“The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” Harold Wilson famously remarked. A beautiful sentiment, say the Labourites, never ones to shy away from claiming the mantle of ethical superiority. In 2021, during one of his more woke-progressive phases, Keir Starmer quoted Wilson’s lines in a speech. Five years later, what defines that moral crusade?
In Westminster pubs and corridors, a febrile atmosphere has taken hold. Everyone is full of righteous indignation: the New Labour cliques are sulking, feigning ignorance of Peter Mandelson’s mendacity and his well-documented friendship with a convicted paedophile; meanwhile, members of Labour’s Left flank are excitedly discussing how they might leverage the scandal, which is surely larger in magnitude than the Profumo Affair, to their own political advantage.
But it is a scandal that bodes ill for the entire party establishment. The provisions of the “humble address”, the parliamentary procedure by which the Conservatives forced Number 10 into transparency, will reveal thousands of messages between Mandelson, ministers, and Downing Street advisers. The process of releasing communications will go on for months, with Labour’s reputation already in tatters. The next election could be an extinction-level event. The paranoiac dreams feverishly of seedy cabals, elite depravity and unimaginable, casual venality. But at what point does subscription to these apparent irrationalities become, in fact, rational? Make no mistake: for a polity that already suffers from a deficit of trust in its politicians, this is fuel to the most deranged of fires, and the Labour Party faces incineration. As British politics fragments, Labour has lost its hegemonic hold over the Left. The Greens are fighting hard in a crucial by-election in Gorton and Denton. “This is grievous,” one of Labour’s parliamentarians tells me via text.
And so, sensing the mood, and surrounded by the unmistakable stench of decay, MPs mull a post-Starmer future, asking what comes next.
Wes Streeting, the heir apparent, is tainted by his long-running association with the Prince of Darkness, his mentor of many years. Angela Rayner, spearheading Commons compromises and permanently flanked around the Parliamentary Estate by a praetorian guard of supporters, is increasingly spoken of as the new leader-in-waiting. One MP tells me the way could now be “clear for Ange”. Known as “Angie” to the comrades, Rayner would recentre the Labour Party firmly within its soft-Left comfort zone. But there’s little or no plan beyond vague assertions that her “fresh” approach would do much beyond stopping the party “trying to out-Reform Reform”, signalling higher taxes, higher spending, laxity on welfare, and a friendlier welcome for migrants.
Then there’s Al Carns, a barely recognised defence minister and military man. Carns only entered Parliament in 2024, but is also being seriously floated as an option. This in itself speaks of the widespread desperation on the Labour benches, and reveals a kind of military fetishism, a fantasy that a heroic man in uniform can deliver the party from certain collapse where mere civilians have failed.
Keir Starmer’s leadership is “hanging by a thread”, one backbencher texts me. As it is, Starmer owes his survival so far to the generally bovine nature of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Almost everyone in the PLP agrees that “it’s over”, that the authority of the Prime Minister is irrecoverable. But in the absence of a standout alternative, the MPs lumber on, zombie-like. Many are unsure of how or when to trigger the inevitable, too scared to take the initiative, afraid for their own careers as well as for the unknown trajectories of a leadership contest that would be fraught with dangers and would plunge the country into a deep uncertainty.
How would a restive public respond if the party of government, which promised respite from endless Tory infighting, entered into a fratricidal contest at a time of deep national malaise? That contest would take the form of introspective debates in which candidates would fall over themselves to cater to the tastes of the party selectorate: 200,000 overwhelmingly middle-class urban progressives whose views little resemble those of the wider public. Fundamentally, the PLP hesitates only because it is paralysed by the paucity of better options. But the herd will move eventually. A critical mass will form.
It will be a fitting epitaph for the reign of both Starmer and McSweeney that they were brought low by the ghosts of New Labour. These are nostalgic emissaries from a faded, halcyon age of “Nice” growth (no inflation, consistent expansion), when Tony Blair played politics on easy mode with a buoyant global economy and a unipolar geopolitical moment. He still managed to badly damage the body politic with the blunders that were the Iraq war, PFI, and the accelerated hollowing-out of the country’s manufacturing base. But rather than exorcising those spectres, the current administration brought the Blairite old guard — not only Mandelson, but Jonathan Powell, Tim Allen, and their second-generation sycophants — back in. In lieu of a real vision, Starmer and McSweeney had promised quiet competence and a steady hand. Their alliance with the old guard delivered neither.
These were “serious appointments”, we were told, aimed at bringing depth of experience and a focus on delivery. Still, Downing Street has floundered, and will go on floundering, whipped around like a plastic bag in a storm, until it ejects a Prime Minister who is palpably unsuited to the job, and who has become a national hate figure with polling as dismal as Liz Truss’s at her nadir. He is the sad captain of a rudderless ship endlessly buffeted by events beyond its control. Even if the ship is blown to calmer waters, its crew would have little sense of which shores they are trying to reach.
