Another peer, another paedophile | Conservative Home

‘Nandy criticises Starmer’s appointment of peer linked to paedophile’ is not, at first glance, a surprising headline in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. The Mandelson story isn’t going to go away anytime soon, after all.

And then you realise Mandie has nothing to do with it. There is another peer, and another paedophile.

I don’t know if British politics has ever had reason to exhibit this particular rule before, so maybe I’m wrong, but I posit that the number of second-degree political connexions to different paedophiles a prime minister can survive is fewer than two. It was almost certainly fewer than one, but definitely fewer than two.

Sir Keir Starmer is, politically speaking, a dead man. He may perhaps keep twitching long enough to fulfill his highest ambitions for office and give away the Chagos Islands, but that’s about it. And notwithstanding my warning from Monday, it is hard to see his downfall as unjust.

This government’s back was long broken; having stated that its top priority is ‘growth’, it has once again underperformed the OBR’s underwhelming forecasts; the best Rachel Reeves’ can manage, instead of scrapping the Employment Rights Bill or the Renters’ Rights Act or any other economically self-harming bit of her own agenda, is to bleat about closer relations with Europe. Naturally, she has taken this as an excuse to limit her ‘deregulatory drive’, whatever that was supposed to have been, even as Germany’s Olaf Scholz calls for a “regulatory clean slate”.

Again, it’s not necessarily that today’s politicians are an order of magnitude worse than their predecessors. It is simply that the forward momentum imparted to the British economy in earlier, better days, and which allowed several cohorts of the inadequate generation to convince themselves they had done a passable job of running it, has run out. When Starmer complains about pulling the levers and nothing happening, the lever in question are “taking the path of least resistance”, and the promised result “everything working out for now”.

If anything, the problem with the whole ‘Two Degrees of Humbert Humbert’ situation the Government now finds itself in is that it is so compelling an explanation for the downfall of a prime minister that Labour will convince itself that the rest of it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the anaemic growth, the soaring taxes, the many and manifest failures in office. It was Mandelson, and Doyle, and the unfortunate decision of a man with apparently no political instincts at all to elevate them to high office.

That comforting fairy story is not true, however weird it is to have to use the phrase “It wasn’t just the paedophiles” to put anyone’s problems in context. A new Labour leader would find that out soon enough, when the gulf between public expectations, the revenue expenditure accounts, and the tax base swallowed them hole. The best they could hope for is that Labour MPs decided to stick with them this time; even then, left-wing voters looking for someone to tell them what they want to hear will have the Greens.

The rest of us, meanwhile, will still have to live in the country they have proven utterly incapable of running. Do you think it haunts any of them, privately? How totally unfit they have proven for the burden of office? I don’t suppose it does – certainly, relatively few Conservatives (relative, that is, to the number who ought to) seem to harbour such doubts. The politics of “Play that same song!” remains popular on our side to have made Prosper UK happen, to whatever extent it is happening. And if the same narrow range of old ideas doesn’t deliver the goods anymore, well, you can always conclude that democracy is impossible.

Perhaps Labour will reach the same conclusion, once they try exactly the same thing without the nonces and find themselves losing anyway.