The Mandy Files expose the terrifying emptiness of Starmer’s government

Coming in at over 1,500 pages, there’s no doubting the volume of the Mandelson Files, dumped on the public to no great excitement on Monday. Their significance is rather less clear.

They certainly haven’t lived up to their billing. In February, when Tory leader Kemi Badenoch originally used a ‘humble address’ to compel the government to release all documentation relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, the objective was clear enough – to establish what ministers and officials knew about Mandelson’s links to the Big Nonce Jeffrey Epstein, as well as any other security concerns and potential conflicts of interest that were raised during his appointment. The files published on Monday singularly fail to do any of that.

We have pages and pages of private emails and WhatsApp messages. A lot of sound and even a little fury. But the objective of the original humble address – to establish what Labour higher-ups knew about the risks of appointing Mandelson, from ‘his links to Jeffrey Epstein’ to his connections in Russia and China – remains thwarted.

This is not a surprise. The Metropolitan Police had already requested that both a nine-page summary document compiled by UK Security Vetting (UKSV), as well as messages between Keir Starmer’s then chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and Mandelson over his links to Epstein, be held back. The intelligence and security committee had also insisted on redacting any information ‘prejudicial to UK national security or international relations’. Plus, the messages of some ministers and officials have simply disappeared thanks to changing devices, deletion and the convenient misfortune of having their phones nicked.

The result is a mass of partial, liberally Tippexed correspondence, circling a void where the actual substance of the humble address ought to be. ‘It is going to take a while for the most interesting material to appear’, reported the Guardian’s live feed, which was perhaps a tad optimistic.

Yet while the files cast a redacted darkness over the appointment of Mandelson, they do shed a relentlessly gossipy light on this most ineffectual and purposeless of governments. That’s largely thanks to Mandelson himself. While no Dorothy Parker, old snidey Pete is ever ready with a withering aside on Starmer and his nominal top team.

Writing in May last year to Pat McFadden, his old New Labour mucker and current secretary of state for work and pensions, Mandelson took aim at Starmer’s then year-old administration. He charged him with not ‘leading from the front’, and complained that Starmer ‘lacks verve as does the cabinet as a whole’. Citing McSweeney himself, Mandelson goes on to say that Starmer, who at that point was constantly u-turning on policies and apologising for speeches, engages in the same cycle, ‘advance / buckle / advance / buckle’. A few weeks later he told McFadden that No10 was ‘beleaguered and bereft’.

He’s equally scathing about other members of the cabinet. Of chancellor Rachel Reeves, he tells McFadden that she’s ‘on a growth mission but without an argument about where the growth will come from or how’. They both slam Ed Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry in pretty unequivocal terms and even complain about former health secretary and Mandelson confidante Wes Streeting. After McFadden complains about Streeting circulating videos of and notes on Israel’s war in Gaza in an attempt to turn the cabinet against the Jewish State, Mandelson quips: ‘It is pathetic. I think Wes is experiencing an early midlife crisis.’

The most cutting and revealing comment arguably comes from McFadden himself. Writing at the time as Cabinet Office minister, he bemoans the reflexive, unthinking recourse to welfarism of his Labour colleagues: ‘Every meeting I have is “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others”. They’re asking the wrong questions.’

None of this is revelatory, of course. It is just more confirmation that this government really is as woeful and clueless as we all suspected. There’s no guiding principle, no economic vision, no leadership. And in the absence of any real answers to the profound challenges we face, Labourites are content offering little more than a future of growing welfare dependency, green platitudes and self-aggrandising poses on Israel.

A No10 spokesperson described the publication of the Mandy Files yesterday as ‘an unprecedented piece of government transparency’. That’s far from the truth, of course. This was a performance of transparency, a carefully choreographed act of selective disclosure designed to conceal rather than reveal the machinations behind Mandelson’s appointment. But the gossipy morass left behind has nevertheless opened something of a window on this government. And the view is very dismal indeed.

In every way, the Mandy Files are an indictment of Starmer’s wretched government.

Tim Black is associated editor of spiked.