(Bloomberg Opinion) — For a very brief moment a few years ago, I thought that I had terminated Peter Mandelson’s third political comeback. Perhaps Prime Minister Keir Starmer now wishes that I had succeeded — having, on the eve of Donald Trump’s trip to the UK, fired Mandelson as ambassador to Washington over his links to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
It was strictly business, nothing personal. In 2008, I revealed in the Sunday Times that the twice-disgraced Labour cabinet minister had been a holiday guest on board the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s yacht off the Greek island of Corfu. Deripaska, the victor in Russia’s corpse-strewn ‘aluminum wars’ in the 1990s, had benefited from a cut in European Union aluminum tariffs introduced by Mandelson when he had been trade commissioner in Brussels.
A succession of Labour leaders, if not the party’s rank and file, have long treasured the so-called “prince of darkness” for his Machiavellian skills and contacts among the global elites — at the time PM Gordon Brown successfully defended him. But the knowledge that Mandelson was “high risk-high reward” as an appointee to be the UK’s representative in the US was well known.
Several Labour figures advised Starmer from the beginning that Mandelson could be a liability. The appointment reactivated enmity on his own side too.
That the Labour left loathes a political realist like Mandelson should be par for the course. But both the soft-left faction gathering around putative leadership challenger, Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, and the center-right Blue Labour faction, who espouse “patriotic” working-class values, regard Mandelson as a metropolitan cuckoo in the nest, the well-tailored hell-spawn of Davos. Starmer has now sacked Mandelson after Bloomberg News unearthed an embarrassing cache of his correspondence with Epstein, but has the PM got the message?
The manner of his appointee’s departure is deeply damaging to the prime minister, a liberal north London human-rights lawyer whose plan was to rule Britain through the technocratic elites of his former milieu. What does he believe in other than Arsenal football club?
That vacuum hampers the PM, who in the Mandelson case and in a sea of other troubles, is falling prey to a mix of arrogance and uncertainty: a toxic combination that is destabilizing his leadership. If it was presumptuous to appoint Mandelson in full knowledge of his long association with Epstein, the manner of his sacking also came across as weak and indecisive. His register in defending colleagues is full-on backing – followed, both in the case of Angela Rayner, his ex-deputy PM and his ex-ambassador, by a headlong retreat. The next time Starmer declares he has “full confidence” in a subordinate, they might quickly seek the advice of a headhunter about new employment opportunities.
That brings us to the court of Starmer, which also has some testing questions to answer. Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, clearly has a sense of political mission his boss lacks. His fingerprints were all over the ambassador’s appointment, having cut his teeth as a young campaigner working around Mandelson in the Blair era. Being close to the more socially conservative, “Blue Labour” faction, McSweeney should have known better than to associate his political project with Mandelson.
Mandelson’s real gift is for strategic policy analysis. As an unofficial adviser to Labour in opposition, he gave sensible advice to Starmer’s team just as he once dispensed it to Tony Blair — make peace with business, abandon dreams of public ownership and isolate the left. His perennial infatuation for rich men with dubious agendas, however, always made him a liability.
Meanwhile, Starmer is left to pick up the pieces. A Cabinet reshuffle, guided by McSweeney, has installed a Blue Labour favourite, Shabana Mahmood, as home secretary, to stem the migrant tide and recover working class votes lost to the populists of Reform UK. An old Blairite enforcer, Pat McFadden is similarly tasked with restricting welfare entitlements. No. 10 backs Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, a northerner from a working-class aspirational background, to replace Rayner as the party’s elected deputy leader and hold off Burnham’s soft-left ally, Lucy Powell.
For all of these moves, this government and leader lack coherence. To date, its program has both alienated business with its tax hikes and employment-law agenda — and yet lost the support of an agitated soft-left over Gaza and its nativist rhetoric on asylum. The Mandelson psychodrama is a symptom of a much wider malaise than an appointment gone wrong: Namely that it shows us a prime minister who lacks a compass. He tries to paper over the cracks in his party in the manner of a settlement lawyer, seeking to stitch up compromises and get the trouble to go away, not as a litigator, ruthlessly pursuing his goals toward victory. Without that, the troubles will keep coming.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Previously, he was editor of the Sunday Times of London and its chief political commentator.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion
