Politics doesn’t need saints, or sinners, it needs more ‘honest’ and ‘normal’

It’s not often you write something about a politician and a party where you are confidant, yourself, it’s correct, and then the Prime Minister gives you, publicly and gratis, every proof it was.

Starmer’s dogged refusal to answer a single question on fuel duty at PMQs but to keep trying to paint Badenoch and Farage as – and he actually used the word – ‘war mongers’ was the clearest sign of the very co-ordinated narrative he and his party want to spin to discredit his opponents and buy himself back some badly needed credibility

The House of Commons has long had a proscription about using the term ‘liar’ towards another member of the house, so it takes some anger for a Tory front bencher to shout the term at the PM. The Speaker rebuked them for it, as they always have, but there was a real anger on Tory benches at the corkscrew logic Starmer applied – whilst dodging the question –  to make him look sensible and statesman-like whilst covering up his flatfooted response, diplomatic fence sitting, and the fact his decision making has been largely guided by domestic political considerations including his own survival.

His one time image of being an unlikely but seemingly effective ‘bridge to Trump’ is in tatters. And 24 hours after his weekly – weakly – PMQs exchange it was his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as his official ‘bridge to Trump’ that he was having to answer for.

His answer given to reporters was that the decision was his ‘mistake’, and again apologised to the victims of the world’s most infamous paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.

It is in keeping with previous problems the PM has faced, that: on Iran Number 10 briefed against the Chief of the Defence staff that a ‘lack of planning’ was more his fault and on Mandelson the minister sent out to ‘defend the indefensible’ on the media yesterday said the topic of Mandelson should really be dropped as raking over it was re-traumatising Eptein’s victims.

Hiding behind, has become a habit. A Chief of Staff, a deputy National Security Advisor, the Head of the Defence staff, it’s a bad pattern but hiding behind trafficked victims of a paedophile is a real low.

The Times reports that Mandelson brokered a meeting in Downing street for Tony Blair and Jeffrey Epstein where they ‘discussed religion and world conflicts’ in 2002, that’s of course 23 years before Mandelson was appointed UK Ambassador to Washington. The general media response to the first file release of what the PM knew before he appointed Mandelson was that they were very awkward for Starmer but no ‘smoking gun’. It is however very clear that he knew enough, for the man who made such play of his moral compass before he was PM to reconsider the appointment as the PM.

The release also shows his claim, to the House of Commons, that a full process had been gone through was at best disingenuous, and that that process was not the standard operation most have to go through. I have seldom seen or faced LBC’s veteran inquisitor Nick Ferrari in such obviously genuine frustration and anger. It’s worth a watch.

Starmer is in Downing Street, partly because he repeatedly suggested, he’d be different. Country before party, service before self-service, a new standard in public life across his government. He and a number of his ministers and aides have spent the last 20 months repeatedly trashing that claim. If on this slate alone, he was ‘the change’, he was a change for the worse.

No, Conservatives can’t remotely pretend to have been squeaky clean in the past, and Reform have been dogged by accusations since they entered Parliament. The Lib Dems have been quietly trying to handle a longstanding issue with a senior member of their party, and Zack Polanski has his – for want of a better phrase – his weird ‘boob thing’.

It takes me back to a line widely picked up in the 2024 conference leadership speech made by my old boss Sir James Cleverly urging the Tories to ‘be more normal’.

If the whole party, indeed all our political parties could take that to heart we might, just might, find that the public didn’t retain quite such an intense distrust of politics as a whole and politicians as a species. Remember when “MPs expenses” was supposed to be the watershed moment?

The losses the Conservative’s sustained in 2024 were numerically appalling for them, but some of those who lost their seats were loses equivalent to a ‘cleansing‘. A few MPs who were dismissed by the electorate were embroiled, in the brutal words used to me by one party Chairman, “in some pretty dark shit”.

In October last year Kemi Badenoch gave a very sensible response when I asked her about standards for candidates and MPs, and the risks of doing opposition the halo-polishing way Starmer had.

It was partly to highlight, as is her job, that it had massively backfired on him and Labour within a year, but she went on to say:

“You know we want everybody to be working to the highest possible standards… I’m sure once in a while, there’ll be some people who fall short. But what I’m not doing is pretending the Conservative MPs are perfect. We’re not. What we are, are people who recognise that people are flawed, make allowances for that, and we don’t want to be a country where the people who are in there [government] are neither competent nor honest. We’ve got to make sure that we bring honesty and competency through and that’s one of the things that I’m focused on. “

Every politician, like every individual has flaws. A year ago a number of Conservatives, some no longer Conservatives were more than happy to tell me hers, whilst glossing over their own. No body needs saints or sinners in their ranks, but competent, honest people who are ‘normal’ would be a massive plus.

Ignoring a man’s relationship with a convicted paedophile to give him one of the highest and most important diplomatic position this country can confer, is, I’d suggest, worse than a man who broke his own rules to eat a cake, and was hounded by the party now defending their PM – but in the real world neither is a good look.

Starmer is still on borrowed time, for all his self-congratulation about his own leadership skills and his loud denigration of others’. His premiership is so riddled with holes by now you could market him as a Swiss cheese. He ‘was the future once’

It’s the politicians coming forward, the candidates and MPs with a future I’m thinking about.

If we can all find a way to choose candidates and foster MPs who are just a bit more normal to a majority of the electorate, we wouldn’t be doing ourselves a favour.

We’d be doing everyone a favour.