You can’t kill something that is already dead. New details about Peter Mandelson’s disastrous appointment as Britain’s ambassador to Washington can trigger more paroxysms of outrage in Westminster. They can sharpen the pitch of opposition calls for the prime minister to resign. They can reinforce the view among Labour MPs that Keir Starmer shouldn’t lead them into a general election. But they can’t produce consensus around a replacement, or invent a way to choose one without self-destructive factional feuding.
Labour MPs’ craving for better leadership has been finely balanced with fear of holding a contest and emerging with someone worse. There is no final straw yet to come because the camel’s back was broken months ago.
Depressed inertia can keep Starmer in post at least until the results of next month’s local and devolved elections. Maybe even longer. Those ballots look sure to confirm what opinion polls have been saying for months about public disappointment with Labour and contempt for its leader.
It is hard to know how much influence the Mandelson saga has already had on general malaise, and how much attention is being paid to its latest convolutions. High living costs weigh on voters’ minds more than diplomatic appointments. When Labour gets hammered it will reflect cumulative disillusionment, not anger that high-level security clearance was granted to a man deemed unworthy of that status by the agency responsible for vetting him.
This isn’t to deny the significance of that decision, or what is revealed by Starmer’s effort to avoid responsibility for it. His defence is ignorance reinforced with righteous fury at the concealment of important facts from Downing Street. No one told the prime minister, or any other minister, that Mandelson’s security vetting raised red flags. Had he known, he could have aborted the appointment, he says. The system let him down.
To express his commitment to procedural rectitude, Starmer fired Olly Robbins, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office who signed off on Mandelson’s security clearance. Robbins told parliament’s foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday that his department was acting on what appeared to be a clear message from Downing Street that Mandelson was heading to Washington no matter what. The announcement had been made. The wheels were in motion and nothing, least of all the footling formality of vetting, should impede his journey.
Starmer’s claim not to have been in the loop at all times is supported by Robbins’s testimony. That gets the prime minister off the technical charge of having knowingly misled parliament – a resigning matter – when he said Mandelson had cleared vetting and procedures had been followed. They were. Discretion was allowed at the final step of the process, and Robbins exercised that discretion. But he did so in the context of “constant pressure” to satisfy No 10’s unambiguous indication that only one outcome was allowed.
How that pressure was applied and by whom will be a subject of breathless Westminster speculation with, inevitably, reference to Morgan McSweeney. The former Downing Street chief of staff and Mandelson protege resigned in an earlier chapter of the scandal, taking responsibility for the whole mess on behalf of his boss.
Here the story gets lost in a labyrinth of Cabinet Office corridors, which is where Starmer wants the focus applied because he claims to have been elsewhere all along. What he doesn’t want is interrogation of the decision to pick Mandelson in the first place. He says he regrets it as a lapse of judgment. He is sorry.
But for what? His apology in the Commons on Monday was addressed to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, who “were clearly failed” by the appointment. The prime minister kicks himself for having believed the Labour peer when he downplayed the extent of his friendship with a man convicted of trafficking underage girls for sex. No level of intimacy with such a person is compatible with an ambassadorial post.
And this wasn’t just any post. Britain already had an ambassador to Washington, Karen Piercewho was doing the job just fine. The problem was Donald Trump. His chaotic, petulant style of administration posed diplomatic challenges to which, it was assumed, only an exquisitely crafty political operator might rise. Starmer was persuaded that Mandelson fitted the bill.
The moral hazard of the Epstein connection was overlooked not because it was hidden, but because it was camouflaged as just another motif on the robes of suitability for the mission that Mandelson seemed to wear. His ease in the milieu of sleazy plutocracy, his fluency in elite codes of geopolitical clientelism – these were his courtier’s calling cards. The traits that should have disqualified him from the job were mistaken by Starmer for credentials.
That was more than an error of character judgment. It was symptomatic of a foreign policy that conflated sycophancy towards the Trump administration with pursuit of the UK national interest. It flowed from panic that the “special relationship” was in jeopardy, and a view that protocol and propriety were unaffordable luxuries in the campaign to save it.
For a time it seemed that Starmer’s method was working. The relationship with Trump started better than expected, given their differences of political pedigree and temperament. It then soured, as was inevitable given the US president’s habit of expecting commercial submission and military obedience from allies.
The demands Trump makes on the global stage and his spiteful reactions when rebuffed have taught Starmer the limits of appeasement. He must regret not having come to that conclusion earlier. Resisting the call to join attacks on Iran raised his standing among MPs and with a wider publicbut as a blip on flatlining approval ratings.
There is limited credit available to a prime minister who finds himself on the right track only because the one he preferred was a dead end. There is no credit at all for claiming to be outraged by the consequences of your own judgment and wishing civil servants had intervened. It isn’t clear even now that Starmer understands why the Mandelson appointment was so wrong. He regrets it, of course, because it has caused him so much trouble. But the point he is unable to explain, because it exposes the abdication of ethics in an epic foreign policy miscalculation, is why he thought it was a good idea at the time.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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