Mike drop?

 

Mike drop?

By Sam Francis

June 26, 2026 8:05 am CET

https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/mike-drop/

 

London Playbook

By SAM FRANCIS

with NOAH KEATE

 

Good Friday morning. This is Sam Francis.

 

DRIVING THE DAY

TAPP DANCE: Anyone hoping to put this strange, overheated week behind them and ease into a cooler weekend … well, bad luck. Immigration Minister Mike Tapp, accused of briefing out Home Office plans as his own, has handed Keir Starmer a neat little test of his authority — and his political judgment — in the final days of his premiership. Shabana Mahmood has called for Tapp to be sacked. But Starmer is keeping one of his more loyal outriders in place — for now.

 

Mike drop? Downing Street confirmed last night that Tapp is “still in his job,” despite an official request from the home secretary to sack him over what she sees as a breach of the ministerial code’s commitment to collective responsibility. Mahmood’s allies are accusing Tapp of trailing immigration changes the department was quietly working on and dressing them up in a Times op-ed as his own thinking “to try to win a job in the new administration.” Government officials were quick to point out last night that firing ministers is ultimately a matter for the PM, who wanted to look into the case and take advice before deciding Tapp’s fate.

 

Playing away from home: Playbook hears Mahmood was unaware Tapp had written in the Times, only finding out once the op-ed had been published. In the piece, Tapp said it was his “strong belief” that migrant care workers who have come to the U.K. and “played by the rules” should not be subject to the proposed reforms to indefinite leave to remain (ILR)  — meaning they have to wait longer to apply for permanent settlement. By pure coincidence, the comments rather closely mirror the thinking of Andy Burnham, who has previously criticized applying the changes retrospectively.

 

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Tapp-tapp — Mike check: Tapp has been approached for comment by virtually every national outlet and replied to none of them. As of late last night, WhatsApp was suggesting messages from your Playbook author hadn’t even been opened.

 

TAPP OVERFLOWS: The clash is already bubbling out across Westminster. One MP who has worked with Tapp said passing off “someone else’s homework” as his own to get ahead “is the kind of thing that Mike Tapp would absolutely” do. The lawmaker said they had warned Mahmood about Tapp’s “ambition” and “self-promotion,” only to be ignored — which summed up a central party machine that refused to listen, in their view. Sky’s Sam Coates, meanwhile, reports disbelief among Starmer loyalists that Mahmood, who was one of the first ministers to tell Starmer to quit, wants a minister sacked for breaking with the government line.

 

License to Bill: The controversy now threatens to overshadow the Immigration and Asylum Bill, due to land in parliament on Tuesday. The Home Office has spent the past week preparing the ground for the legislation, as Mahmood tries to make the case for it to survive into Burnham’s premiership. (It’s worth noting, however, that the ILR changes aren’t part of the bill.)

 

This is fine: With a furious home secretary and a prime minister unwilling (or unable) to act, the clash is also a handy snapshot of the chaos in government right now. How Starmer handles the brewing spat will test how much authority he has left and whether he can hold together what remains of his government.

 

And the Conservatives are loving it: Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said it was “beneath contempt” that Labour had descended into “chaos and infighting.” All Labour ministers care about now “is their own personal ambition and jockeying for government jobs,” he added.

 

Whip it good: Spare a thought, then, for the minister dispatched to face the cameras this morning: Justice Minister Jake Richards — who, as a government whip, is about as well placed as anyone to talk about party discipline (timings as ever below). Richards, an ultimate Downing Street insider, would have been hoping to use the broadcast round to talk up the Home Office’s plan to open up to three new former MoD sites to house asylum-seekers — as trailed in yesterday’s i Paper — alongside the closure of 20 more asylum hotels.

 

BURNHAM WOULD

A FOREIGN CONCEPT: While Starmer and Mahmood slug it out, the rest of Westminster is still trying to read the runes for what the next regime might look like. This morning, several papers are focusing on the fact there is little out there to suggest what Burnham’s approach to foreign policy would be. Every senior brief he has held — culture secretary, health secretary, shadow home secretary, mayor of Greater Manchester — was domestic-facing. Burnham has also been careful not to pin himself down too much. During the Makerfield by-election campaign, he refused to say whether he believed “genocide” was occurring in Gaza and stepped back from previous comments about wanting to rejoin the EU.

 

This could all be about to change … The Observer’s Rachel Sylvester reports that a Burnham speech on foreign policy is in the works. She has also spoken to allies who claim Burnham, a true remainer at heart, is “much warmer to the Europeans and they’ll be much warmer to him” and will not “try and be a Trump whisperer” like Starmer.

 

May or May-or not: On this week’s Westminster Insider, Sascha O’Sullivan looks into whether being a good mayor makes a good prime minister. She speaks to fellow Labour mayor Helen Godwin who reckons Burnham’s leadership of Greater Manchester will give him little help on the world stage because mayors are used to “reacting to macroeconomics” not “geopolitics.”

 

Major intervention: John Major has a similar message in an interview with Independent editor-in-chief Geordie Greig. The former PM warns Burnham that he needs to get his foreign policy game in gear as “Putin, Trump, Macron, Merz” are a very different “sort of problem than dealing with buses in Manchester.”

 

Oliver’s twist? It’s not just Burnham keeping his agenda at home; his incoming chief of staff James Purnell has always had a pretty domestic focus too. But allies insist help is at hand. As covered by Tim Shipman (and in Playbook PM), former head of the Foreign Office Olly Robbins has been in touch with Burnham’s transition team about a potential role in No. 10.

