So, there goes Morgan McSweeney, leaving Keir Starmer even more exposed, and the British side of the vast Jeffrey Epstein scandal still unfolding. The resignation note penned by the prime minister’s former chief of staff is as clear as it had to be, and acknowledges that McSweeney advised Starmer to make the most fateful choice of his time as Labour leader. “The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong,” it says. “He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself.” The vetting process for such decisions, it goes on, “must now be fundamentally overhauled”. But the key question festers on, and it has always been political rather than procedural: between late 2024 and early 2025, despite knowing that Mandelson had maintained his friendship with Epstein after the latter’s conviction for what US law calls soliciting prostitution from a minor, why did McSweeney, Starmer and their inner circle still conclude that he was the right man to be the UK’s ambassador in Washington DC?
There is a very important contextual element of the story, which began to surface at the end of last week, about the absence of alarm – in both politics and the media – at the appointment at the time it was made, suggestive of an amazing collective amnesia about details of the Mandelson/Epstein relationship that had been made public. But even so, that doesn’t detract from the awfulness of what the prime minister and his people did, which sits at the heart of the story like an incurable headache. They surely know it, and so does everyone else: presented with a due diligence report based on a vivid account of what Mandelson had been up to (much of which was well known anyway), they apparently took his denials at face value. Despite warnings to the contrary – from, we now hear, the-then foreign secretary David Lammy and Starmer’s then-deputy Angela Rayner – they gave Mandelson exactly what he wanted.
Self-evidently, that choice involved a blithe disregard for Epstein and his associates’ victims, and the women – not least in the Labour party – who have spent whole lifetimes campaigning against such cruelty and abuse. That plain fact, moreover, blurs into whether Starmer, McSweeney or any of the other people involved had any meaningful awareness of how Mandelson’s appointment might sooner or later look to the public. Apparently not. They made their choice, and have been hit by what they failed to foresee: not just Mandelson’s unravelling, but a hardening of many people’s contempt for both the current government and most of the structures of politics and power.
As I wrote last week, I recently spent three days in the Mancunian constituency of Gorton and Denton, whose looming byelection – on 26 February – could well decide Starmer’s fate. Just before the latest Mandelson scandal broke, what most people told me echoed views I have heard all around the country over the past 15 years, in the midst not just of elections, but such landmark events as the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the Brexit vote two years later. Whoever they were thinking of voting for – and particularly if they were not voting at all – most people in Gorton and Denton had a bitter disdain for politics and politicians, and a belief that the whole Westminster game is largely about wealth and privilege. In Gorton’s covered market, one woman got straight to the point: “I don’t believe none of them. They don’t live how we live. My mum’s 78: she can’t afford to put the heating on, and she’s got terminal cancer. [But] they’re all right. They’re rich. Don’t set me off, honestly.”
Other people I spoke to expressed the same resentment about the difference between existing at the sharp end and the pleasures of life at the top. They also talked – unprompted – about stories that may have been opportunistically seized on and twisted by politicians on the hard right, but that sit at the heart of whole swathes of public opinion: grooming gangs, the tensions surrounding housing large numbers of men in hotels used for asylum seekers, and many people’s keen sense that we live at a time of rising danger for women and girls, from men of all kinds. Even if some of those issues are often talked about in ugly ways, their place in our politics feels immovable.
A YouGov poll conducted last week showed that 95% of the public were aware of the Mandelson story, with 44% following it either “very” or “fairly” closely. A huge number of people, I would imagine, vividly appreciate its defining themes: women and girls reduced to trafficked commodities, the kind of organised abuse that depended on private planes and secluded islands, the involvement of royalty, the roles in the whole terrible saga given to such fellow personifications of boundless privilege as Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
Think also about Mandelson’s loathsome insistence that he couldn’t “live by salary alone”, his frantic moves in defence of bankers’ bonuses, and his bizarre drive to pass minute-by-minute accounts of government business to a multimillionaire financier and child sex offender. A scandal as sprawling and tangled as this one (which may now be widening into suggestions of insider trading and questions over big government contracts) was always going to be a multifaceted reflection of its time. But one of its most startling aspects is how perfectly it chimes with the fears and grievances of millions of people who live metaphorical light years from where everything happened.
For a long time, there have been reports that many voters firmly believe that Starmer was privately educated. Some think his knighthood was somehow inherited. The same people, I would imagine, would disbelieve the fact that we are now governed by the cabinet with the largest share of comprehensive school alumni in history. One of the many consequences of the Mandelson scandal is that these views will not just be even more firmly embedded, but combined with a perfectly understandable belief that too many of the people at the top have had far too indulgent attitudes to the kind of wealth and power that tends to curdle into corruption. And, yes, you could – and probably should – say some of the same things about the rightwing populists who now present themselves as avengers of the elites. Unfortunately, in its current state, there is not much Labour can do about that.
Which brings us back to that nagging question: in the wake of the decision – in 2021 – to bring Mandelson back into Labour’s uppermost circles, what explains that surreally consequential decision to make him the US ambassador? Was it somehow traceable to the presence in Starmer’s senior team of veterans of the Blair years, still wedded to the wealth-worshipping mores of the 1990s, and guilty of a failure to understand how much the public’s perceptions of politics and power have changed since the crash of 2008, the MPs’ expenses saga, the Jimmy Savile scandal and all the rest? Did they think that so far out from the assumed date of a general election, the views of voters could safely be disregarded? Were they simply full of machismo and a careless pomposity? There is probably truth in all those things, and they shine stark light not just on this scandal, but on why Starmer’s premiership has been such a contorted disappointment.
They also show that whoever turns out to be his successor – which, now McSweeney has gone, is the unavoidable Labour question – will need a lot more than another working-class backstory. There are elements in Labour who require a bracing reminder of the times we live in, the toxicity of the years when its leading figures were dazzled by money, and the urgent need for a plan – and a political narrative – to conclusively show that the party serves the people who keep society running. As a matter of urgency, they also need to be jolted into understanding that social justice, equality, feminism and the party’s other articles of faith need to define every choice it makes. In that sense, the meaning of the current crisis is obvious: if Labour cannot meet these challenges, it will look every bit as compromised and small as the man who, at the time of writing, was still nominally in charge.