Angela Rayner has been sacked. Peter Mandelson has been shown the door. Headlines scream of crisis, commentators dust off the clichés, and opponents smell blood. Yet to frame this as a Labour collapse is to misunderstand the political climate we live in. What we are witnessing is not the implosion of a party but the increasingly predictable rhythms of modern politics.
Sophy Ridge summed it up neatly when the deputy PM was forced out of the door:
“Angela Rayner has admitted not paying enough stamp duty & now we’re in that slightly strange limbo where a big story has broken but not much has moved since because we’re waiting for the investigation to conclude.”
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In that pause, everyone retreats to their corner. Ridge put it bluntly: if you support Rayner, you see integrity, victimhood, classism, and sexism. If you oppose her, you see hypocrisy, entitlement, and a resignation waiting to happen. The script is pre-written, the lines well-rehearsed. And crucially, there is no middle ground.
This is tribalism as a political operating system. You pick a side, you never concede an inch, and the conversation is not about facts or proportionality but about the emotional resonance of the scandal.
It’s not confined to Labour, nor to the individuals at the heart of this latest storm. Scandals – personal, financial, behavioural – now dictate the pace of political life. They will beset whoever takes the keys to Number 10. And each one will not only consume days, weeks, sometimes months of oxygen but will also distract ministers from the actual work of governing.
Because when was the last time we saw a minister resign over failure in their brief? Ridge again asked the uncomfortable question:
“When’s the last time we saw a minister resign because they failed at their actual job? Because they didn’t build enough houses… or because NHS waiting lists got bigger… or because more small boats crossed the channel?”
We don’t. Our politics has shifted. It is not policy failure but personal failings that trigger a crisis. And those personal failings don’t even need to be career-ending on their own merits; they just need to be scandal-shaped enough to dominate the news cycle and force the Prime Minister into a calculation about whether the distraction is sustainable.
That’s why Mandelson’s exit matters less than the story it generates. That’s why Rayner’s sacking is not the collapse it might look like. This is how modern politics operates: tribal, emotional, scandal-driven. It’s politics from the heart rather than the head, fuelled by the drama of resignation threats and public outrage rather than by the slow, difficult business of policy delivery.
And so, while opponents may toast this as Labour tearing itself apart, the truth is more banal and more troubling. This will happen to Labour. It will happen to the Conservatives. It would happen to any party in power. In the age of tribal politics, the scandal machine spares no one.
The question, then, is not whether Labour can survive this. They can. The question is whether Britain can survive a political system where spectacle has replaced substance – and where ministers fall for failing themselves, but never for failing us.