The exhaustion of Keir Starmer’s Labour government has certainly been far quicker than that of the New Labour administrations of the 1990s and 2000s. But the parallels are unmistakable.

Both New Labour and its Starmer-fronted retread pitched themselves to voters as virtue incarnate, making almost identical pledges to restore trust in politics after years of Tory ‘sleaze’ – a catch-all pejorative for a whole range of misbehaviour, from financial impropriety to marital infidelity. And yet almost no sooner had they both entered Downing Street, than they found themselves up to their necks in their own lakes of sleaze.

For the fast-forwarded descent of Starmer’s Labour to so closely mirror the years-long fall of Blair’s New Labour is no quirk of history. Nor is it solely attributable to the central role played in both administrations by New Labour figures, especially the now disgraced Labour bigwig and certified sleaze magnet, Peter Mandelson. It’s more significant than that. It is a testament to modern Labour’s fundamental problem with sleaze.

The Labour Party we know today emerged during the 1990s as a very different beast to its earlier 20th-century versions. Under Tony Blair’s leadership, it had set about ‘modernising’ itself – a process of jettisoning the last remaining vestiges of Labour’s ‘old left’ past in order to bring it bang up to date with the post-Cold War world. This was to be a party free, as Tony Blair put it in 1997, of ‘out-dated ideology or doctrine’. A post-political party committed to managerialism rather than socialism. A party determined to administer businesses and society alike, to regulate and audit through quangos and other unaccountable, expert-stuffed bodies. It was a technocratic ‘Third Way’ project entirely of a piece with the ethos of globalism then emerging, in which decision-making was being shifted away from national electorates and towards those who knew best in transnational institutions, such as the EU and the World Trade Organisation.

But there was another key aspect of New Labour, which is of particular relevance right now. Namely, that at the same time as it was ‘modernising’ and embracing managerialism, it was also constructing itself as the ‘anti-sleaze’ party, the Party of the Virtuous.

Within months of John Major’s Conservative Party winning the 1992 General Election, his government’s popularity plummeted after the collapse of the pound following Britain’s withdrawal from the European exchange-rate mechanism – a process that was meant to pave the way for Britain’s adoption of what would become the Euro. The following year, Major attempted to resurrect his party’s fortunes by calling for a return to a ‘conservatism of a traditional kind’: ‘We must go back to basics and the Conservative Party will lead the country back to those basics right across the board: sound money, free trade, traditional teaching, respect for the family and the law.’

‘Back to basics’, as this vision came to be known, wasn’t meant to be a reference to personal or private morality. But that is how the press eagerly interpreted it. This provided the tabloids with an excuse to reveal all the sordid affairs and sexual shenanigans that had long been gathering dust in journalists’ files. At the time, it seemed barely a week passed without a red-top tale of bed-hopping Tories, from David Mellor to Tim Yeo, failing to live up to their own party’s supposedly puritanical values.

By 1994, the respectable broadsheet press was getting in on the act, focussing less on sex-capades and more on dodgy financial dealings. The most notorious of which was the cash-for-questions affair, in which the Guardian alleged (rightly as it eventually turned out) that Tory MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith had received money from Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed in return for asking questions on his behalf in the Commons.

The respectable media, staffed by many who long harboured a distaste for the Tories, feasted on their myriad personal failings, tarring it all with the broad brush of ‘sleaze’. As a 1994 piece for the high-brow London Review of Books had it, ‘The Tories are of course the party of sleazeocracy’.

It was perhaps not fully grasped at the time, but British political culture was undergoing a profound shift. It was effectively being re-oriented around personal conduct, rather than political ideas. It mattered less what a politician stood for, than how personally virtuous they could appear.

This was captured best by what happened in the Cheshire constituency of Tatton at the 1997 General Election. The incumbent MP Neil Hamilton, the Tory junior minister at the centre of the cash-for-questions affair, refused to stand down. And so both Labour and the Lib Dems agreed to withdraw their own candidates to allow an independent candidate to face off against Hamilton. This independent candidate in question was BBC war correspondent Martin Bell, who had pledged at a press conference to remove the ‘poison in the democratic system’.

Bell wasn’t a traditional politician at all – he had no party and no policies. He was a pompous, moralistic gesture stuffed into a tellingly white suit – the crass symbolism of which he had made famous while reporting on the war in Bosnia, before bringing it to the streets of Tatton. He effectively set up the General Election for Tatton voters not as political choice, but as a moral one. A chance to side with good over evil, the pure over the tainted, the white-suited man from the BBC over the wicked Tory.

While Bell may have become the poster boy of the anti-sleaze crusade, it was Labour that became its party-political wing. As a complement to its post-political managerialism, its leading figures adopted an intensely personal, moralistic style – think of it as ‘high sanctimonious’. Shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook would be condemning the Tories as a ‘government that knows no shame’ one week, before Blair himself would be talking of being ‘tough on sleaze and tough on the causes of sleaze’ the next. As The Economist said of the 1997 General Election, ‘the word [“sleaze”] was on the lips of every Labour candidate’.

