I’ve been playing a lot of chess recently and there’s a part of the game called a ‘forcing move’ where you give your opponent no other choice but to take a particular position on the board, in order to save themselves from losing material, or being checkmated.
The problem for your opponent, is that while accepting this move may save them from immediate peril, it can also put them into an even weaker overall position.
As I explained in the Byline Times podcast this afternoon (recorded above) and in my latest column for the paper, this is the situation Keir Starmer now finds himself in.
Faced with growing anger amongst Labour MPs over his appointment of Peter Mandelson, in the wake of the Epstein files, Starmer is coming under huge pressure to sack his chief adviser Morgan McSweeney, who pushed for his appointment in the first place.
As I have set out before on these pages, McSweeney is right at the heart of this Government’s failures, on everything from its self-defeating factional attacks on the left, to its more recent haemorrhaging of votes to the Greens. There is no recovery for Starmer’s premiership that does not begin with his departure.
As one Labour MP put it to me: “Getting rid of Morgan is our only way back.”
Yet as some other Labour MPs explained to me this week, there are many in the party who believe it is now simply impossible to separate the two and that if McSweeney falls, then so too will Starmer.
Faced with forcing move after forcing move, it’s now hard to see how this game can end without the Prime Minister being checkmated, with or without his all powerful queen sat beside him.