New Labour had its fair share of scandal, but it also had a vision of modernity, of what the country should be, and its place in the world: mass higher education for a new, shining “knowledge economy”; openness to globalisation; “Cool Britannia”; the “People’s Princess”; humanitarian interventionism; football, lager and guitar bands; the “special relationship”. To paraphrase John Goodman’s line in The Big Lebowski: say what you want about the tenets of New Labour, Dude, but at least it was an ethos. Mandelson could wax lyrical about the vagaries of Thatcherism in Marxism Today because he had a consistent worldview, combined with a philosophy of power, depraved and abhorrent though that philosophy was. Starmerism is, in contrast, a grey blur, a void. It’s no wonder he and McSweeney began to try and resurrect New Labour throwbacks early on. But the decision is now haunting them.
“Starmerism is a grey blur, a void.”
McSweeney himself is a close confidant, a protégé even, of Mandelson. Both carefully cultivated a reputation for “the dark arts” of political subterfuge; both were consiglieres of powerful superiors. Early in his career, the Irishman made his name as an enthusiastic young spreadsheet-filler, gladly updating the “Excalibur” database through which Mandelson kept tabs on Blair-sceptics in the 2000s. As McSweeney punched newspaper filings into his computer, “Petey” was partying with a sex trafficker.
We were told that the Cork man was of pure “Blue Labour” stock. But while there have been sporadic echoes of this positioning in Starmer’s premiership, they have been limp, reluctant and unconvincing. How could it be otherwise when those stilted speeches have come from the pursed lips of a dull, Remain-campaigning, North London-dwelling human rights barrister?
But the issue surely speaks to a problem with McSweeney himself: the PM’s chief aide is a successful electoral tactician and factional fighter, and a master of the party machine, but he is a man with no hinterland, no intellectual or ideological scaffold. He is a political cipher, a fixer for competing Right-wing factions coming together under the nonentity of “Starmerism”. Internecine war against the Left has been his and their raison d’être. Dirty tricks and spin have been his modus operandi, the ends always justifying the means. But that is not a plan for government. It’s not a plan for the country. McSweeney is likely to resign over his pro-Mandelson manoeuvrings, perhaps buying the Prime Minister a little more time in office. But Starmer will flail uncontrollably without the architect of his ascendancy. McSweeney offered little other than an empty electoral victory, but without him the Prime Minister will be revealed as even more hollow and insubstantial than his aide. The writing is on the wall; the only question is what lies beyond the wall.
New Labour’s days are over, their epoch long since passed. The smooth, polite advocates of Blair’s Davos-friendly progressivism cut lonely figures in today’s harsher, meaner world of hard power, nation-state revival, big government interventions and Great Power realpolitik. To that extent, Streeting is hindered not just by his personal and professional links to Mandelson, but by his ideological associations with a project that is hopelessly out of step with an age of deglobalisation, statism, and ubiquitous, cross-party calls for “reindustrialisation”.
The New Labour philosophy will be the downfall not just of Mandelson, but of this government. Its apparatchiks were enchanted by wealth. Proximity to the ultra-rich — not so much the captains of industry, but the money-men of high finance — was central to their ideological project and became embedded in their lifestyles. The post-2010 trajectories of Mandelson and Blair are the most extreme symptoms of a whole philosophy and guiding culture based on a union between the erstwhile social-democratic Left, global elites, and high finance. They were “intensely relaxed” about the filthy rich, not for strategic or electoral reasons, but because they “really do believe in it”.
They made a Faustian pact with the City and an accommodation with market liberalism, while in their private lives they were cavorting with two-bit oligarchs, despots and other malcontents. It wasn’t merely a pragmatic approach to modern statecraft — they were intoxicated by it all. They convinced themselves that they were the indispensable missing link between the dusty town halls, the old-fashioned parliamentary committee rooms, the dry social-democratic conferences, and the new, dynamic, globalised cash nexus with ultra-high-net-worths sitting atop of it all, apparently owning the future. We’re now witnessing their comeuppance on the national stage.
One parliamentary staffer speaks longingly of their desire for a unifying programme that suits a dirigiste era: a civic patriotism and a firm-but-fair migration system coupled with investment-led regional growth, industrial strategy, and bold interventions around which Labour’s disparate strands could finally coalesce. In this wistful reading, the soft Left, Blue Labour, elements of the old trade-union Right and even the more strategically minded Corbynistas could get behind a project of national renewal, with only the thoroughly discredited and out-of-step Blairites outside of the tent. But this programme is nowhere to be seen. The most plausible candidate that could have articulated such an offer was blocked from standing for Parliament in Manchester last week.
Mandelson used to tell the cynics who never quite accepted his vision — those who worried about the party’s historic base in the post-industrial towns and cities of Britain — that Labour didn’t need to worry about courting the working class, since they had “nowhere else to go”. Meanwhile, Blairism’s éminence grise had many places to go: Epstein’s island, his New York mansions, his private jet. Now, Labour’s people have plenty of options, too: Reform, the Greens, furious abstentionism and a heady mix of zany political entrepreneurs and hyper-online conspiratorialism. “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” Wilson said. That was forgotten long ago. Mandy may have forgotten Labour voters, but they certainly won’t be forgetting him.
