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Not another one. On Sunday it was Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, who took one for the team by resigning over the Peter Mandelson appointment. On Monday, No 10’s head of communications, Tim Allan, did likewise without offering much by way of an explanation.
Presumably it was another effort to delay the inevitable. “We need a futile gesture, chaps.” No matter that most normal people won’t have heard of either of them. Let alone be able to identify them in a police lineup.
It’s a war of attrition inside Downing Street. It can’t be long before a couple of cleaners also resign because they too feel a bit guilty about not warning Starmer that they had misgivings about Mandelson. Then Keir will be left on his own to rattle around inside No 10, with only the echoes of his own voice to keep him company. That’s assuming he is still on the Mary Celeste, of course.
Come Monday afternoon, Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, became the most prominent party figure so far to demand that Starmer stand down. Not that he had any idea who should replace him. Just that enough was enough, and Labour would have a marginally better chance of not being wiped out in the May elections without him. Better the chaos you don’t know rather than the chaos you do.
A spokesperson for Starmer insisted he was going nowhere and was committed to running the country. He didn’t sound altogether convincing. Or reassuring. Sometimes, you wonder if we’d do better with no one. Just let the civil servants get on with it. Belgium went 652 days without a government in between December 2018 and October 2020 and no one seemed to notice the difference.
You can’t also help feeling that the Mandelson scandal is playing havoc with the minds of the entire political class as its members pretend to be concerned about the women and girls who were Jeffrey Epstein’s real victims while scrabbling around for their own advantage.
Amnesia and revisionism are the new order of the day. Almost no one in any party – or in the media – raised any concerns about Mandelson’s Epstein links when he was first appointed as UK ambassador to Washington. Which is not to excuse Starmer. Rather that those in glass houses etc …
Most of the British establishment held Mandy close to their heart. He was one of them. One of the chosen few. A brilliant schmoozer and negotiator. Something must be done for Peter. Too good to be left on the sidelines. If there were concerns, it was whether he could somehow combine being ambassador with chancellor of the University of Oxford. He was a regular on the Times podcast. Michael Gove considered him to be a brilliant appointment. These voices have melted into the background over the last week.
Though not Kemi Badenoch. The Tory leader was one of many who didn’t mention Epstein’s links when Mandelson was first appointed US ambassador. Now she seems to be under the impression that she broke the entire story.
You could sense the astonishment in Nick Robinson’s voice on Monday morning as Badenoch declared on the Today programme that it was only thanks to her performance at last week’s PMQs that we had discovered that Mandelson stayed in Epstein’s flat after his conviction for soliciting prostitution from a child.
It’s as if Kemi now thinks she is a third-rate Marvel hero whose superpower is to believe that everyone will buy whatever she wants to be true. Who has no idea we all know the story had been out in the open for years but that Westminster had chosen to ignore it. In KemiWorld nothing ever happens without her say so. She is in control of everything. No one has yet dared to introduce her to the truth.
Still, Kemi’s fantasy land is probably a more comfortable and kinder place than the reality in which Labour’s cabinet find themselves. On Sunday, Pat McFadden – Starmer’s most loyal retainer – had been sent out to face the media. It wouldn’t make sense for McSweeney to resign, he repeatedly said. Just hours before Mc Sweeney resigned. Pat needed two or three extra diazepam to recover from the shame of that.
So on Monday morning not a single member of the cabinet could be found to speak up for Starmer. An urgent appointment at the hairdresser. If Keir didn’t feel abandoned before, he did now. It was left to the junior minister Jacqui Smith to take the flak. I guess as she is already in the Lords, she probably considers herself more or less untouchable. She will still pick up more than £300 a day even if the worst happens.
Fair to say she crashed and burned. Who wouldn’t? Trying to explain why McSweeney had done the right thing by resigning for giving duff advice – while Starmer had also done the right thing by not resigning for taking the wrong decision – would have stretched the ability of someone far sharper than Smith.
By mid-afternoon the revisionism was well into overdrive. Cabinet ministers who had declined to support the prime minister in the morning offered their undying support on social media. Well, their undying support for the rest of the day. About as much as you could hope for. This is, as they say, a fast moving crisis.
Yvette Cooper, Darren Jones, Bridget Phillipson, Ed Miliband, Peter Kyle and McFadden all declared Starmer to be a thoroughly good bloke. The best prime minister in the best of all possible times. Other ministers gave short interviews saying much the same. As did Angela Rayner. No one was going to stab Keir just yet.
Then came a Commons statement from Darren Jones on standards in public life. Darren is always unbelievably pleased with whatever Darren does, and today was no exception. Even in a crisis there’s not a hint of a crack in his self-confidence. One of Labour’s great survivors.
Jones had come to tell MPs that rogue peers would be kicked out of the Lords – some in the upper chamber won’t be pleased about that – and tighter vetting procedures would be put in place to stop people such as Mandelson getting appointed. Which rather missed the point. Mandy’s relationship with Epstein was a matter of public record. All that was needed to stop the appointment was already known.
None of this stopped Jones from acting as if he was doing everyone a favour. The shadow minister Neil O’Brien merely observed that the government appeared to be collapsing and it was time for Starmer to resign.
At which point Darren got into a bit of competitive sleaze. Labour wrong’uns were far superior to Tory wrong’uns. Emily Thornberry suggested the government could have spared itself a world of pain by having allowed the foreign affairs committee to interrogate Mandelson before he sloped off to Washington. She had a point.
