Starmer was asked his views on Peter Mandelson having stayed at Jeffrey Epstein’s house after the latter had been arrested on child trafficking charges, and merely replied: “I don’t know any more than you do”, writes Daniel Lindley. [GETTY]
While the disastrous local election results may be the final blow that ends Keir Starmer’s premiership, his worst wound has been the continuing fallout from his disastrous decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States.
Most recently, he was forced to give a statement to Parliament where he denied knowing that Mandelson had failed security vetting, and seemed genuinely flustered when MPs reacted to his statement, “I know many members across the House will find these facts to be incredible,” with roars of laughter.
It’s possible Starmer is telling the truth here. I don’t think there’s any hard evidence either way at this point. But even if he isn’t lying, his defence is essentially that he’s completely incapable of running a government, which isn’t really a good reason to remain as Prime Minister.
There are other interesting aspects of this story that haven’t received much attention in the British press, however.
Although the news story made the headlines recently, it appears to have been known in the British media at least since last September. Indeed, the Independent’s political editor has noted: “I knew that Mandelson failed security vetting. So why didn’t Keir Starmer?” He added that he’d communicated the vetting failure to Downing Street seven months before the PM claimed to have known this information.
This has become a bit of a trend in British politics, where ‘scandals’ suddenly become news stories many months after the press clearly already knew about them, raising the question of why exactly the press kept quiet on this very newsworthy story until now.
If I were to speculate, it looks like some faction within the government recently decided they want Starmer gone soon, so they were filling the airwaves with negative stories in the run-up to local elections to hasten his political demise, and have won the support of part of the media class. But it’s hard to figure these things out until someone tells the inside story later.
Secondly, it’s the fact that the whole issue of Mandelson and his connections to Epstein only really became a news story in Britain because of the publishing of the Epstein files, that is to say, a political development in the United States. If the British press had just been left in isolation, there’s every reason to believe we wouldn’t be hearing about this now.
It really tells you something about the decrepit nature of the British news media that things like this seem to keep happening. My favourite recent example was the New York Times’ investigation into the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair, where not only did they expose that the story was essentially a hoax, but also that no British newspaper had done any real scrutiny of the claims until they showed up and started asking perfectly logical questions.
This is especially noteworthy because Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein was not exactly a secret. In January 2024 (before he even became Prime Minister), Starmer was asked his views on Peter Mandelson having stayed at Jeffrey Epstein’s house after the latter had been arrested on child trafficking charges, and merely replied: “I don’t know any more than you do”.
If Britain had a functioning press, as a bare minimum, you would have expected one journalist to have followed up with Starmer, maybe later in the year, to check if he’d since looked into the matter? In the normal world, if you find out that one of your close colleagues was allegedly best friends with the world’s most famous paedophile, most people would want an explanation, right?
And then we come to Mandelson himself. Even leaving aside the Epstein connections, everyone in Britain knows that he has a reputation for being ‘dodgy’. You don’t get the nickname “The Prince of Darkness” in British politics without being a bit of a character
This is a man who had to resign from the cabinet not once but twice for his ‘irregular’ financial activities and doing favours for foreign billionaires. It’s bizarre that such a disreputable character has played such a major role in British politics over the last four decades, especially since most of it appears to be out of the public eye.
For instance, until he became Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, I think it’s fair to say many had no idea who Morgan McSweeney was, yet it soon became widely acknowledged in the press that he’d been a key player in the Labour right for years.
In Taken as Red by Anushka Asthana, McSweeney is depicted in 2015-19 as constantly scheming with Peter Mandelson to regain control of the Labour Party from the left. When reading this, my main thought was, did it ever occur to the author that knowing this information was surely in the public interest at the time?
The real story, and the reason why Starmer may not even be lying when he says he knew nothing about this, is that he’s barely in control of anything. As one of his inner circle once said of Starmer, “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”
Instead, we have government by a group of shadowy figures like Peter Mandelson, who would probably never be elected if they just ran to be Prime Minister, who then have the clout to expect important jobs whenever they want them. That’s how Mandelson became the US ambassador, to put it simply, and that’s why Starmer is incapable of digging himself out of the hole he’s in now.
Daniel Lindley is a writer and trade union activist in the UK.
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