In your briefing today:

📣 Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing deep anger from his MPs and renewed speculation about his leadership after a weak House of Commons defence of his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US.

Labour MP Barry Gardiner told Newsnight last night that the PM tried to “duck… and hide behind process” during yesterday’s Commons session. “We were squirming,” he said of the backbench reaction to Starmer’s performance. (BBC live coverage)

Labour MPs, led by former deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, forced him into a “humiliating climbdown” and the full release of vetting documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment. (Independent)

Starmer said he had been repeatedly lied to by the disgraced peer, adding that Mandelson had “betrayed our country” over the alleged leaks of sensitive government documents to Jeffrey Epstein.

📣 Calls to reopen Scotland’s hospital inquiry are gathering pace, amid claims there was political pressure to get the scandal-hit Queen Elizabeth University Hospital open ahead of a general election.

The father of Molly Cuddihy, a cancer patient who became seriously ill with an infection at the hospital, says he would back calls for a reopening. Seven deaths are now being investigated by prosecutors. (The Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 The Winter Olympics begin today at Milan-Cortina, with Team GB athletes nursing high hopes of bringing back a few medals.

Curling fans are in for a treat - it’s the only sport to feature every day, with Scots Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds starting their Mixed doubles push today just after 9am.

Snowboarding also starts today, with figure skaters taking to the ice from tomorrow.

Confusingly, the actual opening ceremony is tomorrow night. (The BBC has a day-by-day guide)

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📣 A teenager who was part of a bonfire night riot is facing a jail sentence after admitting charges of mobbing and rioting. (Daily Record)

📣 Glasgow City Council gave the now-defunct Centre for Contemporary Arts a loan of around £300,000 five months before it went into liquidation. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 An underground fire that’s been burning for six months is finally under control, but people living near it want compensation to help them clear. (STV)

📣 A one-off bank holiday after Scotland’s first World Cup game this summer has been confirmed. Monday, June 15 will be the day. (STV)

📣 Elon Musk has branded Spain’s prime minister a “true fascist totalitarian” after he proposed a ban on social media use by teenagers. (Independent)

📣 The Bank of England is expected to keep interest rates as they are in its announcement at midday. (BBC)

📣 Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada must reduce its dependence on the US market to protect its sovereignty and its economy. (CBC)

📣 Americans are becoming anxious about the stability of their political system, polling shows, with the concerns setting the country apart from other rich and powerful nations. (AP)

📣 The much-mooted UK version of Saturday Night Live has unveiled its cast ahead of a March launch on Sky: it features sitcom actors, Edinburgh Fringe Festival prizewinners and some familiar panel show faces. (BBC)

⚽️ Rangers made light work of Kilmarnock last night, aided by Dom Thompson getting himself sent off after three minutes. An outstanding performance from Mikey Moore helped the Ibrox side to a 5-1 win, the only response coming after a Jack Butland blunder. (Report & 🎥highlights)

⚽️ It was a dramatic night at Easter Road, where Hibs capped a comeback against Dundee United with an injury-time winner from debutante Ante Suto. (BBC)

⚽️ Neither Aberdeen nor Dundee could supply a playable pitch for their games against Celtic and Motherwell - the former game being due to be screened on Sky Sports. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Manchester City set themselves up for a Carabao Cup final against Arsenal with a 3-1 win over Newcastle. (Guardian)

🏉 Ryan Wilson says Scotland are under “huge pressure” as they go into the 2026 Six Nations, with their opening match against Italy this weekend. (Scotsman)

🗣️ The Fleet Street consensus is that Keir Starmer is toast, although, in what always feels disturbingly like a parlour game for lobby correspondents, nobody quite wants to say who’s going to bear the metaphorical candlestick, or where and when the deed will be done.

And the wags among you may choose to quote Enoch Powell, and point out that all political lives end in failure. Maybe just not in these circumstances, so soon after a huge election win, from such heights.

Quentin Letts of the Mail reaches for the rubber dingy metaphor. “Punctured perhaps beyond repair, Sir Keir Starmer was deflating before our eyes,” he writes.

“Kemi Badenoch kept bayonetting him. All the fight had left Sir Keir, the one-time star prosecutor who so piously berated Boris Johnson over... a goddamn birthday cake. This scandal was nastier: sexual pressures, the betrayal of Cabinet secrets, greed for dollars (or Kremlin roubles), and a diplomatic foul-up in Washington DC. Labour backbenchers watched their flailing leader and they made not a sound. There just came this cold, sinister silence.”

In them, Letts saw “a sullen parliamentary party going through the process of mourning”.

The Guardian is hardly any more sympathetic. “While MPs’ emotions can often be as infectious and overwrought as a boarding school in exam season, the reaction among many Labour backbenchers to No 10’s misjudgment over Mandelson was genuinely furious,” writes Peter Walker and Pippa Crerar.

The release of documents detailing how Mandelson was appointed ambassador to the United States is a concession, but one unlikely to satisfy many. “And after the concessions,” they write, “backbenchers will want action: a swift and comprehensive release of the Mandelson chronology, one that some MPs will hope is sufficiently damning to spell the end of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, Mandelson’s main advocate inside No 10.”

It’s unlikely this is a one-resignation scandal, though. Part of the parlour game has been to try to place this scandal among the great political outrages. Consensus is that, already, this one tops anything this century - worse than the Covid rows of Johnson, worse - presumably - than anything surrounding Iraq in the days of Blair.

The comparison with 1963’s Profumo scandal is valid, says Sky’s Jon Craig: “Both involved sex, call girls, lurid revelations and a police investigation,” he writes.

Anne McElvoy delves into that for the Independent (£), and says those echoes “should send shivers through this Labour administration”.

It’s not just about individuals’ reputations, she writes. It’s the fallout - “in terms of the way the public feels about elites and the theories, many justified and some conspiratorial, about the roots of misconduct and what lies behind them” that becomes epoch-defining, and makes the parallel valid.

The most significant similarity, she writes, “is that both marked defining moments in social and political history – the merry-go-round of affairs among society figures who were interconnected by birth and privilege was, in essence, the end to a post-war culture in which privacy could be guaranteed and private sins stayed secret.

“The public became the audience to the Profumo-Keeler show, as we are today to the Maxwell-Epstein one.”

Tim Stanley has a strikingly cynical conclusion to his disdain-laced sketch in the Telegraph (🎁 gift link). “It was left to Labour’s Chris Vince to make the traditional appeal that not all MPs are like this and, in a way, politicians are victims, too,” he writes.

“Sure. Whatever. I’m not in the mood. I wanted to lean over the press balcony and toss a bundle of fivers into the air, to watch the little piggies trample each other in the dash for free cash.”

Reform UK stands in the wings, staying relatively silent, allowing events to play out. Should the British public decide they want to burn all this down, we all know where the votes will go.

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