The Observer view: Starmer’s days in office are numbered

On Friday police searched two houses belonging to Peter Mandelson, former peer, ambassador, minister and guiding light and strategist for New Labour. They were looking for evidence that he may have shared market-sensitive information with Jeffrey Epstein and others while a minister under Gordon Brown. He could go to jail.

Mandelson’s disgrace is being viewed by Labour as well as opposition MPs as a death knell for Keir Starmer’s government. In reality it is less than that, and more. The Mandelson affair is not in itself a resigning issue for the prime minister, but it is for his chief of staff. Morgan McSweeney’s departure from No 10 is now more than likely and will hasten Starmer’s because he is already fatally weakened. That will leave the Labour party with fundamental questions about its identity: with the entire Blairite project in the rear-view mirror, how will it reconcile the demands of capitalism and social justice? Who will make the case for growth?

Mandelson at least had a political philosophy. The shorthand version was that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”. The longer version: he was the prime mover in Labour’s rejection of doctrinaire socialism under Tony Blair and its embrace of a third way. Starmer has no equivalent. His authority has eroded almost from the moment he arrived in No 10, and it looked beyond repair last week when Angela Rayner had to intervene from the backbenches to insist that the Intelligence and Security Committee manage the release of documents on Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador.

Should he resign? The question is being seriously considered by MPs and ministers who could make it happen. They should note it was Mandelson who consorted with Epstein and lied about it, not Starmer. That if Mandelson broke the law, it was in Brown’s government, not Starmer’s. That one bad appointment is not a resignation offence like crashing the economy. Yet none of this will save him. His days in office are numbered because he has not shown that he can make them count. On policy, from winter fuel to welfare reform, he lost the argument with his own party. On domestic politics, he has outsourced too much and lost control.

Labour needs to look clear-eyed to the future. It faces the ugly choice between a prime minister drained of power and the possibility of a new one with their own skeletons in the closet. Beyond that, Labour risks a lurch to the left and an inconsequential one-term government that sends the party into near-perpetual opposition.

Royal silence

The Epstein files appear to show that one of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s claims in his 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis – that he broke off all contact with Epstein in 2010 – was false. His visit to New York that year was not to say farewell but to attend a celebrity dinner in his honour. He stayed in contact, sending a Christmas greeting in 2010 and a thank-you note in 2011. He admitted hosting Epstein at Sandringham and Windsor, but said nothing about an Epstein trip to Balmoral or an invitation to Buckingham Palace – both of which emerge in the files.

The King appears to hope that this silence will soothe public anger over his brother’s association with a convicted sex offender. This glosses over Mountbatten-Windsor’s other hotly contested claim: that he never knew or had sex with Virginia Giuffre. The FBI has questions about this claim; the ex-prince must answer them.

Visits to royal residences are logged. Email communications are held on the household’s servers. Members of the royal family and staff will have known that the then Prince Andrew was shading the record – yet at no point over the release of the files has the King, the Prince of Wales or the royal household moved to correct it.

Photograph by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street