Another day, another set of embarrassing revelations about Peter Mandelson. A photo has now emerged of Mandelson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jeffrey Epstein all together, the first two wearing bath robes. That doesn’t change anything for Keir Starmer, but it reinforces the questions about his handling of the affair which were highlighted by the wafer-thin vetting exercise exposed by the papers released on Wednesday.
There will be many bad days ahead for the Prime Minister
Perhaps more extraordinary is the revelation in the paperback update of Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s book on Starmer, Get In, that the Prime Minister never once spoke to Mandelson before appointing him as ambassador to the US. Regardless of whether you think the appointment was reckless and wrong or a political gamble worth taking, to pick someone to conduct your relations with a tricksy American President and not bother to speak to him first is quite astonishing.
As Wednesday’s paperwork showed, Starmer got Morgan McSweeney, his former chief of staff, to question Mandelson and left the judgment about whether his answers were satisfactory to Matthew Doyle, his former director of communications.
As my big piece on Starmer last month revealed, even after Mandelson was appointed, Starmer never quizzed him about how to deal with Trump. All this exposes a Prime Minister with Olympic levels of detachment. It has been known for a while that he has little interest in politics but those who have worked with him have been genuinely surprised at his lack of interest in the detail of governing.
It is well worth having a listen to the edition of Coffee House Shots I recorded with Gabriel and Oscar Edmondson this morning. The Pogrund-Maguire book has further new material. Buckingham Palace did not simply have reservations about offering Trump a second state visit – it ‘trenchantly and continuously opposed’ it, according to a senior diplomat involved in the Foreign Office planning.
Sir Clive Alderton, the King’s private secretary, proposed a sequenced alternative: a private meeting first, then a state visit, ‘possibly’ in 2026 or 2027. No 10 rejected this, escalating from informal suggestion to formal constitutional advice – the mechanism by which a government instructs the monarch.
The King’s specific concern was Canada. Charles had his own responsibilities as Canadian head of state, independent of the British government, and did not view Trump’s remarks about annexing the country as humorous. It was Mandelson who conveyed this directly to Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff. According to one senior diplomat, Trump stopped making the jokes from that point on.
The book also reveals that the decision to sack Mandelson was taken by McSweeney, not Starmer. On the day the PM defended Mandelson in the Commons, McSweeney was in a secure basement conference room without his phone when two of Starmer’s closest aides – Paul Ovenden and Stuart Ingham – came to find him. Ingham told him: ‘We just can’t answer these questions.’
McSweeney’s response – ‘It’s unsustainable’ – was the moment the decision was effectively made. Throughout, Mandelson was texting McSweeney urging him not to ‘wobble’ and insisting the story would blow over. It hasn’t yet.
I met earlier today with one of the shrewdest members of the government. This person said: ‘Mandelson could still be the thing that brings Keir down. He has put his future in the hands of the ISC [the Intelligence and Security Committee which must decide which papers can be published] and they will be sitting on a bag of hand grenades. They may be nothing to do with the Mandelson affair but will be released because of it. It will be up to them to decide when and how to throw them.’
The most likely time is after the local elections. Another veteran has a metric for Starmer’s future. If Labour finishes second in May, Starmer will get a bounce. If they are third not much will change. If they are fourth, Starmer will be in big trouble. Fall to fifth and he will be finished. There are still doubts that any successor will emerge from the pack to lead the challenge. But there will be many bad days ahead for this Prime Minister.
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