By Christian Edwards, CNN
London (CNN) — Keir Starmer was fighting to salvage his premiership on Monday after the resignations of key advisers and growing calls from senior Labour figures for the British prime minister to step down, following a bitter fallout from the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Tim Allan, Starmer’s director of communications, said Monday that he was quitting the government. It came less than a day after Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff and his closest adviser, resigned over his role in the appointment of Peter Mandelson – a friend of Jeffrey Epstein – as Britain’s ambassador to the United States last year.
Allan’s resignation adds to the sense that the scandal surrounding the Mandelson appointment cannot be contained and could spell the end of Starmer’s premiership, just 19 months after Labour swept to power in a landslide election that gave it the largest majority in Parliament this century.
That sense grew stronger after Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, broke rank on Monday afternoon and called for Starmer to step down, becoming the first senior Labour figure to do so in public.
“The distraction needs to end, and the leadership in Downing Street has to change,” Sarwar said. He said the decision to call for Starmer to go had caused him “personal hurt and pain,” but he felt a change of direction was needed ahead of local elections in May, which have long been expected to serve as a referendum on Starmer’s leadership.
The British public soured on Starmer almost as soon as it elected him in 2024. Although Labour promised a “decade of national renewal” – which would require it to win two elections – a series of policy missteps and churn at the top of government have driven Starmer’s approval ratings to record lows. Labour’s woes have been to the benefit of the populist Reform UK party, which has led in the polls for more than a year.
Starmer is facing his biggest crisis yet over his decision to appoint Mandelson – a veteran Labour politician – as ambassador to the US, despite his well-known friendship with Epstein, which continued after the disgraced financier’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. The Mandelson revelations have dominated British media for days, snowballing into one of the country’s biggest political scandals this century.
Starmer fired Mandelson in September after a tranche of emails revealed uncomfortable details about his ties to Epstein. Further details of Mandelson’s connection to Epstein emerged when the US Department of Justice last month released millions of documents relating to the disgraced financier. Some of those documents appeared to show that Mandelson, while serving as Britain’s business secretary in 2009, passed Epstein market-sensitive information.
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