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The arrogance takes your breath away, even to the end. Sacked in disgrace for bringing shame upon those who trusted him, Peter Mandelson’s response, we now know, was to unsuccessfully demand half a million pounds of public money to go quietly, all while haughtily insisting upon his dignity as a servant of the crown. In other words, this week’s disclosures suggest Mandelson behaves in a tight corner pretty much exactly as bitter experience suggests he might. What they still don’t explain satisfactorily is why Downing Street, seemingly alone, failed to anticipate that.
To understand what went wrong, imagine the three-step process by which he became ambassador to Washington as a sandwich: two bland slices of officialdom, representing the Cabinet Office’s initial efforts at due diligence and a deeper vetting process at the end, glued together with political filling. Take away the middle, which is the political operation around the prime minister himself, and what’s left is dry bread falling apart in your hands.
The words “general reputational risk”, peppered throughout the Cabinet Office’s brief summary of Mandelson’s inglorious career to date, are mandarin-speak for “don’t say we didn’t warn you”. Though the publicly available facts – chiefly but not only about his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – were bad enough, civil servants were signalling that they couldn’t rule out worse to come. That their verdict isn’t more emphatic may surprise some, but it reflects unelected officials working as they are designed to in a democracy: not blocking a potentially bad decision so much as listing all the ways it might go wrong, before leaving the final call to elected politicians.
What emerges isn’t a portrait of a wildly dysfunctional, chaotic No 10, nor one afraid of telling its prime minister home truths. Instead it suggests an oddly rigid operation that had no time for objections, even ones that would have saved its bacon.
Why didn’t alarm bells ring when the veteran national security adviser Jonathan Powell – who knew Mandelson better and for longer than anyone else in Downing Street – expressed concerns about the appointment to Starmer’s then chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney? Everything felt “weirdly rushed”, Powell told the postmortem following Mandelson’s sacking, with Donald Trump’s January inauguration setting a hard deadline. But still, there should have been time for the kind of wider political discussion that might have allowed Starmer to hear from dissenting voices. Instead, the task of challenging Mandelson over his politically toxic relationship with Epstein was seemingly left to the two people arguably least likely to give him a rough ride: McSweeney, who saw him as a mentor and relied heavily on his political advice, and then director of communications Matthew Doyle, a personal friend.
The critical document detailing exactly what Mandelson was asked and exactly how he answered remains under wraps, reportedly to avoid prejudicing a police investigation into his conduct in public office, as does Mandelson’s confidential vetting file. So we can’t say for certain whether, as Starmer insists and Mandelson denies, he lied when cornered.
But what we do know is that Downing Street evidently now regrets beginning vetting only after Keir Starmer had publicly announced Mandelson’s appointment meaning any official who wanted to block him on security grounds would have had to be prepared to publicly embarrass the prime minister at home and in the court of Trump – and that the whole thing was considered such a done deal in Whitehall that Mandelson began receiving confidential briefings before his security clearance came through. Minds, in short, were already made up. But whose mind, exactly?
Not for the first time, the prime minister emerges from this admittedly partial picture less as the main character in his own drama than as an oddly disembodied presence, bursting onstage only after it’s all gone wrong to stress (according to the official minutes) “his strong concern for Epstein’s victims”, and for the importance of government work to reduce violence against women and girls, or to rail in public against Mandelson for allegedly lying to him.
Did he sail through all those red lights because he was happy to delegate this one to McSweeney and Doyle? Did he ignore the warnings precisely because he already knew this was risky, but had decided that having his own personal Machiavelli inside the rogue court of Trump was worth it? Either way, as he said himself in Belfast on Thursday, in the end it was his mistake.
However angry Labour MPs may be at all this, most have already made up their minds one way or another about Starmer. The outbreak of the Iran war and the prospect of it unleashing a global recession has meanwhile turned Mandelson into almost the least of Labour’s problems, compared with the prospect of inflation galloping back and pushing yet more financially hard-pressed voters into the arms of either the Greens and Reform UK.
But the picture painted here, for those who care to see it, is of a system working broadly as intended to deliver what the prime minister seems to want, only for him to realise too late that actually he should have asked for something different. And that won’t fade in a hurry.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columinst
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