The Peter Mandelson scandal has turned ‘No drama Starmer’ into a lurid soap opera

The irony is that they never much liked each other. Serpentine, gossipy, infatuated with wealth, breathtakingly reckless and obsessed with intrigue, Peter Mandelson is everything Sir Keir Starmer detests about politics. Stolid, generally fastidious, usually risk-averse and often weirdly disengaged from the business of the political game, Sir Keir is everything that Mandelson disdains. Yet it is now a serious possibility that the ignominy of the Prince of Darkness will be the undoing of the prime minister.

Another irony. Sir Keir’s entanglement with the other man was much less intense than that of other Labour prime ministers. It was Tony Blair who first elevated Mandelson to the cabinet, sacked him over one scandal, brought him back, sacked him again over another scandal, then offered a further chance of rehabilitation by sending him to Brussels as an EU commissioner. As the dreadful truth has emerged, Sir Tony has decided that silence is the better part of valour. Gordon Brown is volubly and righteously furious, but ought to be at least a bit cross with himself. When he was desperate to save his flailing premiership, he made a lord of his frenemy and ensconced him at the heart of power at the time of the financial crisis. He now says he deeply regrets making Mandelson business secretary and effective deputy prime minister. It was what he got up to during this period that is the focus of the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into whether he should be charged with imprisonable offences.

I’ve heard people make comparisons with the Profumo affair which harrowed Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government in the early 1960s, but this looks much worse. Jack Profumo was ruined by the revelation that he was having sex with Christine Keeler when she was also involved with a Russian spy, but there’s no good evidence that any actionable intelligence made its way into Moscow’s hands. The Epstein files suggest that Mandelson shared extremely market-sensitive government secrets with a convicted foreign paedophile and did so almost in real time. That would have made Epstein a lot more knowledgeable about high-stakes government decisions than many members of the cabinet. When not exchanging ghastly jokes about sleeping with strippers and “a well hung young man”, or offering to help with Russian visas, or snouting for opportunities to make himself rich, Mandelson was giving treacherous advice to bully Alistair Darling, the then chancellor, into not introducing a supertax on bankers’ bonuses.

I am sure Sir Keir knew nothing of this at the time he gave Mandelson his fifth high-profile act in public life by making him the UK’s ambassador to Washington. But what he did know is quite enough to damn the prime minister in the eyes of most Labour MPs. There was a collective gulp when he admitted to parliament that he made the appointment even though he was aware that the other man had continued his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after the American financier’s first conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.

In an effort to contain the damage, Sir Keir has sought to convey the impression that no one can match his disgust with Mandelson and presented himself as the victim of repeated deceptions. This isn’t defusing the outrage. Harriet Harman, Labour’s former deputy leader, is not alone in thinking that makes the prime minister look “weak, naive and gullible”.

The many who think he ought never to have touched Mandelson with a barge pole are angrily vindicated. Those who went along with the appointment at the time, buying Number 10’s argument that he would be an artful Trump whisperer, now feel like fools. Questions about the prime minister’s judgment are daggers to the heart of what was supposed to be the Starmer brand. Sir Keir did not become Labour leader because of his sparkling charisma. He did not get the job because he is an original thinker or a superb strategist. His primary pitch to both party and country has been as a trustworthy and serious man with a decent moral compass. Sending Mandelson to Washington looked politically dicey and ethically dodgy at the time of the appointment. It now looks like sheer lunacy.

The most credible defence for Sir Keir is so humiliating that he can’t deploy it. The appointment wasn’t really his idea, but one pressed upon him by Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff. Sacking him might assuage the wrath of some Labour MPs, but it would leave the prime minister horribly exposed. “I’ve seen this movie before,” says one cabinet minister. “It won’t help.

He would find it easier to endure this storm were it an exceptional lapse. What makes it more corrosive is that it fits with a pattern of rotten decision-making which has made him spectacularly unpopular. “We have systematically gone about offending everyone,” groans one former cabinet minister who once counted himself a fan. Having presented himself as the antithesis of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, “No drama Starmer” has turned out to be a soap opera as lurid as the Tory one that preceded it.

“I really feel for Keir,” says a loyalist member of the cabinet who wants him to stay. When I asked how the prime minister could rebuild his credibility, he mournfully responded: “I don’t know.” It is not difficult to find Labour MPs ready to call this “the beginning of the end” or to suggest that his removal has become a question of “when, not if”. It is harder to find Labour MPs with a plausible account of how this happens in the immediate future. The utter disgrace of one of the architects of New Labour is not a promising context for a leadership bid by Wes Streeting when the health secretary is most identified with the Blairite wing of the party. Angela Rayner flexed her muscles by making a decisive intervention in the parliamentary debate about the inquiry into the affair. Some of her supporters claim she has a leadership campaign locked, loaded and ready to go. Except it isn’t. Her closest allies accept that it is not viable to offer herself as the leader of the country for so long as HMRC is conducting its investigation into her failure to pay the correct amount of tax on a flat purchase.

Banjaxed though he is, it is likely that Sir Keir will stagger on for a while yet. Should this ultimately do for him, it will be a further irony if the first world leader brought down by the Epstein scandal is a British human rights lawyer who never met him.

Photograph by Alamy