is now living on borrowed time. Whatever credibility he had has gone; it cannot be recovered. This story is not going away. The media is going to keep on about it until Starmer has left. There is no other opportunity for him now; he will have to leave.

And there are immediate political consequences. Labour does, of course, now need to look at who its new leader might be.  Andy Burnham must be annoyed at being kept out of the prospects, but there is, in fact, no obvious successor for Starmer, who could do better. That's the sad state that the Labour Party has reached. Just as the Tories have denuded themselves of talent by throwing out anybody who was any good during the Johnson era, now Labour is in the same position. Starmer has depleted the ranks of anybody who is able, and there is no successor in sight. This is systemic failure and not personal misfortune that we are witnessing with regard to the future of the Labour Party. It has been hollowed out; there is nothing else.

And, of course, we should note that Reform UK will seek to exploit this crisis. But there is a question to  ask: why wasn't there a single Reform MP in the House of Commons to witness this yesterday? That absence matters. What have they got to hide about all this? Because remember, Farage was close to Trump, was close to Steve Bannon, and Steve Bannon most definitely appears in the Epstein papers. What's going on? Why are they so frightened of exploiting a situation that looks like a gift to them?

The reality is that we face a government in paralysis. This is what is going to happen for the next three and a half years. There is no reason for Labour to leave office. We have got used to having lame duck prime ministers sitting around appointed mid-term who can deliver very little. Remember Gordon Brown? Remember Rishi Sunak? Now we're going to have a new one. The point is Labour has time, but no capacity to act. A massive majority has now become meaningless. This is executive collapse in slow motion that we are witnessing here, and that's because there is collateral damage within Labour.

This issue does not stop with Starmer. Wes Streeting is vulnerable because he was so closely associated with Peter Mandelson, whom he called his champion.  Peter Kyle is a close friend of Peter Mandelson, as is Steve Reed of Morgan McSweeney. All  are associated with the key players in this move. They are now toxic as well, but are leading ministers in the government. They probably can't serve in a future administration, but in that case, Labour looks as though it really is bereft of people who can lead the government of the future.

And there is, and let's be clear about this, worse to come, as yet. There is bound to be more material coming out into the public domain soon from the Epstein papers. That's going to happen here in the UK because of the inquiry now set up in Parliament, but also in the United States, and none of that is going to help Labour at all, whilst Starmer's situation can only deteriorate politically.

The Gorton and Denton by-election will be another nail in his coffin. There is not a hope that Labour will now win that,  and come May, there are council elections in England and Senedd elections in Wales, and Holyrood elections in Scotland. Labour is going to be hammered in all of them. It will be enough to consign Labour to history.   In Wales, for the first time in a century, Labour will not be holding a majority of seats. This is quite extraordinary.

So, what happens next? In the short term? I suspect that Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, will be sacked within days. I cannot see how he cannot be sacrificed, although, as I've already noted, that will not save Starmer.

Will Starmer go in the next few days? I very much doubt it. I'm hoping he doesn't because I want this video to go out, and you never know, everything could change between the time I'm literally talking into the camera and the moment we put it into the public domain. But the fact is, nobody really thinks Starmer is going in the next few weeks. He will survive until May, but then his day will be over. The electoral losses will be the excuse for Labour MPs to be rid of him, and be rid of him they will be.

What happens next? I haven't a clue who will lead the Labour Party next.  They have loads of people who fancy the post, from Yvette Cooper onwards, but all of them look like a disaster in the making. And I'm not sure it frankly matters who they choose because Labour is sinking fast. A party hollowed out by neoliberalism cannot recover, and all the prospective leaders, except one that I've heard of, and that is Clive Lewis, who I think is such an outsider he hasn't got a hope, are neoliberal to their core.

There will then have to be a political realignment in this country. We know that the Tories are fading away;   their MPs are haemorrhaging to Reform already.

The left will now leave Labour as well. The obvious beneficiary of all of this is the Greens, but there are problems there as well, and I'm going to make another video on that very soon, because let's be clear, as even they admit, they have a structure set up to be a small party, and they might become a big one very quickly, and whether they can make that transition is, again, open to question.  And all the while, the parliamentary map is shifting faster than expected: the old certainties are gone.

But, and I said I would get to this, there are two deeper questions to ask as well. This crisis is not just about Labour.

The first question that has to be asked is: can the UK survive this? Labour once held the Union together. Scotland and Wales trusted it. They always returned a vast majority of Labour MPs in both countries, and that trust has now gone.  It's very clear; it has dissipated. The opinion polls make it obvious.  Labour is running at around 10% support in Wales, and no more than 15% in Scotland. In  that case, has the glue that held together the Union departed with the Labour Party? Because the replacements are parties supporting independence.   Plaid Cymru in Wales, the SNP in Scotland. How long  can the Union last now? It's a question that has to be asked. I think Labour and the Union have been absolutely intimately linked, and without Labour, I'm not sure how this thing holds together.

But just as importantly, the monarchy is also in the frame, as is its future. This crisis does not stop with Labour. The Epstein scandal raises wider questions, including whether the monarchy can continue, because the issue here is exactly the same as it is with Keir Starmer; it is a question of judgment and accountability, and it is clear that the monarchy has failed.

We've learned a lot about the Royal Family in the last few days.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, whatever he's now called, had to be removed from Windsor on Tuesday night under pressure because of the disclosures being made. He also had to be removed because he remained arrogantly displaying his presence. Further revelations about his behaviour are bound to emerge, and all the royals are doing at present is damage limitation. There is no hint of leadership coming from them. They are floundering, just like Keir Starmer.

The King's failure is of many errors of judgment. Allowing Andrew to remain at Windsor; moving him to Sandringham because that changes nothing; he gets protection and income and is still in the firm as a result. There is no distancing.

But worse still, there's also no evidence that the Royal Family realise that they have to be accountable for what has happened.

Why aren't they investigating all the information that was available that persuaded the late Queen to make a £12 million settlement on behalf of Andrew?

Why aren't they putting information into the public domain?

Why aren't they explaining their current position?

Why aren't they explaining what they know about Andrew?

All of this suggests evasion, and an absence of curiosity and accountability, or just a desire to protect the institution using a mechanism that was once available to them of "offer no explanations", but which no longer holds true.

What's been exposed are the facts, and the facts are that the monarchy is an institution without legitimacy.   It is eugenic by design. You can't argue with that. It's a hereditary principle, and that must mean that it is assumed they have superior genes and therefore this is eugenic, and that assumption breeds entitlement and unaccountability. Andrew is the consequence of that. The idea that ordinary people are somehow disposable and beneath them is built into the system, and that matters politically and morally.

What do we have to conclude from all this? Two institutions have failed.

One is the Labour Party; it is rotten to the core.

The monarchy is rotten to the core.

Neither now serves the public interest.

Neither is now fit for purpose.

Labour is failing, and the monarchy still could.

But let's be clear, a third institution is at risk as well, and that is the Union itself. The UK as a whole could fail as a consequence of this. It is also at peril because there is no reason why the people of Wales, and Scotland, and Northern Ireland should now want to owe their allegiance to an English crown based in London alongside an English parliament that is clearly not delivering justice for them.

We need a new direction of travel.

We need democratic accountability.

We need institutions based on care and not privilege.

We need an economy and politics that values people.

We must stop pretending that broken systems can be patched because they can't.

We have to reform, or the cancerous prejudice at the heart of the UK will continue, and that is the real crisis that we face, which Epstein has uncovered.

We have a system that is rotten. He was. Our system is. The consequences are going to flow for some time to come.

What do you think? There's a poll down below.

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