In many political scandals there is an agreed-upon full stop, a time for the circus to move on: perhaps a resignation, certainly a police investigation. But for Downing Street, Peter Mandelson It just risks being a never-ending headache.
Like the conservative adage about Boris Johnson, Mandelson’s future in public life is definitively over, or so definitively, for a man who needs to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart before you can completely rule out another comeback.
After Resignation from Labour As more revelations emerged about his links to Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson From now on House of Lords, and attempts are being made to strip him of his title.
From the scene with Mandelson, at least until he breaks cover Another self-serving interviewthe focus on Downing Street was very high and the team around Keir Starmer thought it would be a good idea to appoint a well-connected person as ambassador to Donald Trump’s court.
This public inquiry has two interrelated aspects: one internal and the other external.
In the aftermath, opposition parties gleefully poke at the wound, using every parliamentary mechanism in their power to try to tease out new and potentially embarrassing information.
The first stage of this will be a Conservative opposition day debate on Wednesday, where the Tories are expected to release internal documents which the Number 10 knew about Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein when Washington gave him the job.
The aim is to focus as much as possible on the individual stormer. “He either knew it and didn’t care, or didn’t care enough to care, and it wasn’t even good form,” said one Conservative frontbencher.
There was a similar verdict on Tuesday from Nigel Farage, who told a press conference that despite being mentioned 32 times in the Epstein files, he had never met the child sex offender and had “never been to the island”.
While acknowledging Mandelson’s skills as a networker, Farage said Starmer and his team had made a “serious, serious error of judgement” in making him an ambassador. His longest record Previous wrong judgments and bad behavior.
In particular, the Reform UK leader said questions should be asked about the judgment of not just Starmer but his influential chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
McSweeney was furious labor MPs. Some of them said privately that they hoped the Conservative opposition would discuss some of the internal 10th documents on the ambassador’s appointment on the day, mainly because they could see how much force was exerted by McSweeney, a former protégé of Mandelson’s, with whom he consulted regularly before the general election.
McSweeney is already disliked by some Labor MPs, as a proxy for their dissatisfaction with the government’s performance, but his role as head of a group in Number 10 is sometimes seen as partisan to a small degree towards those on the left of the party.
Even before the latest Mandelson scandal, there were calls for McSweeney to be sacked if Labor fares poorly in May’s elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and English councils, as widely expected.
But if, as we saw in the Johnson era, your MPs, and voters more broadly, decide that the problem is not the team, but the person they advise, then changing the team around the leader will buy you little time.
It’s the current Labor endgame, and all talk of Stormer in the party ends now: how much longer does he have? As more evidence of his poor judgment appeared on the front pages in the coming days, the clock ticked again.
