Has Anas Sarwar’s bombshell blown up Keir Starmer…or himself?

The Scottish Labour leader looks isolated after his call for a change of leadership in No 10

So many and varied have been the shocks to Keir Starmer in recent days that it is hard to calibrate the impact of Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar today calling for the Prime Minister to resign. But this could be the big one.

This is no backbench MP calling for the Prime Minister to resign, no unregenerate Corbynite. It is the leader of the party in Scotland — a country that used to be Labour’s heartland in the not-so-distant past. Sarwar is, moreover, a dyed-in-the-wool Starmerite. Perhaps, some speculated, he has been assigned this task by the men and women in grey suits in Westminster who lack the bottle to do it themselves. He is certainly expressing openly a view shared privately by many Laboue MPs

“The leadership in Downing Street has to change,” Sarwar told a specially convened press conference this afternoon. “This isn’t easy and it’s not without pain.” But, he went on, “I have to do what is right for my country, Scotland.”

The Scottish Labour leader is clearly looking to shore up his position in his own backyard before the Holyrood election in three months time. It has not been going to plan.

Eighteen months ago, after Labour’s general election victory, Anas Sarwar was all but measuring the curtains in Bute House. Having returned 37 out of Scotland’s 57 Westminster seats, Labour was confident that it was about to end two decades of SNP government in the May 2026 Scottish Parliament elections. But it all came to nothing. A succession of scandals and U-turns have wrecked Labour’s popularity in Scotland, and Sarwar’s hopes of becoming First Minister.

Last week’s opinion polls placed the Scottish Labour Party in a humiliating third place behind Reform UK, and likely to return only 19 out of 129 MSPs in the Holyrood Parliament in May. I’ll repeat that in case you misssed it. Labour is now trailing the party led by a man who used to be such a political pariah in Scotland that he once had to be rescued by police from anti-racist demonstrators in Edinburgh.

So it is understandable that Sarwar should be resorting to desperate measures. But has he thought this through?

Starmer shows no signs of wishing to go quietly, not least because of the “psychodrama” that would be unleashed by his departure given the febrile state of Labour politics. He is surely right. Is a divisive leadership election, and likely a vicious left-right war, really the best option for the party and the country right now?

Who does Sarwar expect to replace the Prime Minister, to whom he has been a longstanding ally? Angela Rayner — a politician who is still under a cloud over her tax affairs? Wes Streeting — who was so close to Peter Mandelson that he attended regular Sunday suppers with the disgraced peer and Morgan McSweeney?

Indeed, Sarwar is not entirely in the clear here when it comes to public support for the former US ambassador. Only last year, he posted a picture of himself with Mandelson at the ambassador’s residence in Washington DC, saying: “It was great to catch up with my old friend.”

Sarwar has been pressed from the same mould as McSweeney, who resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff yesterday. In December, McSweeney attended a Christmas party at Sarwar’s Glasgow home along with his wife Imogen Walker, the Labour MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley and a key figure in the Scottish Labour leader’s operation.

Sarwar might not describe himself as a Blairite, but he is certainly a pillar of Labour centrism. He is under assault for this from Left-wingers in his party and from outside via the Corbynite Your Party which had its inaugural Scottish conference in Dundee at the weekend. MSPs are naturally angry at the apparent collapse of their political fortunes, and some seem to regard Sarwar’s former closeness to Mandelson’s incestuous political nexus as part of the problem.

Perhaps this explains the Scottish Labour leader’s bombshell call for Starmer to resign. It places clear red water between him and a discredited UK leadership. Maybe Scottish voters will see him as courageous for taking this moral stand. Then again, maybe they wont’t and will just see more chaos in the party of government.

There is an air of bewilderment in Scottish political circles tonight. A senior Scottish Labour source, believed to be the Scottish Labour campaign manager, Douglas Alexander, MP told Sky News that the move is “idiocy, immature, incoherent and self defeating. Bad for the country, playing into our opponents hands, and without any idea of an end game.”

Within hours of Anas Sarwar’s press conference every member of the UK cabinet published statements backing Keir Starmer’s leadership. Sarwar may only have damaged his own position if he is now forced to spend the next three humiliating months tacitly supporting a party leader in which he has expressed zero confidence.

How will Scottish voters view that? After all, dropping bombshells can often blow the bomb-thrower to smithereens.

A m version of this column appeared in UnHerd