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The most senior Labour figure yet has reportedly broken ranks to demand Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation, declaring the Prime Minister has made his position impossible by refusing to admit he was wrong.

Maurice Glasman — the peer and political thinker who established the Blue Labour movement — is understood to have said that Sir Keir had backed himself into a corner from which there was no escape.

He is reported to have said: “If you can’t own your mistakes, you can’t move. All he needed to say was ‘we made an error’. But he’s completely stuck in saying he hasn’t done anything wrong, so this can’t go away. It’s as straightforward as that, really.”

Pressed on whether the Prime Minister should go, Lord Glasman was allegedly unequivocal. “He cannot conceivably continue as a credible Prime Minister any longer. And that’s all because he cannot say ‘I made a mistake, I’m sorry’.”

Vetting scandal

The intervention comes as Sir Keir faces mounting fury over the revelation that intelligence officials had formally recommended against granting Lord Mandelson security clearance before he was installed as Britain’s ambassador in Washington, reports The Telegraph. The Prime Minister has stood firm on his claim that he was never informed the vetting process had produced an adverse finding.

That position has drawn scepticism from within his own ranks. Sir Keir has separately conceded that he went ahead with the Mandelson appointment while already aware of the peer’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein — a concession that has only deepened the questions surrounding his decision-making.

The timing could hardly be worse. A leadership challenge was already being openly discussed ahead of local elections now less than three weeks away, with projections suggesting Labour could shed up to 2,000 seats on May 7.

A warning that went unheeded

Lord Glasman had attempted to head off the crisis months before it exploded into public view. Early in 2025 he put his concerns in writing, sending a memo directly to Morgan McSweeney — at that point Sir Keir’s most senior aide, who would later leave his post over the same scandal — setting out the dangers posed by Mandelson’s Epstein associations and calling on both men to abandon the nomination entirely.

His verdict on the peer at the time was blunt: “the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place.”

His warnings went unheeded. Speaking on Sunday, he made clear he believed the consequences were now unavoidable.

“So how critical is it? He [Sir Keir] is still stumbling on with all this, but it’s just not going to go anywhere. May 7 is going to be another debacle. I can’t see how he carries on after the May elections.

“He could limp on to the summer but the point is we’re doing all this while there’s a war in Iran, there’s a war in Ukraine and where is the political leadership?”

Downing Street pointed Sunday to remarks Sir Keir made in March in which he accepted personal responsibility for the Mandelson decision. The Prime Minister said at the time: “It was me that made the mistake… and it’s me that makes the apology to the victims of Epstein.”

The significance of Lord Glasman’s call for resignation extends beyond his personal views. As the architect of Blue Labour — a movement that has repeatedly pressed Sir Keir to take harder lines on welfare, defence spending and migration — his public break with the Prime Minister signals a rupture that stretches well beyond the Westminster village.