Britain’s worst political scandal of this century

In retrospect, the signs were there. In February 2025 Peter Mandelson was asked by the Financial Times about his relationship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The soon-to-be British ambassador to America offered a forthright response. “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”

Exactly a year on, Lord Mandelson has gone, and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is embroiled in Britain’s worst political scandal of this century. The peer lost his job in September, after emails emerged in which he questioned Epstein’s conviction for procuring a minor. On January 30th another tranche of emails revealed an intimate relationship. Lord Mandelson and Epstein giggled about strippers and joked about “a well hung young man”, in between discussing multi-million-dollar jobs post-politics and casually leaking confidential government documents. A political embarrassment has become a criminal investigation. Lord Mandelson’s behaviour raises depressing questions about the past but a more intriguing one about the present. What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?

If Sir Keir had a purpose, it was stopping things like this. He was a politician of process rather than conviction. Following the erratic Boris Johnson, whose three years in power were marred by executive chaos, this had some appeal. The Mandelson affair reveals that process comes a distant second to political convenience. Lord Mandelson was vetted, and Downing Street knew that a close relationship persisted long after Epstein was found guilty. Sir Keir ploughed on—process be damned. He came to prominence by skewering Mr Johnson. However, it is Mr Johnson’s government, with its propensity for surreal scandal and norm-trampling, that Sir Keir’s own government now resembles.

In a party full of lifers and riddled by—at times—psychopathic factionalism, Sir Keir was supposed to be a refreshing, fair-minded pragmatist. Yet Lord Mandelson was appointed above all thanks to the people he knew and for the wing of the party he represented. He was close to Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s most influential adviser and the man who pushed for Lord Mandelson to land the plum job in Washington. Ironically, Sir Keir is not especially close to Lord Mandelson. Before the Washington appointment, their relationship extended to Lord Mandelson offering the prime minister advice from the sidelines and once suggesting on a podcast that Sir Keir was too fat. The prime minister has no cronies, but still somehow fell foul of cronyism.

Sir Keir leads a hollow administration. It brought in figures from New Labour to give it ballast. Former aides from the glory days of New Labour are scattered all over government. Lord Mandelson was to provide a cynical steel. After all, the “Prince of Darkness” had been there and done it. Whatever flaws he had—strange business dealings or a long-term friendship with a notorious sex offender—were worth it for his expertise, and Sir Keir and his team relied on it. It is shameful in its own way. A man whose political pomp came three decades ago was welcomed back to the top of government, as if Sir Tony Blair had relied on apparatchiks from the Harold Wilson era during his time in office. It is a politics stuck in the 1990s, with the norms to match: two boys giggling over email about sleeping with strippers. A politics previously seen as creaking and ageing is now humiliating.

The best excuse available to Sir Keir is also the most embarrassing: putting Lord Mandelson in Washington was not his idea. The prime minister appointed him largely because an aide, Mr McSweeney, suggested it. People in Labour have always talked about the prime minister as if he were simple. In “Get In”, an at times excruciating account of Sir Keir’s rise to power, his advisers regard him with thinly disguised contempt. “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR,” a driverless train in east London, which has a pretend control panel for the enjoyment of toddlers. Somehow the Starmer train has still crashed.

Sir Keir remains in office only at the mercy of mps who regard him with contempt. Backbenchers stew about the prospects of having their careers blown up by the age of 35, in part due to the prime minister embroiling the government in a needless scandal with a paedophile. To add insult, former ministers shuffled to the backbenches last year were surprised to learn that Lord Mandelson had offered advice on the reshuffle, in between canapés at the White House. It is one thing to lose your job; it is another to do so at the behest of a man who will go down as a 21st-century John Profumo, a Tory minister whose exit because of sex, lies and spies became the benchmark for government-crushing scandal.

Only dumb luck, the underrated factor in his rise to office, can possibly save Sir Keir. Some of his likely challengers, such as Wes Streeting, the health secretary, are far closer to the disgraced peer than the prime minister ever was. Sir Keir’s failings on Lord Mandelson were common across parts of the Labour Party, which could never resist the charms and talents of the former minister, despite his flaws. More gifted politicians than Sir Keir have fallen prey to them. But dumb decisions trump dumb luck, eventually.

In a rare bout of clear-eyed analysis, Sir Keir saw the damage being done by the Mandelson scandal. He warned his cabinet that “the public don’t really see individuals in this scandal, they see politicians.” For all the prime minister’s failings, he understands the seriousness of the moment, even if he does not himself possess the means to meet it. Sir Keir is correct that the shamelessness personified by Lord Mandelson is a fatal poison for the body politic. But if he truly believed what he said, he too would go. ■