Keir Starmer is perhaps the most unpopular prime minister we’ve ever had, and he’s embroiled himself in what may be the most disgusting scandal. Can this loathed public figure survive this self-inflicted catastrophe?

Almost certainly not.

And one person who’s ahead of the curve on this is Zack Polanski:

Important discussion this evening on Palantir.

Keir Starmer having meetings in Washington – and then the US spy tech company receive £260m.

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The largest defence contract in British history – through Peter Mandelsons lobbying company. https://t.co/i9lDjfEx22

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) February 4, 2026

Time to go

As we’ve reported, Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson to be ambassador to the US despite knowing he maintained a friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction. The media presented it as some great revelation when Starmer admitted to this in parliament yesterday, but it was never a secret; the media just failed to interrogate Starmer when he returned Mandelson to public office.

We reported on Mandelson maintaining his ties with Epstein way back in 2023.

It wasn’t a secret.

Starmer knew.

The media knew.

This is all just a grim pantomime.

In the clip above, Polanski describes hiring Mandelson as “the most catastrophic lapse in judgement you can imagine”. In our opinion, the “lapse of judgement” is that Starmer thought the media would ignore this obvious scandal forever. It’s not that he hired a notorious sleazeball, because he clearly doesn’t care about that; after all, he’s part of a movement which is entirely comprised of such people:

Peter Mandelson is not some random outlier.

He was one of the founders and central pillars of the New Labour project.

He was a central player in the Starmer project – including as mentor to the chief of staff.

He is the very core of the Labour Right! https://t.co/lypJOfU8hz

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— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) February 4, 2026

Polanski also said:

I think it’s clear the Prime Minister should do the right thing and step down, because actually the rut runs right throughout the Labour government.

This is a man in Keir Starmer who knew that Peter Mandelson was friends with one of the most known paedophiles in the world, was still staying in his apartment, and he brought him into the heart of government solely because, I imagine, he thought he could whisper in Trump’s ear.

Step down

Polanski is absolutely correct that the “right thing” for Starmer to do would be to “step down”. Given that this is the guy who hired Mandelson, however, there’s no reason to expect him to do the right thing.

Featured image via Zack Polanski

Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch holds press conference after forcing the Government to release the files regarding the Prime Minister’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the UK.

https://www.conservatives.com/news/madelson-files-press-conference

Full text of speech here:

Britain is not being governed.

Last night in Downing Street, what were Keir Starmer and his team doing?

They were not thinking about the future of NATO…
They were not up late talking about sorting out the cost of living …

They were not planning to reindustrialise Britain with cheaper energy.

They were… yet again… desperately ringing round Labour MPs trying to save his job.

The Labour Party came into government just 18 months ago but with no plan for this country.

And in the last 18 months, we have seen exactlywhat happens when a government has no ideawhat it is doing in power…and no idea what it stands for….

They have made a series of random decisions.

Not a single one of which was in their manifesto.

Snatching Winter Fuel Payments. Taxing Family farms. Mandatory digital ID.

Surrendering the Chagos Islands.

A disastrous Budget….for Benefits Street.
Taxing jobs, pubs and businesses – and making this country poorer.

Every. single. one of these decisions… they have got wrong.

It is bad enough to have a government preoccupied with cleaning up its own messes.

But what’s worse… is the reason these mistakes keep happening.

Because every single one of them… comes back to the judgement of one man.

Keir Starmer.

At a time when Britain needs a leader, we have a Prime Minister who makes the wrong decision again…and again.

For months….I have been pressing the Prime Minister about his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador.

And Yesterday in Parliament, I finally forced him to admit the shocking truth.

HE KNEW.

He knew that Mandelson had a continuing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

He knew Mandelson had stayed in his house while Epstein was in jail for child prostitution.

The Prime Minister knew all this and appointed Peter Mandelson anyway to the most prestigious job in the diplomatic service.

The Prime Minister brushed aside the security warnings.

He turned a blind eye…to what he knew….about Mandelson’s association…..with one of the world’s most notorious paedophiles.

And instead of standing up and taking full responsibility for this disastrous appointment,

The Prime Minister is trying to make himself out to be the victim.

Nobody is buying it.

This morning Cabinet ministers are out there defending the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson – still claiming that it was a rational appointment.

They should be ashamed.

And it’s not just Peter Mandelson.

The Prime Minister has surrounded himself with people who do not have Britain’s best interests at heart.

Like Jonathan Powell.
Like Lord Hermer.

