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One of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet colleagues has branded the chaos in his Government “unforgivable”. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said Labour had “forgotten” its true purpose. And she slammed Sir Keir’s claims about immigration, after the Prime Minister said last year that the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers”.

Ms Nandy, whose father was a migrant from India, echoed complaints that Sir Keir had used similar language to Enoch Powell, who was accused of stirring up racial hatred with his incendiary “Rivers of Blood” speech. Asked what she made of Sir Keir’s comments, she said: “I found it jarring because my dad used to debate with Enoch Powell on TV shows. What I think [Starmer] was trying to say is something I would express very differently. In this country, one of the biggest challenges we face is that we’ve lost the ability to understand one another.”

The Culture Secretary made the comments in an interview with the Guardian, where she was asked about recent scandals to hit the Government, including rows over Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle.

Sir Keir has been criticised by female Labour MPs for making Mandelson an ambassador to the US despite his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and now is under pressure over appointing Lord Doyle to the House of Lords, despite his past association with Sean Morton, a former Labour councillor who admitted indecent child image offences in 2017.

The Guardian interviewer suggested the Government had become a “shitshow”. Ms Nandy replied: “You call it a shitshow, I say it’s unforgivable.

“I want to get the words right because it’s really important. It does look to people outside that we’re more interested in ourselves and less interested in preventing chaos.

“What was laid bare in the Epstein files is that there are a group of people in this country and across the world – powerful, wealthy people, mostly men – who control the system, look after their own interests, look after each other and screw everyone else. And that has been happening in plain sight for a really long time.”

The Culture Secretary continued: “At times in our history in the Labour movement we’ve understood that our job is not just about redistributing wealth, it’s about who holds power … I think we’ve forgotten it.”

And she said this “has got to be the moment of reckoning” for Labour.