Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.
With three years left and a huge majority, Labour can govern with more humility and deliver real change. But with Starmer at the helm? I can’t see it.
The smell of death is in the Westminster air. Labour’s King Rat Peter Mandelson has again cast his sulphurous odour of villainy around the palace, and contamination may drag a decent, well-intentioned Labour leader down with him.
That’s the tragedy. Nothing about Keir Starmer’s life purpose, attitudes, tastes, morals or values resembles Mandelson’s and his venal world of corrupted power, where mega-billions buy anyone anything. Not friends; they had nothing in common. For all Mandelson’s pedigree, reaching into the party’s past, he never seemed to have a single Labour value or egalitarian instinct. Labour was a vehicle.
But even if the men were never close, Mandelson worked to cast his mantle over Starmer’s team, just as he had exerted his malign and worldly influence on Labour for decades. Morgan McSweeney was his young protege, learning the Mandelsonian way of political cynicism; others in the cabinet, too, were surely seduced by that aura of “grownup” reckoning with the “real world”.
McSweeney was widely reported to be the one pushing Mandelson’s appointment to Washington, a clever idea to plant a man without scruples to schmooze a president with even fewer. Clever, that is, if you can skip past the minor irrelevance of his intimate friendship with a man who trafficked young girls for influence with the mighty. All the great and bad whose names tumble out of the newly released files – Noam Chomsky! – shrugged it off. Somehow, the grooming gangs of Rotherham cause more visceral disgust and outcry than exploitation of these equally vulnerable victims procured for the lusts of the wealthy.
The end for Starmer is nigh: that was signalled by the sheer naked outrage from Labour’s own side, not point-scoring but shocked to the core, not plotting but erupting right, left and centre of his party. Misjudgment has been the mounting charge against their leader, and he gave a wretched display of it in the Commons with a fatal attempt to hold back some vital documents on Mandelson’s vetting and appointment. Never mind that it was for sincere security reasons – mainly fear of what abuse of the US president the papers might contain – Starmer failed to measure the ferocity of the storm on his own benches, last-minute U-turning yet again. Vetting? We shall now see if this was no more than a “good chaps” chat, wherein the already installed ambassador’s notoriously unreliable word was taken by people who are now shocked (shocked!) that Mandelson lied and lied again: he was fascinating, yes, but he was never a good chap.
Mandelson’s betrayal is beyond the comprehension of Starmer, his MPs and the rest of us. At the height of the bankers’ crash, a Labour business secretary rushed to give away extremely sensitive market information to a foreign financier. At a time when the country was reeling from the subsequent recession and crying out for punishment of the perpetrators, Labour’s own business secretary sent a message via Epstein to JP Morgan’s hugely powerful CEO, Jamie Dimon, asking him to “mildly threaten” his own chancellor, sitting across the cabinet table, to stop him imposing tax on bankers’ bonuses. We don’t yet know if that was illegal, but it stinks of old-fashioned, send-him-to-the-Tower treachery and treason. Alas, that good chancellor, Alistair Darling, is no longer here to know who instigated a call from Dimon, but his memoir, Back from the Brink, records JP Morgan’s CEO calling him, “very, very angry”, with a not-so-mild threat. “He said that his bank bought a lot of UK debt and he wondered if that was now such a good idea,” Darling wrote. The chancellor resisted intimidation and imposed a 50% supertax on bank bonuses over £25k.
This one episode risks justifying the wildest conspiracy theories zipping round the ether about the Bilderberg group, the new world order, Freemasons, Davos and a thousand others. There is indeed an illuminati controlling money, governments, AI and everything. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” wrote Adam Smith, in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations. His famous dictum is even truer now that such a tiny cabal of billionaires controls most of what the world needs, with no concern for what’s below their flying palaces circling the globe.
On the smaller matter of the survival of Britain’s prime minister, the question is only “how long?”. If the vetting papers reveal a near-wilful neglect of Mandelson’s best-pal relationship with Epstein as twin fixers and manipulators, MPs look ready to act fast. A spontaneous uprising would be the neatest end, forcing a resignation by sheer weight and breadth of MPs’ indignation, with no need for plots and challenges, or for collecting 81 MPs willing to back a stand against him before they see the field. But never underestimate Labour’s ability to dither, to put faction before party, choosing inevitable failure over victory for the other wing. Losing the Gorton and Denton byelection on 26 February might be the trigger. Or they may wait for the expected wipeout in May in Scotland and Wales, plus English councils, so a new leader doesn’t take the blame.
I still don’t understand the reason for this level of public dislike for a good and serious man, but it’s hard to find MPs who think Starmer can revive his own or his party’s fortunes. The cut-through over this affair is phenomenal in a population not over-bothered by the news: YouGov finds an astonishing 95% of British adults know about the Mandelson/Epstein scandal. There is no escaping public disgust.
This local scandal on our little island lifts the edge of the global carpet that hides the cockroaches of power. “Take back control” never sounded hollower. But the glimpse we saw of the real way of the world should spur us all on to shore up our own weak democracy. Look how easily, under Mandelsonian guidance, the likes of Palantir is paid to run deep into our defence and NHS systems. This affair should have jolted out of complacency all those responsible for these contracts.
Soon, an elections bill will arrive in the Commons that risks exposing the utter inadequacy of this government’s response to all the above. Good things include votes at 16 and easy ID at polling stations. But where is the great electoral reform to ensure never again a result like last time – 34% of the vote winning 63% of seats? Where is Lords reform? With three years still on the clock and a massive, if unearned, majority, it’s time for Labour to start all over again – this time with more humility and an understanding that the public is revolted by transactional politics conducted in ways they don’t understand. This time as an enterprise ready enough and competent enough to deliver real change.