 

Right on cue: David Miliband, touted as a potential foreign secretary under Burnham, appears on Brussels Playbook’s Week Ender podcast advising Burnham to push harder for closer alignment with the EU. He argues Starmer’s reset lacked the “momentum and heft,” as well as the “coherence or the ambition,” to make a meaningful difference.

 

Getting the Mili-band back together: Miliband demurred when asked at the Institute for Government on Thursday whether he would accept an offer to return as foreign secretary under Burnham, a fellow Brown-era Cabinet minister. ”Let him make his choices,” he said. Watch the clip 38 minutes into this video. If that weren’t enough D. Miliband for one day, he will be doing a fireside chat at the Centre for Global Development at 3.30 p.m. Attendance is by invitation only but plebs like us can listen in here.

 

Cooper trooper: While the presumptive PM is being urged to consider his world view, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper flies to NATO’s eastern flank near Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave this morning — ahead of the second day of the Ukraine Recovery Conference — to meet British troops stationed there. ITV’s Robert Peston is along for the ride, with an interview on foreign policy to follow later in the day.

 

MILIFANDOM: Who becomes Burnham’s chancellor remains the big question in Westminster — and Ed Miliband has picked up two useful endorsements. Andrea Egan, the general secretary of Unison, told the Guardian’s Kiran Stacey that “only Ed Miliband could enact the kinds of policies trade unions and our members urgently need.” More unexpectedly, the Daily Mail’s City Editor Alex Brummer — in defiance of his own paper’s front page on Wednesday — argues Miliband’s “single-mindedness and refusal to be bullied into U-turns shows just the kind of willpower urgently needed at the Treasury.”

 

Streets away: Despite Team Burnham insisting that the conversation is still live, one person close to the incoming PM tells my colleague Dan Bloom the idea of Wes Streeting as chancellor is for the birds. “He is trying to brief himself into existence,” they add.

 

Continuity candidate: Rachel Reeves, who yesterday made her pitch to remain as chancellor, is helping Burnham prepare for government in the name of economic stability and continuity, the i Paper’s Jane Merrick and Kitty Donaldson report.

 

Even Greater Manchester: Whoever gets the keys to No. 11 may find a few bits missing when they move in. The FT’s George Parker, Sam Fleming and Jennifer Williams report Team Burnham is considering breaking up the Treasury and creating a separate growth department. The piece also has new details on Burnham’s plans to move more of the machinery of government to his Manchester power base, where he plans to set up a “devolution department.” Meanwhile, Caroline Wheeler in the i Paper hears Burnham is considering giving England’s regional mayors the power to raise and retain their own taxes, including business rates.

 

The doctor will see you now: In what would be one of the more surprising moves, the Spectator is reporting that trained surgeon Zubir Ahmed has been in talks with Burnham’s team about the possibility of taking up the role of health secretary. Last night Team Burnham was playing down the speculation, claiming there was no formal meeting.

 

DOUBLE ACT: My colleague Dan has a nugget-packed profile of James Purnell — who shared the same age, flat, job, office, football team and ambitions with Burnham before one became the trendy London media exec and the other headed north. Allies are hoping the incoming chief of staff will be the Goldilocks chief — part bureaucrat, part strategist — and know Burnham’s mind enough to actually get stuff done. And centrist Labour types now reckon they have one of their own in the Burnham camp.

 

Times change: Former Gordon Brown SpAd John Woodcock recalls the night in 2009 that Purnell tried to topple the PM … and one minister who was particularly loyal in rowing in behind Brown. Andy Burnham was the Cabinet minister “most keen to come out with a pledge of loyalty to Gordon as quickly as possible,” Woodcock told Dan.

 

TAKING A STEP BACK: It’s worth taking a beat and considering what has happened since Monday. A prime minister resigned, even before his heir apparent was sworn in as an MP. Since then every barrier between him and Downing Street has simply given way. Streeting, his likeliest challenger, endorsed Burnham on the same day the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party did the same while beaming beside him for a selfie in Westminster Hall. Then on Wednesday morning, when Darren Jones confirmed he would not stand, the last flicker of rebellion appeared to die.

 

This is not normal: The speed and smoothness of Burnham’s path to power is even more remarkable when you consider he has not made a single public appearance this week to explain what he would actually do or answer questions from the press. A party in government is changing leader midterm, with no contest and no program, around a man working largely behind the scenes. While it has felt inevitable for some time, that has not made it any less startling to watch it unfold this fast.

 

Early election? For those nervous about their summer holidays, my colleagues Tim Ross and Andrew McDonald have looked at the case for Burnham to call a snap general election and found a … mixed picture. Leaders tend to be the most popular at the start of their terms, but Reform is leading in the polls. Meanwhile polling indicates voters are not desperate for Burnham to secure a fresh mandate, but do not much like the way Labour is choosing a leader either.

 

Finally, some scrutiny: Yesterday’s NEC meeting, which set the timetable for appointing a new leader, was not all rosy for Andy Burnham according to NEC member Abdi Duale. He was one of “many members” dissatisfied that CLPs will not be able to make their feelings known if there is no contest. If Burnham is coronated, as expected, Duale has proposed a members’ Q&A on July 16 to let constituent parties have their say on the new leader.