How Keir Starmer could be replaced as UK leader if Epstein fallout brings him down

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing a battle to stay in post as he comes under heavy criticism for his decision in 2024 to appoint veteran politician Peter Mandelson as the British ambassador to the U.S. despite the latter's ties to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Starmer’s judgment is in the spotlight like never before after the recent release of millions of pages of Epstein-related documents by the U.S. Justice Department showed how close Mandelson and Epstein were.

There’s widespread anger that the prime minister appointed Mandelson, long a key figure of Starmer's own Labour Party, to such a sensitive and high-profile post.

Starmer fired Mandelson in September after an earlier batch of emails was published showing he remained friends with Epstein after the late financier’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses involving a minor.

But the newly released emails show that Mandelson also passed on sensitive — and potentially market-moving — government information to the disgraced financier in 2009, when he was a member of the Labour Cabinet.

Starmer’s leadership has now been called into question, and several Labour lawmakers have called for him to quit. His chief of staff resigned on Sunday, taking the blame for advising Starmer to appoint Mandelson, and his communications director quit on Monday.

Many believe that is not enough to keep Starmer in the job.

The prime minister is trying to persuade his party members to back him. He has apologized to the British public and to the victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking for believing what he has termed “Mandelson’s lies.”

There are a number of ways in which Starmer could go, some more straightforward than others.

The simplest option is that Starmer announces his intention to resign, triggering an election for the Labour leadership. A resignation could possibly come if a delegation of Cabinet members tell Starmer he has lost too much support within the party or if members of his government quit in protest.

Those considered to harbor leadership ambitions include Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and former deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, who had to resign last year after admitting she didn’t pay enough tax on a house purchase. An investigation into that is ongoing.

But there's no clear front-runner.

Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Manchester who was blocked from standing at a special election in the city later this month, would not be eligible because by longstanding convention the prime minister must be a member of Parliament.

Whoever does run, the election would likely take weeks, with Starmer likely staying in post until that concludes.

If Starmer decides to resign immediately, the Cabinet and Labour’s governing body would likely pick an interim leader to be prime minister, probably someone not standing to be Labour leader. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy could fit the bill.

Under Labour’s rules, candidates must have the support of a fifth of party lawmakers — about 80.

The wider party membership would then vote to choose a winner.

King Charles III would invite the winner to become prime minister and form a government.

If Starmer does not resign, he could face a challenge, potentially from within his Cabinet.

Unlike the Conservative Party, which has a history of getting rid of leaders such as Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and Boris Johnson in 2022, Labour does not have that muscle memory. No Labour prime minister has ever been dislodged, though Tony Blair announced his plan to resign in 2007 after a series of low-level resignations.

Challengers would have to meet the eligibility thresholds above, but Starmer would automatically be on the ballot.

Starmer faces a series of hurdles in the weeks ahead. The first will probably be when files related to the vetting of Mandelson are published. Starmer will be hoping they show the scale of Mandelson’s lies. Should they not, that could be a point of high jeopardy for the prime minister.

Another potential pitfall could be the special election in Gorton and Denton on Feb. 26, traditionally a safe Labour seat. However, this time it will be a tough fight, with challenges from the anti-immigration Reform U.K. on the right and the Greens on the left.

After that comes a raft of elections in May. Many in Labour fear the party could lose power in Wales for the first time since the legislature was created in 1999, fall way short in Scotland and get battered in local elections in England.

It's clear that Starmer faces a difficult landscape.

And that’s barring surprise developments that could further rock his premiership.

“Events, dear boy, events,” Harold Macmillan, prime minister between 1957 and 1963, said when asked what the greatest challenges for leaders were.

FILE - President Donald Trump, left, gets a reaction from Britian's ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson, right, as they take questions from members of the media after announcing a trade deal between U.S. and U.K. in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, May 8, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, file)

FILE - British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, right, talks with Britain's ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson during a welcome reception at the ambassador's residence on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025 in Washington. (Carl Court/Pool Photo via AP, file)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers a speech at Horntye Park Sports Complex in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, England, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (Peter Nicholls/Pool Photo via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer adjusts his glasses as he waits to deliver his speech at Horntye Park Sports Complex in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, England, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (Peter Nicholls/Pool Photo via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer talks with members of the audience after delivering a speech at Horntye Park Sports Complex in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, England, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (Peter Nicholls/Pool Photo via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent weeknight, three tenants of an aging Bronx building were trading apartment horror stories inside a packed ballroom lined with city bureaucrats.

The occasion was the third in a series of “rental rip-off hearings,” a new forum launched by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for disgruntled renters to air their complaints directly to housing officials — and in some cases, the mayor himself.

As she waited in line, Gulhayo Yuldosheva said she worried that noxious mold in her apartment had worsened her child’s asthma. Nearby, her downstairs neighbor, Marina Quiroz, was showing a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen to a representative of the city’s tenant protection office.

Ann Maitin, a longtime resident of the same building, had just met with the mayor.

“He let me go over my three minutes,” she said, holding up a spiral notebook’s worth of grievances.

