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Sir Keir Starmer's week from hell kicked off in his favourite place: the padded red seat of a hospitality box at north London's Emirates Stadium, where Arsenal was playing Bournemouth.
The Prime Minister and his teenage son arrived at around noon on Saturday, hoping to watch their beloved team tighten its grip on what would be a first Premier League title in more than 20 years.
Three hours and a few proverbial prawn sandwiches later, the cheery optimism in their £500-a-head free seats had evaporated. A listless Arsenal lost 2-1, turning in perhaps their worst performance of the season and throwing the title race wide open.
Sir Keir, one of those grown men whose attitude to the national sport mirrors that of the late Bill Shankly – 'some people believe football is a matter of life and death… I can assure you, it's much, much more important than that' – was by all accounts devastated.
'It's his only real passion and his one release from the tensions of office,' says a source. 'He thought the Premier League was in the bag. He now thinks they are bottling it. The result ruined his weekend.'
Yet if manager Mikel Arteta and his Arsenal team had a bad day at the office, that was nothing compared to the horror show awaiting their prime ministerial fan when he returned to the political treadmill on Monday morning. For a series of unfortunate events, largely self-inflicted, would by last night leave the Labour leader mired in the biggest crisis of his career.
Trouble began during the week's very first appointment: a visit to Manchester, where Sir Keir had arranged to pose for a somewhat awkward PR photograph with Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner in order to dampen speculation of a rift with the duo, each of whom is thought to harbour leadership ambitions.
During Starmer's trip north, the International Monetary Fund decided to release a briefing note, embargoed until the following day, revealing that Britain faces the biggest economic hit from the Iran War of any major developed nation.
Sir Keir Starmer was at the Emirates Stadium to watch his Arsenal side lose 2-1 to Bournemouth last week in a blow to their Premier League title dreams
Back in the Commons chamber, Starmer could be seen in a spat with Speaker Lindsay Hoyle
It had trimmed 0.5 per cent off our growth forecast, as consumers and businesses reel from Labour's tax hikes. Adding to the ugly news emanating from Washington DC, where Chancellor Rachel Reeves was just jetting off to attend the IMF and World Bank's spring meetings, was a second report (this one due on Wednesday) revealing that UK consumers face the fastest rising tax bills in the Western hemisphere.
The report provided a grim backdrop to a second developing bad-news story, which Sir Keir discovered that he was going to wake up to on Tuesday morning.
Lord Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary and Secretary General of Nato, was reported by the Financial Times newspaper to be preparing to publicly skewer Starmer over his failure to deliver on promises to properly fund defence.
He warned that the PM has left the UK unprepared for war due to an 'ever-expanding welfare budget' and 'corrosive complacency'. Attacking the vandals in the Treasury, he said: 'We are underprepared. We are underinsured. We are under attack. We are not safe… Britain's national security and safety is in peril.'
Robertson, who only recently conducted a Strategic Defence Review for Starmer's Government, was picking at a running sore: according to an astonishing report in The Spectator, Sir Keir's efforts to increase military budgets are being blocked by
Ms Reeves, who believes the MoD has an insufficiently woke record on 'gender parity'.
Reeves and Robertson aren't the only Labour big hitters at loggerheads with Downing Street. Later on Tuesday, the Speaker of the House Sir Lindsay Hoyle had a run-in with the premier's staff over arrangements for the funeral of former Labour minister Phil Woolas at St Margaret's Church in Westminster.
The PM's office had somewhat pompously demanded that Sir Keir take precedence and arrive last at the funeral. But the Speaker was having none of it. His office was forced to quote Erskine May, the bible of parliamentary procedure, at Starmer's staff to ensure that Sir Lindsay could arrive last, complete with his train bearer and Serjeant at Arms.
'Starmer looked miffed,' said a Labour MP who was at the service. 'But it was totally his fault. No 10 had misjudged the whole thing and Starmer showed his complete lack of understanding of Parliament, its traditions and procedures.'
Downing Street was still simmering over that petty humiliation on Tuesday night, when the week's biggest bad news bomb dropped: another scandalous development in the Peter Mandelson saga.
Officials at the Cabinet Office have spent months poring over hundreds of documents detailing the shamed former Labour peer's appointment as US ambassador and subsequent sacking over his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Under the terms of a 'humble address motion' passed by the Conservatives, the Government is required to publicly disclose all material that might shed light on the affair. And what the Cabinet Office's Permanent Secretary Cat Little told Starmer was explosive.
