British prime minister Keir Starmer has already said sorry – appointing Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the United States in late 2024 was a bad idea. Everyone else claims they knew it was a bad idea, an obvious calamity from a mile off (energy secretary Ed Miliband and then foreign secretary David Lammy said so to each other at the time, if we are to believe the story).
Starmer was supine – and nasal – in the House of Commons on Monday: “I should not have appointed Peter Mandelson … I take responsibility for that decision … and I apologise again …”
What more is a man to do? Britain is not technically a secular state – it has the Church of England over which the monarch reigns. But Westminster has not demonstrated much in its powers of forgiveness this past week, that ultimate Christian virtue. The feeling among Labour MPs is quietly mutinous; and his cabinet are hardly voluble in their support (secretary of state for work and pensions, Pat McFadden, on the radio on Wednesday morning three times declined to say the PM was right in his decision to sack a prominent civil servant over the whole debacle).
A quick precis for anyone who hasn’t been following: Mandelson, Starmer’s one-time adviser, was appointed ambassador to the US. Last year, details of Mandelson’s continued relationship with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed – Mandelson was sacked, and Starmer’s chief of staff, Corkman Morgan McSweeney, stepped down. And then the Guardian reported recently that Mandelson failed his security vetting for the appointment, but was appointed anyway. Starmer said he didn’t know about any of this, and he fired Olly Robbins, the permanent secretary to the foreign office. Now his own premiership is in doubt.
I know a mess when I see one, and don’t seek to minimise this as anything other than that. But he should not resign. This was a knotty procedural failure, followed by a bit of blame-shifting from Number 10 and Starmer’s camp. Firing Robbins was rash. And who knows what else will be revealed next … Yes – sure, whatever.
But the threshold at which politicians seek to overthrow their leader should be much, much higher than this (I am looking at you, Fianna Fáil). Until anyone finds a genuine smoking gun – that, say, Starmer lied about knowing Epstein himself – forcing him out would be no patriotic deposition, just an act of petty harm. To the British prime minister, but also to the general direction of democracy.
First, those in his ranks who are baying for blood – if you will permit the cliche – are fascinating in their short sightedness. What a display of generational amnesia, as though we didn’t all watch the Conservative party cycle through David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in eight years. Forgive me if I am remembering incorrectly, but I do not think that period screamed “stable”, “in control” and “for the greater good of the country”. No, everyone was reasonably united at the time that this internecine, Roman back-stabbing and machination was self-indulgent Tory pap. Labour was supposed to be above all of that.
And second, their argument is totally contorted. No – it’s not that Starmer appointed Mandelson in spite of the failed vetting, they say. It’s how he behaved after the fact, in sacking McSweeney and Robbins. It’s that he displayed bad judgment in the first place. It’s that he won’t do this, or say that; or has he done too much of that? Wait, perhaps it’s that he has not done enough of this … The most salient fact – that Starmer was not told about the vetting – somehow is consigned as a secondary irrelevance in all of this. Legitimate defence, be damned.
The truth is, they want him gone – he is unpopular in the polls; there are several credible pretenders; everyone says his government isn’t really working. And so they are making the opportunistic case now. But forcing an argument around the facts is the job of an opinion columnist, not a serious mechanism for deposing a political leader with a huge democratic mandate.
I can’t help but think of Micheál Martin at a time like this (though I would not call his mandate “huge”). How many times has his leadership been said to be in peril? He seems to have survived the heave rumblings of last week (in Westminster they refer to it as a “herd”) – but things were rocky not long ago with the selection of Jim Gavin for the presidential candidacy. In fact, Harry McGee reckons there have been more than half a dozen moments of credible danger for the Fianna Fáil leader.
And what exactly is the point of all this? Is everyone just bored? Allow me some glib whataboutery for a second: last I checked, Trump was running rampage in the Middle East, and there was a serious attritional war happening in Europe. The effects of this oil crisis have yet to be truly felt on either of these islands. I want to shake the British Labour Party by the shoulders and shout: “Now? Really?”
