Starmer Needs to Learn the Lessons of the Mandelson Saga

It has been yet another day of political high drama in the saga of the government’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador in December 2024.

Broadly, developments have not been as bad as they could have been for Keir Starmer. Philip Barton, the former most senior official at the Foreign Office, and Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s ex-chief of staff, failed to land fresh hammer blows on the PM in their evidence to MPs on his handling of the matter.

That puts the Starmer in a strong position to see off a move by the Conservatives to establish a detailed investigation into whether he misled Parliament in his statements about the Mandelson debacle. A vote is due in the coming hours.

Whatever the outcome, the continuing saga provides rare glimpses into the world of security vetting and thinking at the top of government on the international threats facing the country. It has also laid bare the string of misjudgments that led to former New Labour adviser and minister Mandelson getting one of the most plum diplomatic postings. There will be more to come in this extraordinary tale of reputational destruction in the form of additional disclosures to parliament and evidence sessions in the coming weeks.

But there are also two bigger points to emerge from all this. One is that the fact Mandelson was a terrible choice as US ambassador should have been clear right from the start.

McSweeney said today that learning in the autumn how close Mandelson continued to be to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — with many of those revelations coming from reporting by Bloomberg – was like “a knife through my soul”. But there were already multiple details in the public domain about Mandelson’s links to Epstein months and years before that.