What was Keir Starmer thinking? Did he momentarily confuse Peter Mandelson with the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa of Calcutta? Was there nothing in the much-cited “due process” that made him pause for a moment’s thought before appointing the Prince of Darkness to be his Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the US?
Somebody should take the prime minister to one side and introduce him to a natty little tool called “Google”, because the evidence suggests he may be a stranger to the concept of search engines.
“The way it works, prime minister, is that you can type in ‘Are there any red flags about Peter Mandelson that I should know about before giving him an extremely sensitive high-level job in government?’ And before you can blow your nose it will produce more red flags than a Spanish bull festival. Or, perhaps, Gary Lineker in his offside prime.”
Let’s have a go, shall we?
Oh yes, I remember now, there was that unfortunate business in 1998 when Peter had to step down over the revelation that he’d accepted a massive and undeclared loan to buy a posh house in Notting Hill.
And then—oh God, it’s all coming back to me—he had to resign again over that business with the Hindujas and a passport. That’s right, it says here he was later cleared, but his reputation was already so iffy that he really had no choice but to go.
Then—ooh, it’s all here, so clever, isnt’ it?—there’s his taste in immensely high net worth, er, “friends” .
Damn! I’d clean forgotten that yachting holiday with George Osborne and Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska who—let’s google him—seems, oh how embarrassing, to be sanctioned by the US, the UK and the European Union and has been slammed with an order freezing his assets and banning him from travelling to Britain .
But surely I couldn’t have known about his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein? Don’t tell me Google would have raised alerts over that?
Oh, hang on. There’s a 2019 JP Morgan bank compliance review which makes for uncomfortable reading. And a 2023 Financial Times report detailing how he stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan home while its owner was in jail. Ooh, and a Channel 4 Dispatches report about using a convicted sex offender as a fixer…. and all kinds of stuff about him being in Epstein’s black book.
It was, in other words, all hiding in plain sight.
Enough for a Whitehall mandarin in the Humphrey Appleby mould to gentle mutter “very brave, prime minister!” at any suggestion that this loose cannonball should be dispatched to Washington at a time of maximum delicacy between two nations separated by a common language and an unhinged sleaze ball in the White House.
I’d have used even blunter language than Sir Humphrey if anyone in Downing Street had long enough memories to recall that it was the Guardian—when I was editor—that brought about the first two downfalls of Mandy. The Geoffrey Robinson and Hunduja revelations were uncomfortable stories, given that the paper was broadly sympathetic to the new Labour project.
But Blair, like Starmer, had presented himself as being whiter than white after years of murky dealings at Westminster. And we had, after all, led the charge against the Tory sleaze in the age of Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken. So there was no alternative but to go after Mandelson as well. If he minded, he never complained to me.
Or perhaps Starmer was too clever by half, thinking Donald Trump would recognise in Mandelson a fellow sleaze ball? But, if reports are to be believed, Trump soon got Mandelson’s measure, nicknaming him “Sneaky Pete”. Starmer may have thought he was playing chess. Turns out it was Russian roulette.
There are, I think, two lessons to be learned from this sorry saga.
Their first is about Starmer’s judgement. I happen to think the prime minister is a decent, honest and competent man. But I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not a little unworldly. Mandelson is undoubtedly brilliant in many ways, but even his closest friends would not call him Mr Clean. You didn’t have to be Mystic Meg to see that his moth-like attraction to ropey multi-millionaires might (once again) blow up in his face. Mandy is brilliant, but also slippery. Connected, but also compromised. Was Starmer too naive to recognise that?
The second lesson concerns “the Blob,” a denigration the spicier fringes of the right uses to dismiss virtually the entire Whitehall machinery, including the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The FCDO has long had a reputation as a bastion of a certain “Mandarin” worldview—multilateralist, cautious, liberal-leaning, unaccountable, establishment minded and Europhilic. Just ask veteran Blob-bashers Nigel Lawson, Dominic Cummings, Priti Patel, Jacob Rees Mogg, Michael Gove… or virtually any Spectator columnist over the past 10 years.
Surely Starmer wouldn’t nod along in agreement with this lot? But how else to explain why he would replace a highly respected, lifelong professional diplomat, Dame Karen Pierce, with a risky gadfly like Mandelson? What signal does it send about the calibre of foreign office ambassadors if not one of them was considered up to the top job?
In this he has something in common with Trump, who appointed his old chum and golfing partner Steve Witkoff to simultaneously negotiate an end to not one, but two, of the world’s most intractable conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Oh, and Iran, too.
Were there literally no State Department employees with Russian, Ukrainian or Middle Eastern experience who could do a better job? Apparently not. There was, in Trump’s mind, no-one smarter than Witkoff, who began as a small-time landlord in the Bronx and ended up building luxury hotels in Manhattan. Just the preparation for dealing with Putin and Netanyahu.
“His inexperience shines through,” one informed source recently told Politico. “He’s kind of a rogue actor,” said another US official familiar with Witkoff’s diplomatic style. “He talks to all these people, but no one knows what he says in any of these meetings. He will say things publicly but then he changes his mind. It’s hard to operationalise that.”
Such criticism didn’t play well in the White House, with vice president JD Vance using X to describe the piece as “journalistic malpractice”. He offered two possible explanations for the reporter, Felicia Schwartz, producing such “garbage”: “Felicia is just not very smart, and allowed herself to be used by deep state con men. Or she’s in on it, and used her position to willingly participate in a literal foreign influence operation. Either way, it’s disgraceful.”
Such an elegant response calls to mind Mandelson’s own riposte when, back in February, the FT’s political editor, George Parker, raised the delicate issue of our man in Washington’s friendship with Epstein: “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all f*** off, OK?”
Oh dear. Bring back the Blob, all is forgiven. And someone give Keir some more lessons in Google.
