Starmer must cling on to Jonathan Powell, who warned him Mandelson was trouble

In 1911, HG Wells published a novel called The New Machiavelli, a drama of what happens when sex gets mixed up in politics. This is the story of a brilliant political strategist who gets entangled in an affair with a charismatic woman that leads to the collapse of his promising political career. It was, as its target, the Fabian Beatrice Webb, said at the time, “very clever in a malicious way” and lays bare Wells’s “total incapacity for decent conduct”.

Almost a century later, The New Machiavelli was also the title of a reflective book by Jonathan Powell that is part memoir of his time as the chief of staff in Tony Blair’s Downing Street and part an advice book on wielding power, rather like Machiavelli’s 1513 original, The Prince. Powell’s book is largely a meditation on Machiavelli’s warning that “to a person to whom offence has been given, no administrative post of importance should subsequently be assigned”. That person was Gordon Brown, and Powell’s strong advice was that he should have been sacked.

Now Powell is Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, and his strong advice, delivered directly to the prime minister himself, was that Peter Mandelson, whose political career has been ended by a terrible sexual imbroglio, should never have been appointed. Mandelson, who could have been scripted by Wells, is a key character in Powell’s The New Machiavelli as he moves his allegiance from Brown to Blair.

Powell also relates how he twice had to deal with Mandelson’s departure from government, from the trade and industry department in 1999, when it was revealed that he had bought a house with a loan from former paymaster general Geoffrey Robinson, and then again in 2001, when he was forced to leave his post in Northern Ireland over the allegation that he had helped the Indian tycoon Srichand Hinduja gain a British passport.

The release of the first tranche of the Mandelson papers shows that Powell advised against his appointment as the ambassador to Washington DC in the flurry of a process he described as “weirdly rushed”. Powell’s sage advice was founded not just on Mandelson’s connection to the disgraced and disgraceful financier Jeffrey Epstein, but also on his experience as a chief of staff. He just regarded Mandelson as trouble. The instinct from the expert on The Prince was to avoid the “prince of darkness”.

The Epstein connection was the latest way that Mandelson had found to self-destruct but, had it not been that, there would have been another way, because self-destruction is what Mandelson always does. Powell’s counsel, though, was ignored on this occasion and now the rumours are circling that he intends to leave the government at the end of the year, to return to his consultancy Inter Mediate, which seeks to resolve conflicts around the world.

It would be a shame if that were true because, in a government that has allowed itself to be defined by its inability to get much done, Powell has proved effective. The constant argument about the Chagos deal, which Powell negotiated at the instigation at the prime minister, shows that the government does at least have a policy. The difficult relationship with the United States has been handled with aplomb and Starmer has been at his best in diplomatic exchanges in Europe over Ukraine. If the job of prime minister contained no domestic demands at all, Starmer would be judged a far better leader than he is. And this is in no small part due to the quality of the advice he is getting.

Yet even this relative success reveals a failure. In his memoir, Powell cites Machiavelli’s bald statement that the selection of good servants is reflected directly upon the prince’s intelligence. If a poor decision is made, then that decision always redounds to the discredit of the leader. Advisers advise and ministers decide, as the old civil service cliche puts it. Starmer warrants credit for taking Powell’s advice with respect to Donald Trump’s incursion into Iran, which is, for all the noise, a defensible position of being opposed to attack but in favour of defence.

But, by the same token, the leader cannot wriggle free when things go wrong. When he blamed his speechwriters for the phrase “island of strangers”, which he claimed not to have seen before he read it out loud, Starmer sounded as if he thought advice and responsibility could be separated. They can’t. His former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney pushed through the appointment of Mandelson to Washington and was clearly granted the power to do so. But the granting of excessive power to a consigliere was, and is, the responsibility of the principal, just as it was when Dominic Cummings was acting as if he, rather than Boris Johnson, were the real prime minister.

Powell’s clarity also demonstrates Machiavelli’s most important maxim about politics, which is about knowing what you think. In Chapter XXI of The Prince – devoted to how the prince can gain renown – Machiavelli says a good leader must prepare for future threats and opportunities and think beyond immediate gains. Politics needs a purpose, a plan, a project.

In his long experience with the Northern Ireland peace process, his part in the negotiations to end the Basque conflict and demobilise the Eta separatist group, his role as a peace adviser to the former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and his work alongside Mozambique’s former president Filipe Nyusi to end the country’s long civil war, Powell has had a purpose, a plan, a project. Try doing politics without it and you end up at 16 % in the opinion polls.

In his chapter entitled How Flatterers Should be Avoided, Machiavelli urges the prince to appoint a wise counsellor but to maintain ultimate authority. The tale of two counsellors – Mandelson and Powell – shows what can happen when the prince cedes that authority. He becomes a prisoner of the adviser, wholly dependent on the sagacity or not of the person he has appointed.

In the case of Powell, Starmer needs to cling to him if he can. Powell is a modern master of conflict resolution, but in the end, even he was unable to reconcile one of the toughest conflicts of all, which is the conflict that runs through Mandelson.

Photograph by Tayfun Salc/Anadolu via Getty Images