People advising him to surrender the Chagos Islands…simply to impress lawyers at North London dinner parties….

People advising him to let the Chinese build an enormous Spy Hub in the centre of London.

People advising him to drag our brave veterans through the courts while terrorists walk free.

Keir Starmer is either too weak, or too foolish, to see the folly of what he is agreeing to.

Even the Health Secretary has said there’s a toxic culture in Number 10.

Cabinet Ministers briefing against each other…not focused on their jobs…

We have constant u-turns

This is not just a Westminster bubble story.

Britain is not being governed.

And this is having an impact on the lives and the livelihoods of people across the country.

Britain is getting poorer….and Britain is getting weaker.

Because of Keir Starmer’s bad judgement.

It can’t go on.

It is now up to Labour MPs to do the right thing.

I know there are many who are horrified by what has happened.

We saw that in the House of Commons yesterday.

They might now expect the Prime Minister to take responsibility…

…but we know he won’t.

He will have to be dragged out of No10.

So I am making them an offer.

If they want the change they know the country needs, come and speak to my whips…and let’s talk seriously about a vote of no confidence, to force the moment.

Keir Starmer’s position is clearly untenable.

It is for Labour MPs to decide when he goes.

It’s a question of when not if he goes.

Just now Keir Starmer has given a speech supposedly about local funding. 

No doubt another mission, or pledge, or milestone – made up by an aide yesterday afternoon….yet another relaunch that in a week’s time no one will remember.

He apologised for believing Mandelson’s lies. That’s not good enough.

What he should apologise for…is ignoring security advice and vetting that showed him Mandelson should never have been appointed in the first place.

He cannot bring himself to do that because his self-righteousness is his greatest weakness.

And what else have the British public got on offer?

Fresh from announcing a pubs policy this week with a £10 billion black hole in it.

Nigel Farage is in now Wales….announcing his new Welsh leader… after the last one was sent to prison in November for taking bribes from Russia.

We all know a Reform government would just be more of the same.

More incompetence. More dodgy appointments. More drama… when what this country needs is some serious government.

There is only one party in Britain today that is actually serious.

One that is doing the deep thinking and the hard work…to fix our country’s problems.

And be ready to deliver the second we come into office.

That is my Conservative Party.

Yes we made mistakes but we acknowledge them and we have learned from them.

We are on the side of hard-working people.

People who do the right thing… and are fed up with a Government that isn’t working for them.

We are on the side of those who play by the rules. We are not on the side of people claiming benefits when they could and should be working.

We are not on the side of spivs and scammers who think the rules don’t apply to them.

Britain is not being governed.

We need to show that we can do better.

That a government with a plan can fix the things going wrong in our country.

That is our alternative.

Our strong borders plan.

Our cheap power plan.

Our £47 billion savings plan.

Our plan to abolish stamp duty

Our plan to fix the high street.

Our plan to Get Britain Working again.

This is what we believe in.

This is the change WE WILL DELIVER.”

Rabid media coverage of the Epstein files has breathlessly focused on political gossip at the expense of centring victims and survivors. As such, public discussion of elite sexual abuse often gravitates towards spectacle: powerful men, hidden networks and institutional failure. Of course, coverage from mainstream media is complicit in upholding power structures that decide who counts as a victim – and who doesn’t.

Instead, the newly released Epstein files point to an uncomfortable reality. It has been noted from FBI interview records and grand jury testimony that Epstein’s “preference was short, little, white girls.” Crucially, Epstein’s operation did not rely on chance or opportunism. Instead, Epstein paid girls to recruit other minors and enforced his preferences through discipline and reward. When recruiters failed to comply, the system reprimanded them. In practice, race did not sit in the background. Rather, it structured how the trafficking itself operated.

When recruiters violated those expectations, Epstein reprimanded them. In one instance, he refused to allow a Black girl to massage him, telling the recruiter that he “was not interested in black girls.” As a result, racial selection operated not as personal taste but as an enforced rule within the trafficking system.

This is not simply evidence of personal bias. It is evidence of racialised trafficking.

Epstein files: trafficking as selection, not chaos

A 2019 prosecution memorandum from the Southern District of New York reinforces this pattern. Drawing on multiple victims’ accounts, the memo describes how Epstein’s operation recruited, paid, recycled, and excluded girls. Epstein “expressed displeasure” when certain girls were brought to him and “did not like dark-skinned girls”.

