Why Starmer clung to Peter Mandelson for so long

The sacking of Peter Mandelson, this time as UK ambassador to the US, came as a surprise to absolutely no one. This, remember, is someone unaffectionately referred to as ‘the Prince of Darkness’: a thin-lipped smarmster attracted to wealth and power like flies to the proverbial. He is a one-man scandal magnet. So much so he’s now been dismissed three times by different Labour prime ministers, in three different decades. Which is surely some sort of record.

All of which raises the question as to why Keir Starmer, the latest PM to give Mandelson his P45, appointed him in the first place. He must have known that Mandy’s activities would at the very least embarrass the government at some point. After all, the reason for his sacking – his close relationship with arguably the world’s most famous nonce, Jeffrey Epstein – has been public knowledge for years.

Starmer and his new foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, claim that they gave Mandelson the boot after ‘additional information’ about his friendship with Epstein came to light, in the shape of a newly released stash of email correspondence between the pair. Some of the details in the emails are certainly new. We now know that Mandelson thought Epstein should challenge his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute and ‘fight for early release’. And thanks to the release of Epstein’s ‘birthday book’, a bundle of sycophantic messages from Epstein’s high-powered buddies collated by Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s 50th in 2003, we’ll now struggle to forget Mandelson’s paean to his ‘best pal’ – a yearning missive in which Mandy waxes lyrical about the ‘glorious homes [Epstein] likes to share with his friends (yum yum)’. Then there are the photos: a be-shorted Mandy gazing from one of Epstein’s balconies, Mandy standing over a large table with two women and, finally, a guffawing Mandy in a white dressing gown chatting with Epstein.

But while the details and those photos are new, news of the proximity of Mandelson to Epstein really isn’t. It has long been known that Mandelson stayed at one of Epstein’s ‘glorious homes’ while his best pal was in prison. Just as it has long been known – thanks to a 2019 internal report on Epstein by JP Morgan bank filed to a New York court – that the convicted sex offender ‘maintain[ed] a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government’. Heck, MI6 even warned Starmer about appointing the Labour peer, because of a worry, among other concerns, that his past links to Epstein ‘would compromise him’.

And yet Starmer still appointed him. He still appointed a man who has consistently straddled the lines between political and self-interest. A man whose whole career has been infused with a whiff of money-grubbing impropriety.

Remember, he was first sacked as minister without portfolio (by Tony Blair in 1998) after failing to declare a £373,000 loan from his wealthy friend and then paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson, to pay for a house in Notting Hill. He was forced out again, as Northern Ireland Secretary in 2001, after he’d been exposed helping out millionaire Labour donors Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja with their passport applications. Even after he’d (temporarily) departed Westminster in 2004 to work at the EU as Britain’s European commissioner he still couldn’t help himself. In 2008, it emerged that Mandelson had been frollicking on the superyacht of Russia’s then richest man, Oleg Deripaska, to whom he then granted trade concessions worth up to £50million a year.

None of this will be news to Starmer and his team. All of it should have made them think twice about giving Mandelson his umpteenth plum job, this time overseeing the UK’s most important relationship – with the US.

But this is Starmer’s government we’re talking about. Lacking any sort of guiding vision, indeed any real plan for government beyond, well, Sue Gray, Starmer et al started in office by reaching for the comfort blanket of the New Labour years. For the orthodoxies of globalism and managerialism. And – when it came to a key appointment – for the political archetype of those years and orthodoxies, namely Peter Mandelson.

That’s why this thoroughly New Labour man, this globalist networker who has slipped and slid around transnational hubs of power and wealth for years, ended up as Britain’s man in Washington, DC. Not just because Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a New Labourite who worked for Mandelson during the 2000s, pushed for it. But also because Starmer’s fealty to the technocratic, globalist consensus of the New Labour years, his closeness to its leading figures, blinded him to their manifest failings.

Mandelson’s departure is significant. Coming so soon after the resignation of Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner, it is a further sign of the volatility behind the scenes. Instead of putting an end, as promised, to the Tory years of ‘chaos and decline’, Starmer et al seem to be emulating them instead.

It marks an end, too. A forced cutting of the apron strings tying Starmer’s administration to its New Labour predecessors. This retread of a government has never looked more empty and exhausted than it does right now.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.