Labour In Turmoil As Mandelson Saga Threatens To Take Down PM

Keir Starmer may be seeing red over the latest Peter Mandelson drama but so are Labour MPs.

Three weeks before the May elections – when voters will choose their candidates for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments along with some English councils and mayoralties – the prime minister has been hit with a fresh revelation about the ex-ambassador.

It appears security vetting officials advised against hiring Mandelson last year but the Foreign Office decided to give him the job as the UK’s attaché to Washington anyway.

The prime minister promptly sacked the Foreign Office’s top civil servant Olly Robbins hours after the Guardian broke the story on Thursday night.

Downing Street said neither Starmer nor other government ministers were not aware until this week that Mandelson, former friend to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had not passed vetting.

Starmer told the press he was “furious” that he had not been told ahead of giving Mandelson the plum post.

Meanwhile, his political opponents have accused Starmer of misleading parliament after he previously told MPs “full due process” was followed with Mandelson.

The Liberal Democrats have also reported the prime minister to ethics adviser Laurie Magnus for failing to notify parliament as soon as he knew about the vetting on Tuesday evening.

This is not the first time Starmer has been hit with calls to resign over Mandelson.

He vowed to fight on in February when questions arose over how much the PM knew about Mandelson’s Epstein links before he gave him the top job.

Starmer also dodged questions about whether he had even spoken directly to Mandelson before making him chief diplomat to the US during prime minister’s questions in March.

The eruption of the Iran war, and the public’s support for Starmer’s refusal to be drawn drawn into it, shifted attention away from the crisis around his judgement.

But will he be lucky enough to escape with his job yet again after this latest crisis?

One Labour source told HuffPost UK: “Yeah, he’s fucked.”

Most party insiders speculated that Starmer’s time in office is almost certainly up – it’s not expected to happen this side of the May elections.

Multiple sources claimed even the PM’s internal opponents would want him to stay in post so he could take the fall for what is already expected to be a bloodbath for Labour.

Just before the new Mandelson crisis erupted, James Johnson of JL Partners said early polls suggest it could be “the worst even local election for Labour in England”.

The party is expected to plummet to third place in Wales too, losing control of the entire Senedd for the first time in history.

Savanta’s political research director Chris Hopkins said Starmer expressing his own anger over Mandelson “just isn’t going to wash with voters”.

He told HuffPost UK: “Trust in politicians is at an all-time low and Labour, elected in part off a ‘holier than thou’ election campaign, have been anything but in office.

“They have done nothing to differentiate themselves from the chaos, sleaze and lies of the Conservative Party, so who can blame voters for seeking something completely different now?

“UK politics is no longer a case of ‘better the devil you know’, and voters are more than willing to roll the dice with insurgent parties and relatively unknown quantities when it comes to candidates.”

But not everyone is quite so pessimistic about what this means for Starmer’s future, insisting the blame still sits with officials rather than the prime minister.

A cabinet minister told HuffPost UK: “I don’t think he has lied. It is extraordinary that he wasn’t told vetting [was] not passed, but that’s different from lying or deliberately misleading.”

One Labour insider blamed the process, adding: “It’s the whole system that is totally dysfunctional and all the time we keep blaming it on individuals we’ll keep going round this loop.”

A source from within the party’s headquarters suggested internal Labour groups do not feel the same “levels of hatred” felt during Jeremy Corbyn’s time in office towards Starmer.

“There is a lot of loyalty to him,” they said. “But just anger at the situation. We all know whoever comes next will be fucked up.”

A different minister said: “It’ll all come down to what he was told and when. Given Olly Robbins has gone, there must’ve been something but we don’t know.”

But they added: “If the PM did know, then it’s terminal.”

Meanwhile a Labour backbencher suggested the current saga “feels like another match to avoid relegation.”

Meanwhile, Maryam Eslamdoust, the general secretary of the Labour affiliated TSSA union, publicly said it was time for a leadership contest.

She said: “Labour is in danger of being irreversibly tainted by this latest installment in the Mandelson scandal and Keir Starmer’s handling of it.”

Her brutal assessment concluded: “At the very least, Keir has lost control by presiding over such reckless conduct.”

His critics seem to think it has become a question of when, not if, Starmer is forced out of office.

Will the prime minister be able to defy the odds and hang onto power?

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