𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Angela Rayner has been warned that the ousting of Sir Keir Starmer will backfire. It is thought that the former Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary would be one of the front runners for the Labour leadership were the Prime Minister to step down. Sir Keir has faced arguably the most perilous week of his premiership so far after further revelations about Lord Mandelson in the latest batch of the Epstein Files.

It is alleged that he leaked market-sensitive information from the heart of former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown’s Government to the paedophile financier. A police investigation is underway. The Prime Minister appointed Mandelson as US ambassador last year, and his judgment is now being questioned.

It has been reported that Ms Rayner, who is now on the back benches after resigning over her tax affairs last year, has built up a £1 million “war chest” to force Sir Keir out of office.

But she has now been told that if she became his successor, she would not have a personal mandate from the electorate and so should call a general election.

“If you come in with a completely different agenda then the country legitimately says, ‘We didn’t vote for this’,” a Labour figure who has served on Sir Keir’s front bench told The Telegraph.

They added that Ms Rayner could claim “constitutional grounds” for not holding a poll, but in today’s world of “frenzied” social and news media, they suggested that this would not be sustainable.

“The pressure for an election would be enormous,” a Cabinet minister who is one of the Prime Minister’s allies told the newspaper.

Mr Brown told the BBC’s Today programme this morning that the situation facing Sir Keir is “serious” and suggested the Labour leader had been “too slow to do the right things” to clean up politics in the wake of the Mandelson row.

But the former PM backed Sir Keir as a “man of integrity” who had been “betrayed” by Lord Mandelson.

Police are sifting through boxes of evidence removed from Lord Mandelson’s addresses as part of their investigation into alleged misconduct in a public office.

Officers probing accusations relating to the peer’s association with Jeffrey Epstein searched a house near Regent’s Park in central London and a property in Wiltshire on Friday afternoon.