Mamdani, a democratic socialist swept into office on a promise of zealous tenant advocacy, framed the event as a struggle session for renters, assuring the standing room only crowd that their stories would guide the city's efforts “to actually hold landlords accountable when they don’t follow the law."

To the residents of 705 Gerard Avenue, this raised a practical problem: No one seemed to know who actually owned their building.

“It feels like such a basic question,” said Maitin, a retired Verizon technician who recently organized the building’s tenant association. “You’d think we’d have the right to that information.”

Their situation is hardly unique. As corporate owners and investor groups have grown their share of the rental market in New York City, they are increasingly shielding their identities behind limited liability companies, or LLCs.

The practice, which has also been spreading nationally, is legal. But experts warn it could complicate Mamdani’s promised crackdown, making it harder for the city and tenants to track the chronically negligent owners whose buildings the mayor has vowed to target and even seize.

“There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason,” said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. “That’s a problem for the administration, and it’s even worse for tenants.”

For Yuldosheva and her neighbors, finding their landlord is one of many problems afflicting their six-story building near Yankee Stadium.

Heat and hot water outages are regular enough that some tenants keep a thermometer on their fridge and the city’s complaint hotline on speed dial. Common areas are often filthy, and increasingly populated by drug users. Getting help with an urgent maintenance issue “feels like waiting for Christmas in July,” said Maitin.

During a monthslong elevator outage, a tenant who uses a wheelchair, Tommy Rodriguez, said he was forced to “slide down the steps, like a kid.” Calls to the building management about a repair timeline went unanswered, he said.

Growing up in the building in the 1980s, Rodriguez recalled the previous landlord as a friendly and responsive neighborhood presence.

“This felt like a home before,” Rodriguez said. “Now they treat us the same as the rats.”

A large rodent had recently chewed a hole through his couch cushion. He handled the extermination himself, with a two-by-four.

Recently, tenants received a clue about their landlord, following the partial collapse of another Bronx building. The man identified in news stories as the owner of that building, David Kleiner, shared a Brooklyn office with their building manager, Binyomin Herzl.

A handful of tenants visited each of the building’s 72 units, logging an array of decrepit conditions and unusual alterations.

“We didn’t want to become the next news story,” said Yuldosheva, pointing to a crack in the wall of a bedroom shared by her three children — a result, she feared, of the subway that rumbles just below her windows.

Lawsuits show that Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, several of which were found by a judge to pose an imminent hazard.

Reached by phone, Herzl said he didn't own any of those properties, but simply acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, whom he declined to list. “There’s no one landlord,” he said. “It’s a group of investors.”

Kleiner, who was previously featured on the city’s “worst landlord” list, confirmed his partial ownership of 705 Gerard in a brief phone call, but declined further comment.

Herzl, meanwhile, attributed the tenants’ complaints to “normal wear and tear” of a nearly century old building. He said Mamdani should focus on improving the city’s public housing, rather than going after private landlords.

“Our buildings look like five star hotels against his,” he added.

When landlords refuse to address a serious violation, like heat or hot water outages, the city can step in and order repairs, then bill the owner directly.

In the last three years, inspectors have ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings that list either Herzl or Kleiner as an owner, according to records provided by the city’s housing department. The men have been billed $446,521 for those repairs.

Mamdani has proposed using such fines as a vehicle to bring distressed rental properties under city stewardship, by aggressively pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up their portfolios through foreclosure auctions.

Just as the city can shut down unsanitary restaurants, Mamdani has said, landlords that “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City — with no exceptions."

In reality, the process is resource-intensive and legally fraught. It is made more complex by the nest of LLCs often used by landlords to obfuscate the full scope of their portfolios, according to Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

“It’d be great to have a better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing,” she said.

State legislation that would have made it easier to identify LLC owners was recently vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul amid pressure from landlords.

Kenny Burgos, the CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a landlord lobbying group, said Mamdani’s tenant proposals — including freezing the rent for regulated tenants — would force landlords to cut back on maintenance and services.

“That’s going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget,” he said. “It’s a question of math: These buildings are crumbling because of policy, not because of bad landlords.”

He characterized the rental rip-off hearings as “show trials” that took a “tribal approach” to the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Despite the combative branding — “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords,” blares one promotion — the Bronx event mostly resembled a standard constituent service night: City officials fielded questions about local laws, helped residents with paperwork and connected them to service providers.

Maitin left feeling “glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem,” but felt it was too early to tell “if it’s all talk."

The next morning, she was surprised to find the building’s superintendent applying a fresh coat of paint to a staircase. Outside, workers were removing scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years.

“I think they caught wind of the rental rip-off,” Maitin said. “They’re scared.”

Gulhayo Yuldosheva's children get ready for school in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Francisco Medina, left, cleans his apartment next to his relative, Maria Frias, right, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Gulhayo Yuldosheva, 33 , center right, Marina Quiroz, 65, top, pose for a portrait with other two residents in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Tommy Rodriguez, right, talks to his relative, Francisco Medina, left, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Marina Quiroz stands in her living room in a Bronx apartment building, where tenants report maintenance issues, pest infestations, Tuesday, March 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)