Chris Mason: Resolving a difficult day for the government

“It hasn’t been our best 24 hours in government,” one senior government figure admitted to me, after confusing us in one way or another, some in public, many more in private.

It began with anonymous reports to journalists that Keir Starmer would oppose any attempt to remove him and that cabinet ministers, including Wes Streeting, were planning challenges.

Streeting insisted he was loyal to the Prime Minister and called for those behind the briefings to be sacked, and the Prime Minister announced that any attacks on his ministers were “unacceptable”.

Added to the mix were questions about whether the prime minister had authorized the original briefings to eliminate potential rivals, and whether those behind the briefings were doing so with his approval.

Would there be an investigation into leaks? Would there be redundancies in what Streeting called a “toxic” Number 10 operation?

What did those close to the prime minister hope to achieve?

I have been making a lot of phone calls to understand what really happened and where all this leaves Keir Starmer’s government.

There are two key facts at the heart of all this: the government is unpopular and so is the prime minister.

These facts are the fuel behind the constant conversations I hear about what the Labor Party is trying to do about it and what it might mean for how long Sir Keir Starmer remains in Downing Street.

But let’s get to the consequences of all that confusion.

The Prime Minister and Health Secretary Wes Streeting spoke by phone on Wednesday night to sort things out.

I heard Sir Keir apologize to Streeting in the short call and they agreed to speak in more detail “soon”.

They did not discuss Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who has become a lightning rod for criticism from everyone from Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in public to junior and senior Labor figures in private.

Widely credited as the mastermind of Labour’s landslide election victory and the political mastermind behind Sir Keir’s rapid rise since he stepped down as Director of Public Prosecutions, McSweeney is also among the first to face criticism when the Downing Street machinery is perceived to have stuttered, stumbled or failed outright.

He does not respond to requests for comment, as some call for his head to be stuck on a stick.

His critics argue that in a Downing Street where McSweeney is asked to make many important political judgments, he should take responsibility for how all this unfolded.

Others in the building insist no one who works there was behind any reports against a cabinet minister, after Wes Streeting said the person responsible should be sacked.

At number 10, there is a tacit acknowledgment that the Health Secretary handled a round of pre-arranged interviews on Wednesday morning with dignity, poise and humour, despite facing incessant questions about his own ambitions because those briefings about him came just hours earlier.

For some Labor MPs, he demonstrated an agility and communication skills they wish the Prime Minister shared.

It will also not have gone unnoticed that at least some of those briefings that attempted to prop up the Prime Minister ended up creating an opportunity for Streeting to say that he shared the sentiment of his colleagues who described Downing Street as toxic and sexist and that those behind the briefings should be sacked.

What a disaster.

I’m told the Prime Minister is “incandescent” at how this has all unfolded and is investigating how it happened.

What seems to have gone wrong, from No 10’s perspective, is both volume and emphasis.

First, they had imagined, perhaps naively, that the briefings would generate some news, but not full headlines.

It turned out to be much louder than they had anticipated.

I would say that a Prime Minister who lets this sort of thing be known, through his supporters, less than 18 months after a landslide general election victory, was always going to be on the front page, at the top of the newsletters, as it turned out, in these pages and others.

And secondly, for emphasis, they insist that they were not expecting all this talk about Wes Streeting, which was then enormously magnified by all those interviews he had scheduled for Wednesday morning.

Others, it must be said, concluded that this was precisely the intention.

A few more days have passed in which Labor in government talk about the lessons learned and many on the benches are irritated by what they see as an absurd spectacle that they first have to witness and then try to defend.

And they would prefer not to.

But a government and a prime minister whose nervousness about their situation is even greater than that of their vast majority will likely see repeats of this saga unless they can quickly address the profound unpopularity driving it.