New Labourites, immersed in managerialism, no longer bothered promoting a vision of the good life; they pushed themselves forward as good people instead. They were the virtuous ones, the Elliot Nesses of the British political scene – ‘purer than pure’, as Blair once put it. And, in turn, the Tories were cast as perpetual wrongdoers, the vice-ridden ones.

Through the idea of ‘sleaze’ pushed and promoted by the media, Labour was refashioning itself for the post-political, post-class age – and reframing party politics in the process. It was no longer a contest over the economy, a battle between two still relatively distinct visions of the future, grounded on relatively clear social constituencies. It was now a contest between good people and bad people, a battle between clean and the dirty, a fight to restore public standards, integrity etc, etc.

This wasn’t just a moral performance. Labour were also determined to institutionalise this anti-sleaze crusade. ‘We will change the law to make the Tories clean up their act’, Blair pledged in 1996. And that’s what New Labour did when it finally won power in 1997, promising, as the new prime minister did on that sunny day in May nearly three decades ago, ‘to restore trust in politics in this country… [to] clean it up [and give] people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public’.

To this end, Labour set about installing the ethos of anti-sleaze within the state. Building on the new ‘code of conduct’, introduced in 1996 by the equally new Committee on Standards in Public Life, Labour also strengthened the ministerial code in 1997, even creating the role of ‘independent adviser on ministerial standards’ to advise on said code in 2006. It also enacted various anti-sleaze measures under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

This was New Labour. A combination of managerialism and personal moralism. A party that positioned itself beyond politics, as an almost ethical force full of Good People. A government that was determined to create new rules and procedures, overseen by unelected experts, to hold the bad, ‘sleazy’ Tories to account.

And almost from the moment Blair stepped across the threshold of No10 on 2 May 1997, it all backfired. Labour found itself hoist by its own moralistic petard. By the autumn of 1997, Labour was already facing several allegations of sleazy conduct. Mohammed Sarwar, MP for Glasgow Central (and father of current Scottish Labour leader Anas) had been suspended from parliament over bribery allegations. Liverpool West Derby MP Bob Wareing was found guilty of failing to register financial interests. And Robin Cook, a particularly self-righteous New-ish Labourite, was caught having an affair with his personal assistant. More troubling still, it also emerged that Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone had given Labour a £1million donation and, seemingly in return, Labour exempted Formula One from its ban on tobacco advertising.

As the years passed, New Labour continued to wrack up the sleaze allegations. Alongside countless marital infidelities and the usual sexual shenanigans, there were significant donations from porn baron Richard Desmond and eccentric businessman Richard Abrahams, all seemingly made in an attempt to influence government policy in some unspecified way.

Then there were ‘Tony’s cronies’, the press’s epithet for those supporters and donors Labour attempted to reward for their loyalty and cash with peerages. Indeed, it was Labour’s ultimately thwarted attempt to grant access to the upper house for those willing to cough up that led to the cash-for-honours scandal, complete with a police investigation and a two-time interview under caution for Blair. This, lest one forget, serenaded Blair’s exit from government in 2007. As the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley put it at the time: ‘[Blair] will be seen with John Major as a prime minister whose time in office was punctuated, despoiled and diminished by scandal.’

On top of all this, there was Peter Mandelson, sacked twice during the New Labour years. First in 1998, for failing to declare a £373,000 loan from his wealthy friend and then paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson. Then in 2001, after he’d been exposed helping out millionaire Labour donor Srichand Hinduja with a passport application.

The shady financial transactions, the cash for influence and the attempts on the part of the wealthy to curry favour seemed far in excess of anything that happened during the Tory years of so-called sleaze. As John Major pointed out in 2007, the Tory scandals of the mid-1990s were characterised by individual misbehaviour, be it sexual or financial. Labour’s scandals of the 2000s were of an altogether different order, he said. ‘The sleaze has seemed to be systemic since 1997.’

Major wasn’t wrong. The party of the Good People, the political wing of the anti-sleaze crusade, appeared to be just as sleazy, if not more so, than its opponents.

Partly this was because New Labour, supported by the respectable media, had politicised ‘individual misbehaviour’, as Major had it, in ways it never had been before. New Labour had spent the 1990s personalising and moralising politics, foregrounding the putative good character of its own, while demonising the character of its opponents. They were presented not just as people with whom Labourites disagreed, but as bad, immoral people. Then, once in power, it had started creating an anti-sleaze regime within the state itself – a system of rules and procedures, adjudicated on by unelected, unaccountable advisers and bodies. This undermined elected politicians, empowering and authorising non-democratic, quasi-judicial actors at their expense. It effectively institutionalised distrust of elected politicians, by suggesting that they were not capable of acting responsibly without the threat of external sanction. In this way, it created a rod for Labour’s own back.

Perhaps Blair et al might have gotten away with it if their back wasn’t so seemingly crooked. But that was never going to be the case. Firstly, because as James Heartfield insightfully argued at the time, politics and the market are always inextricably intertwined. To do just about anything – from building and maintaining infrastructure to procuring supplies for schools and hospitals – the government needs to work with the market, contracting and outsourcing to private-sector actors. What’s more, this was the New Labour era of private-finance initiatives (PFIs), countless business forums and an ever-expanding quangocracy. The increasingly complex relationship between politics and business meant that there was, and still is, always space for a ‘favour’ or two, or a deal between ‘friends’.

