Starmer needs sharper survival strategy if he is to stay on
The last time Keir Starmer faced a threat to his leadership, his core team assembled in the cabinet room and persuaded ministers to fire off a succession of supportive tweets in an attempt to keep him in office.This time has been different.As the number of MPs calling for the prime minister to resign has grown over the last 48 hours, much of the cabinet has remained quiet.And though the prime minister remained in office on Tuesday night, some in government were wondering whether his political operation was as sharp as it once was, especially since the departure of Starmer’s long-term aide Morgan McSweeney.“How could they not plan for this, it’s mad,” said one MP, frustrated at what they saw as a lack of fightback from Downing Street.
Another said there was “literally no guidance or plan,I have no idea what plan it was that they think they were preparing,”Starmer’s political operation is a very different one from what it was for most of his first 20 months in office, during which the prime minister would decide the broad direction of the government but leave much of the daily politics to McSweeney,When faced with a scandal, for example, it was often McSweeney who would lead the strategy over how to respond and, if required, make the first phone call to a minister whom the prime minister wanted to resign,McSweeney resigned as chief of staff in February over his role in recommending Peter Mandelson as ambassador in Washington.
He remains close to Starmer and is understood to have spoken to the prime minister in recent days about his situation.He is not providing advice to No 10 however, even behind the scenes.Starmer appointed Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson after McSweeney’s resignation, and they led the fightback in February when the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, called for Starmer to resign.Alongside Amy Richards, the Downing Street political director, and Jonathan Reynolds, the chief whip, they coordinated a response to Sarwar that was so swift it gave any potential rival very little time to act.This time the same team has once more assembled in the cabinet room, albeit largely without Cuthbertson, who is on maternity leave.
While she came in to Downing Street on Monday evening, sources say it was only briefly and she did not get involved in making calls.“They have really missed Jill, she was the one with the connections across the Labour party,” said one government official.Stuart Ingham, one of the prime minister’s longest-standing aides, and Sophie Nazemi, his director of communications, have also pitched in.Downing Street officials say they have tried to use broadly the same tactics as they employed last time to keep him in post, with phone calls across the party and defiant messages in public.Some have been warning of dire consequences should the prime minister be ousted, such as a spike in bond yields – though they have been careful not to use those arguments too directly with Labour MPs.
“There is a very good chance that we are heading for a Liz Truss moment in the next few months,” said one government figure, referring to the jump in UK borrowing costs that followed the former prime minister’s “mini-budget”.“We can’t say so in such terms to MPs though, as they get nervous about being made to feel like they are being held hostage.”To an extent, Starmer’s aides have been helped by the fact that MPs are still in their constituencies after the local elections, and do not return to Westminster until Wednesday.While their absence has made it more difficult to coordinate the prime minister’s defence, it has also prevented the same level of collaboration among his opponents.For some MPs, the outreach has worked.
On Tuesday more than 100 Labour MPs, including the former minister Tulip Siddiq, Carolyn Harris and Perran Moon, signed a letter insisting: “This is no time for a leadership contest.”The letter was coordinated by backbenchers and some parliamentary ministerial aides.Organisers say it did not come from No 10, though MPs said it had been circulated by government whips.Starmer himself made his message clear at cabinet – it was time to trigger a leadership contest or stand down.In words that in effect dared the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to move against him, the prime minister said: “The past 48 hours have been destabilising for government and that has a real economic cost for our country and for families.
“The Labour party has a process for challenging a leader and that has not been triggered.”Sources told the Guardian that Starmer did not give cabinet critics time to respond, before moving the conversation on to the Middle East.They added that he did not have one-on-one meetings before or after cabinet, apart from with his close ally Richard Hermer.One source said Streeting had tried to speak to the prime minister privately after, but had been rebuffed.While Starmer then headed to a technical college in south London for a planned ministerial visit, his words persuaded some cabinet ministers to issue supportive statements to reporters outside Downing Street as they left the meeting.
Others, however, have remained quiet, in marked contrast to February, when every cabinet minister quickly issued public declarations of support.Streeting himself has remained quiet in public, as have Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary.As the dust began to settle on another day of political drama, Starmer’s allies were quietly hopeful they had shored the prime minister up for another day, even if they were wary of predicting any further into the future.“I don’t know what happens next,” said one.“It might be that Andy or Wes backs down having marched their armies halfway up the hill.
Or it might be that one of them succeeds and arrives in Downing Street just as the jet fuel runs out,”
GameStop’s $55.5bn bid for eBay rejected as ‘neither credible nor attractive’
The board of eBay has rejected the US video games retailer GameStop’s surprise $55.5bn bid (£41bn) for the online marketplace, describing the proposal as “neither credible nor attractive”.Earlier this month, GameStop made an unsolicited bid for eBay, publishing a letter on its website outlining a half-cash, half-stock proposal.This was despite the US games company – which became a global household name during the meme stock craze of 2021 – being worth far less than its takeover target. GameStop had a market valuation of roughly $12bn before its bid, almost a quarter of eBay’s $46bn valuation
Molière Ex Machina: AI used to create ‘new work’ by beloved French playwright
Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages (The Astrologer, or False Omens), a three-act comedy, made its debut at the Royal Opera at the Château de Versailles last week.The two-hour play tells the story of a wealthy bourgeois Parisian who, under the instruction of a charlatan astrologer called Pseudoramus, insists his daughter Lucile marry a debt-ridden and elderly wigmaker.While the theme could well have been dreamed up by Molière, the dialogue, music, costumes and scenery were all created with the help of a French AI tool called Le Chat (The Cat)
Who is Louis Mosley, the man tasked with defending Palantir against its critics?
The hall was packed with rightwing radicals when Louis Mosley heralded a coming revolution. Just as Oliver Cromwell – that “crusader for Christ and liberty” – routed King Charles I’s royalists, “a similar revolution is brewing today”, said the UK and Europe boss of Palantir. Globalism’s “twilight” was upon us, he said in a speech dotted with admiring mentions of the podcaster Joe Rogan and “Elon’s Doge”.It was not a typical peroration for a big UK government contractor with more than £600m in deals with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and police. But Palantir, the world’s most controversial tech company, is no typical contractor
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Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, testifies in OpenAI trial
Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, took the stand on Wednesday as one of the most highly anticipated witnesses in Musk’s case against OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has argued that, while Zilis worked with OpenAI from 2016 to 2023, she was also involved in a secret relationship with Musk, acting as an informant for him.Musk’s case against OpenAI alleges that the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and president, Greg Brockman, co-founders of the company with Musk, broke a founding agreement when they restructured it from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of unjustly enriching themselves and wants both removed from their positions at the startup, one of the most valuable in the world. He is also seeking the undoing of the for-profit restructuring and $134bn in damages to be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm
TikTok’s algorithm favored Republican content in 2024 US elections, study finds
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature finds that TikTok’s algorithm systematically prioritized pro-Republican content in three states leading up to the 2024 US elections.Researchers created hundreds of dummy accounts and conditioned them to mimic real users’ behavior by watching a set of videos either aligned with the US Democratic or Republican parties. Then, they tracked the videos TikTok recommended on these accounts’ For You pages, TikTok’s main feed.“We found a consistent imbalance,” they wrote in Nature.About 42% of US social media users say that these platforms are important for getting involved with political and social issues, according to Pew Research, but it’s not often clear how recommendation algorithms shape what appears in feeds
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