The Mandelson Files: Starmer is out of excuses
Keir Starmer should pay the price for ignoring the warnings about Peter Mandelson
Keir Starmer knew.
The UK Prime Minister was explicitly warned about Peter Mandelson’s links to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the former Labour peer’s links to China and promotion of CCP lies.
Files released on Thursday have exposed Keir Starmer as the inept, toadying, charlatan that he is. Despite being told that Mandelson’s connections to Epstein and the CCP made him a reputational risk, Starmer ignored them and went ahead anyway.
Two Tony Blair proteges were the chief protagonists, the disgraced former Number 10 spin doctor Matthew Doyle and the prime minister’s campaign strategist Morgan McSweeney, who prevailed in a power struggle to become Sir Keir’s chief of staff in office.
The Mandelson files expose the hollowness of UK Labour’s election pitch.
McSweeney promoted Starmer as a candidate who would deliver ‘change.’ But all both delivered were yesterday’s style of politics, favour, factionalism and fecklessness.
The 130 pages of briefs, memos, emails and officials’ minutes of meetings that were released on Wednesday betrayed Starmer’s wilful ineptitude or worse, calculated deceit.
The Prime Minister was explicitly told that Mandelson carried reputational risk. Why he needed official advice to tell him that was mind-boggling.
Mandelson, now sacked, has been questioned by British police in relation to sending Epstein confidential government information when he was a minister in the former Blair-Brown governments. But he was sacked twice from government in scandal. Yet, he was pushed by Mr Doyle and Mr McSweeney to Starmer as the star candidate to become the UK’s Ambassador in Washington.
The files also show the misgivings of Sir Keir’s National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, who felt the appointment was ‘weirdly rushed.’
Mandelson was given briefings above his security clearance and then demanded a payout worth around half a million pounds when he was sacked over revelations contained in the Epstein Files.
Sir Keir had always maintained that Mandelson did not tell him the full extent of his relationship with Epstein.
But there was only one metric Starmer needed to satisfy himself of — did Mandelson maintain his friendship with a paedophile after his conviction and release from jail in 2008?
The answer was yes, and this was provided to him in his briefing. It should have been case closed then.
In the days prior to his appointment being confirmed, Mandelson gave Team Starmer one more reason to raise questions when he denied to me on the record that he had ever had business dealings in China. This was despite an extensive document compiling his work prepared by researchers at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, showing otherwise.
And now the files exposed that the prime minister was explicitly warned that Mandelson’s Global Counsel firm had high-profile Chinese clients, including TikTok and fast fashion retailer Shein.
Yet still, Sir Keir, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, ignored the warning sirens and went ahead with the appointment. He later claimed that Mandelson had concealed from him the extent of his friendship with Epstein.
‘These papers … are absolutely damming of the Prime Minister. Starmer has not told the truth and cannot be trusted,’ Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch said.
Starmer is out of excuses. He either read the briefings provided to him and chose to ignore and override them. Or he did not. Neither is a good excuse, and both are enough to disqualify him from office.
The files do not shed any light on Starmer’s own views or reasons for pursuing Mandelson’s appointment. Those remain, quite literally, a blank page. And this is Starmer’s fault. He has always been void of purpose, blank on his objectives, an empty suit that Labour donors had purchased for him.
He and McSweeney said they had reclaimed the UK Labour Party from the Corbynistas.
But as Richard Burgon, a Labour MP and ally of the former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn told the House of Commons, Mandelson’s appointment despite his ‘despicable character, greed and avarice,’ went ahead because of politics.
‘It suited the interests of a tiny faction of the Labour party,’ Burgon said.
Starmer has vindicated his critics.
He has not delivered the change that he promised and that he claims to have a mandate to deliver, and is the reason he gives as to why he should stay in Number 10.
He represents more of the same old crony politics that has led to a surge in support for the lolly options of the Greens on the far left and Reform on the far right.
Starmer used to seek refuge in being politically vacant. But he has been exposed as willing to compromise national security, Britain’s dignity and his own premiership to bestow political favour on an egg that had rotted long ago.
This piece was first published by The Nightly