Starmer can forget Mandelson and his flaws but not what he stood for

With his love of adventure, his attraction to risk and his brightly coloured coat, Mandelson has more than once nearly been turned into rabbit pie, but he went too far when he ventured into Jeffrey Epstein’s lair. He compounded the spectacular misjudgment by sending cringingly sycophantic emails to the convicted paedophile after he had been found guilty to suggest that he might have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. The man who once described himself as a “fighter not a quitter” will not be able to escape this time.

It was predictable that the appointment of the man labelled the Prince of Darkness as British ambassador to Washington would blow up in the prime minister’s face. Mandelson has always been dazzled by glamour and celebrity – even more than the power he has been surrounded with for most of the past 30 years. Loathed and admired in equal measure at Westminster, he is a magnet for media attention. “My job is to stay below the radar, not on the radar,” he said when he took the job, but that was never going to happen. Though he spent much of his career operating in the shadows, whether as a spin doctor or a diplomat, he has always loved the limelight.

In the 1990s, while other politicians read Hansard in bed or drank pints in the House of Commons Strangers’ Bar, Mandelson swanned off to the Ministry of Sound nightclub, shared champagne with Prince Charles. And he lived next door to Princess Charlotte of Luxembourg in Notting Hill. He had the charisma but not the money to be a star, which may be why he attached himself to people who had cash but needed connections. When he resigned in 1998, over his failure to declare the loan he used to buy his home, one of his friends told me: “Peter was living beyond his means, pretending to be something he’s not and therefore he was beholden to people.”

He was an outsider desperate to be an insider – and by the time he moved into the Lutyens-designed ambassador’s residence in Washington he had become a fully-fledged member of the establishment, with a peerage and several Cabinet positions on his CV. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer all relied at different times on the man who used to be described affectionately by his own aides as the “sinister minister”.

Once, when I asked him whether he saw himself more as Machiavelli or Macbeth, Mandelson replied, with his trademark archness: “Famously, a bit of both.” His suggestion that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” could have been a personal mantra as much as a political motto. Whether in ermine-trimmed robe or cashmere jumper, he was a fun-loving cavalier in an era of political roundheads.

The waters are closing over Mandelson’s head, the conversation at Westminster has moved on to whether Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is to blame for sending him to Washington and how long Starmer can survive in No 10. To lose two senior figures, an ambassador and a deputy prime minister in a week is a “big problem for Keir”, one senior Labour figure says. “He’s running out of lives.”

The Labour party should not, however, forget what the architect of New Labour stood for politically because of his personal flaws. It was Mandelson who delivered a landslide election victory in 1997, and then helped secure two more wins for the party by rejecting the tribalism of the past and confounding people’s expectations. He replaced the red flag with the red rose, bringing middle-class and working-class voters together in his big tent, and built an astonishingly successful electoral coalition.

Mandelson was a spin doctor who insisted on message discipline and clarity, but he also took a close interest in policy, because he knew that politics was nothing without ideas. He rejected class war, wooed business and refused to disapprove of the wealth-creators on whom he knew economic success depended. He understood the importance of patriotism and made a British bulldog called Fitz the star of an election broadcast, but never used the flag to whip up hostility to immigrants.

In the run-up to the last election, he thought Labour should try to win over “Harrow man and woman”, the aspirant “made good” mainstream voters who had lost faith in the party, rather than just focussing on the red wall voters flirting with Reform or the liberal metropolitans tempted by the greens. He hated the Labour left so much that he once said he wished he could enclose its members in a “sealed tomb”, but he also insisted the party had to celebrate the future rather than define itself against its past.

Blair said that his work would be complete when the Labour party learned to love Mandelson. It never happened, and it is too late now, but if Starmer wants to win again he needs to think beyond his party’s factionalism and focus on the country to continue the political project Mandelson began.