All three of the resignation letters from ministers who have quit government in the past couple of hours will be painful for Keir Starmer, but Jess Phillips’s will hurt the most. The Safeguarding Minister makes a series of accusations against the Prime Minister which he will find personally hard to take. They cut right to the heart of why his premiership has failed.
She describes him as a ‘good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things’, with the inevitable criticism following straight after: ‘however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough’. She claims that Starmer stalled on ‘solutions, long worked on by brilliant civil servants that would end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves’, and that ‘it has taken me a year to get you to agree to even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten’. She also claims that ‘real change and direction’ on tackling violence against women and girls ‘usually came from threats made by me in light of catastrophic mistakes’, including after the Mandelson scandal.
Phillips has struggled as a minister: she found that the violence against women and girls sector, which she had worked in before becoming an MP, was quickly disappointed in her when she joined the government. She would regularly have to argue that she was still working as hard as ever to push the agenda within government, and had to go on the defensive when the government ended up struggling to respond to the sudden rise up the agenda of grooming gangs. For months she has kept her counsel about the factors behind the disappointment that her former colleagues feel, and today she has ended her silence in a hugely damaging manner for the Prime Minister.
Her Home Office colleague Alex Davies-Jones swiftly followed with her own resignation from the victims minister role. She also included the claim that she believes Starmer to be a ‘good and honest man’, which is the kind of compliment impossible to take when accompanied with a demand for a timetable for the Prime Minister’s departure.
The morning’s cabinet meeting – as reported here by James – suggested a level of delusion from Starmer that is on a par with Boris Johnson in the final days of his premiership, where he kept calling Volodymyr Zelensky in order to show what an important job he was doing, as ministers penned their resignation letters. We know how messily that ended, and so do those around Starmer, who will hope that they don’t end up in the position the former Tory prime minister did, of having to appoint the most random Tory backbenchers to ministerial posts in order to pretend that the government could still function.