More importantly perhaps, the Labour Party itself needed cash. New Labour was not just a post-political, post-class party in theory, it was also increasingly one in practice. By the late 1990s, Labour, like the Tories, had ceased to be a mass-membership movement. Having numbered some one million members (even excluding affiliated trade-union members) in the mid-20th century, Labour’s membership had shrunk to just 300,000 by 2001. Facing a funding shortfall (modern parties need a lot of capital for campaigning and staff), New Labour was always going to be increasingly reliant on large donations. As the governing party, it was also attractive to those seeking to exert a bit of influence. It’s worth bearing in mind that part of the reason for Peter Mandelson’s unflushability rested with his talent for ‘networking’ – in other words, bringing in the cash.

New Labour may have been a party forged in the crusade against Tory ‘sleaze’. But by the end of its time in government, crowned with the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal, the stench of its own sleaze became unbearable.

What’s remarkable about Starmer’s Labour is the extent to which that same party, re-purposed during the 1990s for a post-political age, has lived on. It remains managerialist in ideology and globalist in outlook. And if anything, it is more intensely, performatively moralistic than its New Labour predecessor.

During its time in opposition, Starmer’s party was suffused with that same, high-sanctimonious style that typified the early New Labour years. Starmer himself often spoke as if it was still 1995, declaring in 2021 that ‘sleaze is at the heart of this Conservative government’ – this after the entirely forgettable ‘scandal’ involving former prime minister David Cameron’s unsuccessful attempt to get the government to help out finance firm Greensill Capital, before it duly collapsed. Time and again, Starmer struck the same pious, ‘purer than pure’ tone. Ahead of the General Election two years ago, Starmer positioned Labour just as Blair did, as anti-sleaze crusaders. ‘We need to clean up politics’, he declared, adding, ‘I will restore standards in public life’.

He even appointed as his chief of staff Sue Gray, the former head of the Propriety and Ethics team in the Cabinet Office, and the civil servant responsible for investigating prime minister Boris Johnson and the Partygate scandal. Starmer viewed her less as a politico than an incorruptible, sitting above the tawdry affairs of parliament. She was the ideal symbol of Starmer’s government of the self-righteous. As it turned out, she was less ideal for the actual art of governing, and had to quit within months of arriving in No10.

Labour’s supporting cast members have been even more inclined to see themselves as the Good People, morally superior to their opponents. Rachel Reeves, now the chancellor, would talk of ‘rebuilding fragile trust in politics as a force for good’. Angela Rayner, Starmer’s former deputy and arguably the leading contender to replace him, didn’t just regard the Tories as ‘scum’. She also spent much of her time in opposition poring over the tax affairs of her ‘sleazy’ Tory opponents, looking for further signs of their bad, scummy character.

Labour’s 2024 election manifesto declared that ‘Labour will end the chaos of sleaze’. It even promised to build on the existing New Labour-era anti-sleaze regime through the creation of an independent Ethics and Integrity Commission to further hold parliamentarians to account. And on 5 July that year, Starmer entered Downing Street, much as Blair did nearly three decades before, pledging to restore trust in politics.

At points Starmer et al’s rhetoric sounds like a Blair-era rip off. The talk of Labourites’ ‘integrity’, their ‘decency’, their commitment to ‘public service’, could have come from 1997. But it is not 1997 anymore. This version of Labour was forged at the dawn of an era that is now fast drawing to a close. Its managerialism, its technocratic impulses, its globalist tendencies, are no longer fit for the new world now emerging. And the contradictions between its moralism and its money-grubbing reality, between its high-horse-riding and the party’s need for cash, are far more intense now than they were then. So it’s no wonder we’ve seen Starmer’s Labour government consumed by its preening hypocrisy far faster than perhaps anyone expected.

The ‘freebies’ scandal, in which Labour frontbenchers were revealed to have accepted some £200,000 in free gifts, broke almost as soon as the Starmers had moved into Downing Street. It’s been downhill ever since. Labour MPs arrested. A chancellor accused of fibbing on her CV. Cronyism seemingly rife among civil-service appointments. Angela Rayner forced to resign over a seeming tax dodge on a second property. Huge multi-million donations coming into Labour coffers from dubious sources. And of course, the obligatory Peter Mandelson scandal, in which it is alleged the now ex-British ambassador to the US was passing on market-sensitive information to financier and world-famous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein some 17 years ago.

Modern Labour’s ‘sleaze’ problem is not a bug, but a feature. Which is a big problem for a party that, for the past three decades, has grounded its authority, indeed its electoral appeal, on being morally superior to its right-wing opponents. That’s why with every scandal, every misplaced hire, Labour’s authority depletes further.

Washed into power on a wave Tory sleaze nearly three decades ago, Labour is now itself being washed out again on a sleazy wave of its own making.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.