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In many political scandals there is an agreed full stop, a time for the circus to move on: maybe a resignation, certainly a police investigation. But for Downing Street, Peter Mandelson risks being a headache that simply will not end.
Mandelson’s future in public life is definitively over, or as definitive as you can be for a figure who, much as with the Conservative saying about Boris Johnson, would possibly need to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart before you could completely rule out another comeback.
After resigning from Labour as yet more revelations about his links to Jeffrey Epstein emerged, Mandelson has now departed from the House of Lords, and efforts are under way to strip him of his title.
With Mandelson off the scene, at least until he breaks cover with another self-serving interview, the focus is very much on Downing Street, and how on earth the team around Keir Starmer thought it was a good idea to appoint such a tarnished, if well-connected, figure to be the ambassador to the Donald Trump court.
There are two interconnected elements to this very public inquest: one internal and the other external.
On the latter, opposition parties will delightedly punch the bruise, using every parliamentary mechanism in their power to try to tease out new and potentially embarrassing information.
The first stage of this is likely to be a Conservative opposition day debate on Wednesday, where the Tories are expected to push for the release of internal documents setting out what No 10 knew about Mandelson’s links to Epstein at the time he was given the Washington job.
The aim of this will be to focus as much fire as possible on Starmer personally. “It’s either he knew and didn’t care, or just wasn’t curious enough to care, and neither is a good look,” one Conservative frontbencher said.
There was a similar verdict on Tuesday from Nigel Farage, who told a press conference that while he is himself mentioned 32 times in the Epstein files, he never met the child sex offender and “never went to the island”.
While acknowledging Mandelson’s skills as a networker, Farage said Starmer and his team made “a grave, grave error of judgment” in making him ambassador despite his long record of previous misjudgments and poor conduct.
Notably, the Reform UK leader said questions should be asked about the judgment of not just Starmer but Morgan McSweeney, his influential chief of staff.
McSweeney is the focus of considerable anger from Labour MPs. Some of them have said privately they hope the Conservative opposition day debate does ferret out some internal No 10 documents about the ambassadorial appointment, mainly so they can see how much it was forced by McSweeney, a former protege of Mandelson, with whom he consulted regularly before the general election.
McSweeney was already disliked by some Labour MPs, in part as a proxy for their dissatisfaction with the government’s performance, but also because of his role as the head of a group in No 10 viewed as factional to a sometimes petty degree towards those on the left of the party.
Even before the latest Mandelson scandal, there had been calls for McSweeney to be ousted if, as widely presumed, Labour fares badly in May’s elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and English councils.
But, as we saw in the Johnson era, changing the team around the leader will buy you only a small amount of time if your MPs, and the electorate more widely, conclude that the problem is not the team but the person they advise.
This is the current Labour endgame, the place at which essentially all conversations about Starmer within the party now end up: how much longer does he have? With yet more evidence of his seemingly poor judgment likely to be on the front pages for days to come, the ticking of that clock has again become louder.
