Sir Keir Starmer has defiantly vowed to fight on as prime minister, telling Labour MPs he won’t “walk away” and that he’s won every fight he’s ever been in.
He was speaking at a crunch meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, as the fallout from his decision to appoint Lord Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US continues to reverberate as more revelations about the disgraced peer’s relationship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein are revealed.
The prime minister refused to resign, saying: “I have had my detractors every step along the way, and I’ve got them now. Detractors that don’t want a Labour government at all, and certainly not one to succeed.
“After having fought so hard for the chance to change our country, I’m not prepared to walk away from my mandate and my responsibility to my country, or to plunge us into chaos as others have done.”
Sir Keir told MPs he had “won every fight I’ve ever been in”.
He said he’d “fought to change the Crown Prosecution Service so it better served victims of violence against women and girls”, and “fought to change the Labour Party to allow us to win an election again”.
“People told me I couldn’t do it. And then they gradually said, you might just get over the line.
“We won with a landslide majority. Every fight I’ve been in, I have won,” the prime minister told Labour MPs.
Sky’s chief political correspondent Jon Craig said the prime minister arrived at the meeting with a “face like thunder”, and “didn’t even say good evening” to journalists outside.
He got a “very good reception” from his MPs,…