This language confirms that race operated as a selection criterion within the abuse economy. The operation expected recruiters to internalise Epstein’s preferences and adjust their behaviour accordingly. When recruiters failed, the system punished them through loss of payment, emotional reprimand, or exclusion from favour. Trafficking here did not operate opportunistically or chaotically. It functioned as a regulated system, with whiteness operating as currency and Blackness marking disposability.

Black women-led anti-trafficking advocates have long warned that sexual exploitation cannot be understood outside race. As survivor-leader Vednita Carter, founder of Breaking Free, has stated:

Prostitution is a racial justice issue..you can’t just take race out of it.

The Epstein files bear this out.

Institutions frame misogynoir solely as hypersexualisation, with Black women and girls rendered excessively visible and exposed to violence. The Epstein material reveals a quieter but equally damaging mechanism. Black girls were not hypervisible. Institutions filtered them out. Their exclusion did not signal safety. It signalled erasure.

Exclusion from the pipeline meant exclusion from testimony, from media coverage, and from public memory. It also reinforced a persistent myth: that elite sexual exploitation primarily harms white girls.

Who counts as the “real” victim?

This is how racialised sexual violence hides. Black girls are routinely denied access to the category of the “ideal victim”: young, innocent, credible and deserving of sympathy. Research on adultification bias shows that Black girls are routinely denied the presumption of innocence and vulnerability afforded to white girls.

That category was never built to include them. When Black girls are missing from abuse narratives, it is not because they were protected, but because institutions are structured to look past them.

This omission is not politically neutral. Silence here is not an oversight. It is an organising strategy. When Black girls are written out of sexual abuse narratives, institutions are spared the obligation to protect them, fund services for them or confront the racialised nature of exploitation.

How institutions fail Black survivors

The National Black Women’s Justice Institute has noted that Black women and girls face “intersecting challenges rooted in racism, sexism and systemic oppression”, which not only heighten vulnerability to trafficking but also create barriers to recognition, justice, and healing once harm occurs.

Elite abuse narratives often rely on a narrow feminist crime that centres white girlhood as the default site of innocence. This framing does not merely overlook Black girls. It depends on their absence. It allows institutions to perform concern while leaving intact the racial hierarchies that decide whose suffering is legible.

Eugenics as context, not spectacle

It is within this framework that Epstein’s documented interests in eugenics becomes relevant. As the Canary has previously reported, Epstein repeatedly expressed “Nazi-like” eugenic obsessions around intelligence, breeding, and hierarchy. These views are disturbing, but they are not the story on their own.

What matters is how this ideology aligns with the trafficking practices documented in the files.

Eugenics did not create Epstein’s abuse, but it helped rationalise the sorting, ranking, and exclusion that defined it. Belief systems rooted in hierarchy sustain racialised trafficking by framing inequality as natural and exclusion as reasonable.

In that sense, Epstein’s eugenic thinking functions as context rather than cause. It helps explain how institutions normalised racial selection, enforced it through practice, and largely refused to interrogate it.

Misogynoir as subtraction

Understanding misogynoir only through sexualisation misses how it operates in elite abuse systems. Here, misogynoir functions through subtraction. Black girls disappear twice: first from protection, then memory -trafficking organisations working with Black survivors have warned that this has material consequences. This leads to gaps in accountability, long-term support, and prevention. Absence from the record becomes absence from remedy.

When abuse narratives centre those only deemed recognisable victims, accountability remains partial. Power survives by narrowing the field of concern.

The Epstein files show how institutions produce that acknowledgement: through recruitment rules, racialised preferences, reprimand, reward, and silence.

Why this matters now

Public outrage around sexual exploitation often peaks around individual villains, then dissipates. Structural analysis demands more and offers less comfort. Without it, the same hierarchies persist.

Institutions continue to under-identify Black girls as victims of sexual violence, under-protect them, and write them out of high-profile cases. When commentators read that absence as evidence of safety rather than exclusion, misogynoir does its quiet work.

The Epstein files do not simply expose an individual abuser. They show how systems of power decide whose suffering they record in the first place. As long as racialised trafficking remains peripheral to how institutions understand sexual exploitation, they will continue to frame abuse as exceptional rather than structural.

This is not a failure of evidence. It is a failure of political will.

Featured image via the Canary

An air fryer gave me much better results

Are air fryers always a better choice?

3 min read20 min

“I am sorry,” the Prime Minister said at a press conference on Thursday morning.

