The walls of Number 10 are closing in on Sir Keir Starmer. Barely a week after the resignation of his deputy Angela Rayner in a damaging tax scandal, the prime minister finds himself engulfed in an even darker controversy: the sacking of Lord Peter Mandelson following revelations of his email exchanges with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The scandal has shaken the Labour Party to its core, not only because of the lurid connections but because of the way Starmer handled it. Government officials have confirmed that both Downing Street and the Foreign Office knew of the emails at least two days before Mandelson was forced out. Yet on Wednesday, Starmer stood before MPs and offered his full confidence in the former Labour power broker. Less than 24 hours later, Mandelson was gone.

For many Labour MPs, the sequence was damning. “I don’t think I’ve known it this bad, to be honest,” Olivia Blake, a leftwing MP, told the BBC. She accused Starmer’s team of “deep failings” and warned that the prime minister was losing his grip on the party.

Officials inside Whitehall insist that the delay was not negligence but caution. Sir Olly Robbins, the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, spent Tuesday and Wednesday seeking to verify the details, sending questions to Mandelson late into the evening. But as Mandelson dragged his feet in responding, Robbins grew increasingly impatient. When the full cache of emails surfaced on Wednesday night, Number 10 moved swiftly.

“You can’t just sack someone without asking questions and looking into the issue,” one government official explained, stressing that Starmer had not seen the entire set of emails until they were published. “The emails were reviewed overnight, and a decision was taken quickly on Thursday morning.”

Yet for critics inside the party, that explanation does little to erase the perception of dithering at the very top. The optics of a leader offering public loyalty, only to reverse course within hours, are politically disastrous. The fact that this is the second such episode in as many weeks — with Starmer having given a similar vote of confidence to Angela Rayner days before her resignation — compounds the damage.

The mood inside Labour’s parliamentary ranks is funereal. Whispers of whether Starmer can survive until the next general election, or even beyond the summer, are spreading through the corridors of Westminster. For a leader who entered Number 10 promising discipline and integrity, the unfolding chaos feels like betrayal to those who rallied behind him.

The timing could hardly be worse. Donald Trump is scheduled to arrive in Britain for a state visit next week, a trip that was once viewed as a political headache for Starmer. Now, his allies see it as an unexpected chance to reset the narrative. Downing Street is preparing to roll out a slate of investment announcements — in artificial intelligence, technology, and nuclear power — in the hope of projecting stability and competence.

But even the prospect of billions in foreign investment may not quiet the storm of mistrust. Labour MPs want answers: Why was the information on Mandelson not delivered to Starmer sooner? Who failed in their duty to brief him? And can a prime minister who has twice vouched for colleagues only to see them disgraced still command authority?

The Mandelson scandal is not just about one man’s emails with Epstein. It is about the fragility of leadership and the speed at which credibility can collapse in modern politics. Starmer now faces not only the judgment of the public but the restless scrutiny of his own MPs.

For now, he remains in office, clinging to the hope that next week’s pageantry and economic pledges will buy him time. But within Labour, the question is no longer whispered in private — it is spoken aloud in Parliament’s tea rooms and in front of television cameras: Is Keir Starmer finished?