Newspaper Reader offers a condensation of Mr. Pecks report.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Apr 27, 2026

Headline: Speaker has Keir Starmer snookered with privileges committee vote

Sub-Headline: Sir Lindsay Hoyle was in jovial mood, bantering about the baize action at the Crucible — then left the prime minister in need of a trick shot or two

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/speaker-lindsay-hoyle-keir-starmer-snookered-mdn0m5k69

…

Over recent weeks, the prime minister’s ever-more absurd refusal to answer questions put to him at prime minister’s questions has built to a rolling boil. The Speaker has received several highly abusive letters from members of the public blaming him for not making Starmer do better. Terse exchanges between the pair of them at the end of the sessions have become a regular occurrence. There’s not actually much the Speaker can do about it, but the public don’t necessarily know that. Though he can, of course, seek redress in more creative ways.

It was his duty as a “gatekeeper”, he said, to allow the House to decide. Specifically, it will decide on whether Starmer has been knowingly truthful at all times, to the House of Commons, especially in regard to a claim made at last week’s prime minister’s questions, that “no pressure existed whatsoever” on the Foreign Office to rush through Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the United States. Sir Olly Robbins, the sacked head of the FCDO, very much took a different view.

Team Starmer will now have to fight extremely hard to ensure the bucket doesn’t become airborne, but it can do nothing about the smell, which is already everywhere. Whatever the outcome, on Tuesday the Commons will debate whether or not Starmer has knowingly misled it — and while it does so, the foreign affairs select committee will hear from his sacked chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and the former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Philip Barton, will tell them what he knew about Mandelson. All three will be brutal.

Even Boris Johnson, who also had a large majority, didn’t try to prevent his MPs from referring him to the privileges committee. Not merely because it would have been too outrageous but it would have asked too much of them and he knew that many of them simply wouldn’t have gone along with it. Starmer, we are told, is considering enforcing a three-line whip on his MPs to oppose the motion. For the many who have already had more than enough of him, that might push them past the point of no return.

Not that long ago, Starmer was considered a lucky politician. Even after Johnson’s various Covid outrages, by the autumn of 2022 he was miles ahead in the polls and widely considered unstoppable. Then along came partygate, and the rest was highly poisonous history to which Starmer was meant to be the antidote.

That he now finds himself in the same invidious position is almost more damaging to him than it was to Johnson. He has so much further to fall.

Newspaper Reader.

Tom Peck, Parliamentary Sketch Writer.