Starmer is under severe political pressure over his decision to bring Mandelson into government despite being made aware of his links to the paedophile financier.

There was widespread anger and dismay over the scandal among Labour MPs on Wednesday night, with many calling on Starmer to remove his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who was instrumental in the decision to appoint Mandelson as the UK ambassador in Washington.

The Prime Minister has said that Mandelson, who was a key figure in the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and has remained influential in the Labour Party ever since, lied to his team about the extent of his relationship with Epstein.

Speaking in Hastings, Starmer said he wanted to address Epstein’s victims.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“Sorry for what was done to you. Sorry that so many people with power failed you. Sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed him. And sorry that even now, you’re forced to watch this story unfold in public once again.”

He added: “But I also want to say this: in this country, we will not look away.

“We will not shrug our shoulders, and we will not allow the powerful to treat justice as optional. We will pursue the truth. We will uphold the integrity of public life. And we will do everything within our power, and in the interests of justice, to ensure accountability is delivered.

“That is what the public expects. That is what the victims deserve. And it is what I will do.”

The Prime Minister said he was personally frustrated that he is not able to immediately publish all material related to Mandelson’s appointment after the Metropolitan Police asked the government to withold information that could undermine its own criminal investigation.

However, he stressed that he would not do anything that risked collapsing that police investigation because justice for the victims must take priority.

Mandelson, a former cabinet minister, resigned from the House of Lords earlier this week amid growing outrage over his links to Epstein. 

It came after millions of court documents relating to Epstein were published by the US Department of Justice, revealing that Mandelson had shared confidential and high-level UK government information with him, including that the euro bailout was coming.

He was sacked as UK ambassador to the US in September after more details about his relationship with Epstein emerged.

Caroline Elsom is Head of Government Reform at Onward.

The catastrophic cost of Britain’s benefits bill is no secret. But the already eyewatering sums are usually missing a crucial part of the welfare system – all of the extra payments, discounts and freebies that claimants can receive on top of their regular benefits.

Many of these schemes, known as passported benefits, will be familiar to readers, like free school meals, free prescriptions or council tax reduction for those on certain benefits. Few will be aware of just how many different extras are now on offer, covering everything from broadband contracts to court fee remission. At least 20 different schemes are topping up the incomes of those already receiving tens of thousands each year from the state in benefit payments that are intended to have already covered their essential living costs.

In my new report for Onward think tank, The Hidden Benefits Bill, I reveal the true cost of all these passported benefits: over £10 billion. The rollout of Universal Credit, which was meant to do away with the need for all these piecemeal legacy schemes, has dragged on so long that new schemes have now been added and existing ones enlarged.

It is no coincidence that the two major passported benefits that the Labour Government has decided to expand this year are free school meals and the Warm Home Discount. They are some of the only passported schemes that are measured in poverty statistics as additional effective income, while almost all others go uncounted. By bringing more people into these schemes, they can claim to have lowered poverty despite the changes poorly targeting those most in need.

From this year, the Warm Home Discount will automatically apply a flat £150 rebate to the energy bills of all households on Universal Credit, regardless of how energy efficient or low usage their home is. Likewise, expanding free school is set to cause chaos for school and local authority funding which uses free school meals as a marker of deprivation for the National Funding Formula, the Pupil Premium, eligibility for the Holiday Activities and Food Programme and extended rights to free home-to-school transport.

With the end of the rollout of Universal Credit finally in sight this Parliament, now is precisely the time that the Government should be looking to rationalise these schemes, not adding to them further. Instead, the Labour Government has ruled out any new welfare legislation for at least the next year following the disability benefit reform debacle. The bill to taxpayers and consumers will only grow further as a result.

Some would argue that £10 billion is a price worth paying for targeted support schemes – that it’s the cost of a civilised society that takes care of its most vulnerable. If only it were actually the case that these fragmented schemes were improving outcomes. Broadband social tariffs are often giving claimants worse deals than regular switching. Bursary cash for disadvantaged teens that makes them worse off in the long run, missing out on vital early experiences of the workplace. Special savings accounts that are driving claimants to hold out for top-ups while falling further into debt. Online forums that discuss using Healthy Start grocery cards to buy alcohol and vapes.

Worse still, the cumulative effect on some families of being able to claim thousands, sometimes more than £10,000 in additional support while on Universal Credit, is that they face a steep cliff edge if they try to come off benefits. The impact of already high marginal effective tax rates for many claimants due to the taper rate and income tax is compounded by the withdrawal of passported benefits, leaving claimants questioning whether they are really better off working more – or working at all.

