And here's Chris Mason. He is every bit as bad as I've been told
A grim week for Starmer – but things could be about to get worse
This is such shit.
If you had asked me a fortnight ago about the sentiment we were picking up from Labour MPs about Sir Keir's future in Downing Street, I would have told you that pressure from them appeared to have eased.
Perhaps, some pondered, after the prime minister's political near death experience in February - the moment the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the party "looked over the precipice" - the appetite to take another peek over the edge had gone, at least for now.
Labour MPs were still looking towards the elections around Britain a week on Thursday with trepidation bordering on horror, but many talked with pride about how their leader was handling the war in the Middle East and the fervent leadership chatter had eased, at least a bit.
But all of this was before mid-afternoon on Thursday of last week, when the Guardian's investigation about Lord Mandelson's security vetting dropped.
Since then, an unremittingly, relentlessly, incessantly grim story, if you think of it from the perspective of the Labour Party, has been squatting on the news agenda, expelling the potential for anything they would rather be talking about getting any attention.
Only actual politics in this is that Starmer was handling the Middle East war well. Yeah, let's get that guy out of Downing Street.
Starmer's so far been vindicated and the Guardian story looks like overexcited Inside Baseball stuff. How are those developments "unremittingly, relentlessly, incessantly grim"? As others have observed, the news agenda seemed to move on pretty rapidly when Cat Little was speaking. Was that because her testimony was too grim, so played down as a favour to Starmer?
Pure hot dog man stuff.