Keir Starmer is facing new questions about why he kept quiet about the Peter Mandelson (pictured together on February 27, 2025) vetting fiasco
The Foreign Office's top civil servant Sir Olly Robbins (pictured) was sacked after his department failed to inform Starmer that Lord Mandelson had failed the security vetting
Specifically, it had emerged that, on January 28 last year, the body responsible for screening public appointments – UK Security Vetting – had told the Foreign Office that Mandelson posed too much of a risk to be given clearance to view classified documents.
Yet that decision had then been overruled by the Foreign Office. This revelation directly contradicted the version of events that Starmer had publicly given, on several occasions, when he repeatedly insisted that 'all due process' was followed with regard to the ill-fated appointment. In other words, it made the Prime Minister look like a liar.
Starmer greeted news of the development with fury. 'Keir insists he had no idea that this vetting affair had happened. The problem is that he jolly well should have known about it, so he now looks incompetent,' says one senior source. 'The whole thing highlights a major personality flaw: he's not dishonest but he's very incurious and in this case that's what's come to bite him.'
Another senior source says: 'Starmer could have seen the security advice any time he wanted but he didn't like to look and that's why he's gone round for months spouting false information.
'It's like someone receiving a raft of red letter bills and not opening them until the bailiffs turn up at the door.'
As news of the development sank in, late on Tuesday, Starmer's inner circle made what could come to be regarded as a second very serious blunder.
Rather than getting out ahead of the impending PR crisis, and proactively seeking to correct the record about Mandelson's security vetting, they decided to keep schtum. Or as insiders put it last night, Sir Keir dithered. 'This was classic Starmer, who's like a rabbit caught in the headlights.' Downing Street yesterday claimed they wanted to 'establish the facts' about what had actually happened at the Foreign Office before making the whole thing public.
But if Starmer really did order an immediate inquiry, it wasn't exactly thorough: no one bothered to pick the brains of David Lammy (who was Foreign Secretary at the time) or Yvette Cooper (the current Foreign Secretary) or even Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's former chief of staff, over the ensuing 48 hours.
Instead, the Prime Minister endured a troubled night's sleep, not helped by a volley of invective from Donald Trump, who used a social media feed to suggest that, having recently fallen out with Starmer over the Iran war, he might be inclined to scrap a trade deal with the UK that was negotiated last May.
The treaty, which cut some of his tariffs on car, aluminium and steel exports from the UK, was better than he had needed to make it, warned the President – who added that it could 'always be changed'.
Adding to Starmer's headache, US President Donald Trump said he might be minded to scrap a trade deal with the UK after falling out with the Labour leader over the Iran war
Starmer was, therefore, in a prickly mood at Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions, where Kemi Badenoch mocked him over the Lord Robertson affair, and Speaker Hoyle, with whom he'd tangled the previous day over those funeral arragements, intervened to insist that he properly answer questions.
Visibly angered, at the end of the session, Starmer confronted Hoyle on his way out of the Commons chamber and banged his first on the arm rest on the Speaker's chair. 'Keir's view is that all prime ministers obfuscate a bit at the dispatch box, and that Lindsay was being unreasonable,' one source who witnessed the occasion told us.
'The problem is that the way he's been doing it is completely shameless and totally unsubtle, so the Speaker had to act. It was all caught on camera and just made him look rattled. Of course, we now know why he was so tetchy.'
The dam really broke on Thursday, when the Guardian newspaper informed Downing Street that it was intending to publish details about Mandelson's vetting.
Shortly before the story broke, Starmer struggled through his opening remarks on child safety at a Downing Street meeting of seven social media executives. He spoke entirely from a script. 'I think his mind was somewhere else,' said a Whitehall insider. 'The cloud was about to burst and he knew it.'
By the time the next day's papers were going to bed, it had become clear that heads would have to roll. And the man in the firing line was, of course, Sir Olly Robbins, the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, who stands accused of unilaterally overruling UK Security Vetting so that Mandelson could go to Washington.
The suggestion that this career mandarin took such a decision without seeking clearance from ministers, or running it past anyone at Downing Street, has left Whitehall insiders gobsmacked.
'No one who actually knows Olly believes he was a rogue operator,' is how one puts it. 'It just beggars belief that he did this on his own. Rule one in Whitehall is to cover your a*** and pass decisions up the chain of command.
'The Foreign Office was widely thought to be opposed to Mandelson's appointment but we are now supposed to believe Olly was told he'd failed vetting but decided to over-rule that and not tell anyone. It makes no sense at all.'
Robbins won't have to wait long to share his version of events: he's been booked in to give evidence to the foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday.
Starmer, for his part, will make a statement to Parliament the day before, where he will doubtless face hostile questions from the leaders of every rival party, all of whom were yesterday calling for him to resign.
As for Arsenal, on Sunday they travel to second placed Manchester City, for what is the most important game of the season.
Defeat would surely cap the most miserable week of the Prime Minister's career.
