When Keir Starmer’s Labour was flung into power by the implosion of the Conservatives, the chattering classes were gripped by almost comical levels of delusion. We were assured this assortment of third-rate managerialists were about to usher in a new age of calm, competence and principle. Surely, the Peter Mandelson scandal has finally put paid to all that.
Sleaze defined New Labour, and it didn’t just sully the so-called Prince of Darkness
Of all the supposed virtues that were projected on to Starmer’s incoming Labour government, the notion it would rid British politics of sleaze was almost adorable in its naivety – not to mention its wilful blindness to not-too-distant history. Indeed, with his deference to New Labour and its apparatchiks, Starmer was always doomed to be hoist by his own moralistic petard.
Having spent the past few years calling for Tories’ heads when they so much as passed wind, Starmer was inevitably, and instantly, beset by scandal. Even so, Lord Alli’s shopping trips and Angela Rayner’s creative accounting are quaint compared with what Mandelson had been getting up to. Following the latest release of the Epstein Files by the US Department of Justice, he stands accused of handing politically and financially sensitive information to financier Jeffrey Epstein, while Mandelson was serving in Gordon Brown’s government, after Epstein had been convicted of child sex offences, and after tens of thousands of Epstein’s dollars appear to have wended their way into Mandelson’s bank accounts, which he says he cannot recall and has no record of.
Starmer has been putting on his best shocked and angry face. But no one is buying it. The PM was briefed about Mandelson’s ‘links’ with Epstein before he made him ambassador to the US in 2024. It had been public knowledge for years anyway. While few could have imagined the revelations of recent days, Mandelson was always a liability – even excluding his known, chummy relationship with the world’s most infamous paedo.
After all, every big job Mandelson has ever held has ended in scandal. There’s the undeclared £373,000 loan from wealthy colleague Geoffrey Robinson, which led to his resignation as trade and industry secretary in 1998. In 2001, Mandelson’s efforts to get Indian billionaire Srichand Hinduja granted British citizenship hastened the end of his time in the Northern Ireland Office. While serving as European trade commissioner, he granted trade concessions to a Russian oligarch, whose yacht he had been found frolicking on. It would have been amazing if his Washington stint didn’t go up in flames.
Sleaze defined New Labour, and it didn’t just sully the so-called Prince of Darkness. Tony Blair had barely been in power five minutes before his government was embroiled in the Bernie Ecclestone saga – accused of taking a £1million donation from the Formula One magnate in exchange for exempting the sport from the tobacco-sponsorship ban. Blair also became the first serving prime minister to be quizzed by police, during the cash-for-honours scandal. And yet, reading the news during the tailend of the Tory years, you’d be forgiven for thinking Boris Johnson getting a donor to pay for his curtains was a grim new low for British democracy.
The commentariat either have short memories or think it isn’t sleaze if the centrist dads are doing it. All of Mandelson’s well-documented sins were washed away when he was mooted for the DC job, with some of our most esteemed commentators hailing it a rare stroke of genius on the part of the PM. ‘Peter Mandelson is the only politician who has never lied to me in more than 40 years on the Westminster beat’, wrote Adam Boulton, long-time face of Sky News, somewhat improbably. Tory peer and Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein called Mandelson the ‘ideal person’ for the role: ‘My question was always: would Keir Starmer be bold enough to pick Peter Mandelson? I’m pretty impressed that he was.’ Even some of Mandelson’s supposed Tory adversaries seem to have been struck by this reflexive deference to the supposed brilliance of the New Labour slimeballs.
What of the insufferable activists who spent the years after the referendum railing against the alleged perfidy of those ‘Brexshitter’ Tories?
And what of the insufferable activists who spent the years after the referendum railing against the alleged perfidy of those ‘Brexshitter’ Tories? As one reliably amusing X account put it the other day, wait until the Led By Donkeys guys find out about Mandy. Indeed, these anti-Brexit campaigners – whose lame billboard stunts would blast the supposed ‘lies, lunacy and hypocrisy’ of the Brexiteers – have been remarkably quiet during the lies, lunacy and hypocrisy of Keir Starmer’s troubled reign so far, despite claiming Labour is also ‘fair game’. Maybe they got lost at a craft-beer festival somewhere. Or maybe they, too, are massive, steaming hypocrites.
If it proves to be as bad as it smells, the Mandelson-Epstein Affair would be the biggest scandal since Profumo. Whatever else happens next, the phoney moral superiority of Labour – and its credulous outriders – lies in tatters.
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