In the clamour to look caring by carving out all these special schemes, it has become harder for claimants to manage their finances as a whole, with an entirely different set of household budgeting dynamics to those just beyond the benefits system. At the same time, many are left missing out on extra support they may be eligible for because they are simply unaware or unable to navigate the associated bureaucracy.

There is no easy way out of this mess without politically difficult trade-offs to radically rationalise the system. My report goes through each scheme in turn to propose an alternative way to deliver support, consolidating most into Universal Credit payments, alongside a single scheme for one-off unavoidable or unforeseeable costs and a lower taper rate for those working their way to financial independence from the state.

These changes are not about ripping up the Conservative record on welfare reform. Quite the opposite, in fact. They deliver on the reforms as originally intended – making Universal Credit the simpler, smoother system it was always meant to be. It’s time for a hard reset of working-age welfare, to peel back the layers of extra benefits and to return to the principle that work should always pay.

Academic Shaiel Ben-Ephraim describes himself as a “Jew from occupied Palestine”. He has posted what he describes as “probably the most important Hebrew tweet I’ve ever seen”. Ben-Ephraim introduces and translates the Hebrew words of Israeli general Moshe ‘Bogie’ Ya’alon, one of Israel’s most senior military and establishment figures.

Ben-Ephraim’s words – and the explosive words of Ya’alon – need little elaboration, except to flag to readers that Ya’alon describes Israel as ethno-supremacist “Judeo-Nazis” for their crimes against Palestinian people. And he mocks the common Zionist tactic of complaining that we must never compare Israel to the Nazis. Read in full below – emphases added:

This is probably the most important Hebrew Tweet I’ve ever seen. Moshe Ya’alon is a former chief of staff and defense minister. The absolute cream of the Israeli defense establishment. In this text he admits that the Israeli government and settlers have become Judeo-Nazis and their policy is based on Jewish supremacy. Here is a full translation:

“On the last Tuesday evening, I attended an event marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. When I got home, I received a message about Jewish pogromists attacking Palestinians in the south of Hebron, stealing their livestock, and burning their property. “We can’t compare!…”

After ambulances, which tried to reach the scene, were delayed by the Jewish terrorists, three Palestinians were evacuated to the hospital, one of them with skull fractures. “No event can ever compare to the Holocaust, which we endured!” …

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I turned, of course, immediately to the security authorities in the area, and I was assured that the incident was being handled by the IDF. To this day not a single Jewish terrorist has been stopped (as in many other cases), because … the Israel Police is controlled by a convicted criminal, a fascist racist Nazi, the Shin Bet is controlled by a representative of “Jewish supremacy” from the schools of the rabbis Tao, Lior, Ginzburg, and Zini (Dodo), the defense minister prevents administrative detentions of Jewish terrorists, and the other minister in the Ministry of Defense encourages illegal outposts and equips them with off-road vehicles, to torment the lives of Palestinians, to evict them from their land, and to settle the land with Jews (you’ll ask again why I blamed the government for “ethnic cleansing”!?). The ideology of “Jewish supremacy,” which has become dominant in the Israeli government, resembles Nazi racial theory, “but we must not compare!” …

When I commanded the Jerusalem and Samaria Division, the Central Command, and the IDF, I was acquainted with the warnings of Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, regarding the process of dehumanization to the point of turning us into “Judeo-Nazis” (as he put it), under our control of another people. I did my best, even as defense minister, “so that we may know how to defeat terrorism and remain human.”

I never deceived myself into thinking that only through concessions would we achieve “peace now,” and I also understood the danger of “Jewish supremacy” over our future and our existence. Therefore I advocated separation according to the proto-programmatic speech of Yitzhak Rabin of October 5, 1995, and therefore I named my book is “A Long Short Way.” As of now, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was right and I was wrong.

The task of the next Israeli government is to prove that Professor Leibowitz was wrong, and not to bring ruin upon our state. The government of “Jewish Supremacy” — the government of lies and betrayal — the government of messianism, the traitors and the corrupt — must be replaced before ruin.”

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Israelis of conscience see that it is adopting the policies of Judeo-Nazism and Jewish supremacy. They have known it for a long time. But most do not have the courage to say so. This is an earthquake.

Unsurprisingly, the silence of ‘mainstream’ media and pro-Israel groups on Ya’alon’s words is deafening.

Featured image via the Canary