Sir Keir Starmer to chair Cabinet after surviving call for resignation

Sir Keir Starmer will chair Cabinet on Tuesday after surviving renewed calls for his resignation from members of his own party.

The routine meeting comes a day after Sir Keir’s top ministers rallied round him after Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar urged him to step down amid the fallout from the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Mr Sarwar became the most senior Labour figure to call for Sir Keir to go, citing concern that the “distraction” from Downing Street would harm his party’s chances of unseating the SNP in May’s Holyrood elections.

But, backed by his Cabinet, Sir Keir issued a defiant response at that evening’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, telling a packed room in Westminster: “I’ve won every fight I’ve ever been in.”

The Prime Minister said he was “not prepared to walk away” as he received a warm reception from MPs reluctant to join Mr Sarwar in calling for him to quit.

The lack of a concerted effort by MPs to depose Sir Keir suggests the immediate danger may have passed.

But some discontent remains, with one critic comparing the meeting to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a Wild West massacre also known as Custer’s Last Stand.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, writing in the Daily Telegraph, said Sir Keir should resign as he had “proved incapable of doing the things a prime minister needs to do”.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir is expected to continue reshaping his Downing Street operation, after telling MPs he wanted to be more “open and inclusive”.

He has already promoted senior aides Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson to be joint acting chiefs of staff, after the departure of Morgan McSweeney over the weekend.

Sir Keir will also need to appoint a new communications chief after the resignation of Tim Allan on Monday, while the Guardian reported that the UK’s top civil servant, cabinet secretary Sir Chris Wormald, was expected to leave his job in the coming days.

With the threat to his position appearing to recede, Sir Keir is expected to travel to Germany at the end of the week to attend the Munich Security Conference, where concern about the future of the transatlantic alliance is likely to be high on the agenda.