UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s weak leadership exposed by Peter Mandelson scandal and Labour chaos

Keir Starmer is a pitiful figure. Incurious and incompetent, his reputation as a decent but boring managerial technocrat is shot.

The nexus of his failure is the new Labour web that installed him.

Approaching two years of his premiership, Sir Keir is agenda-less. Whatever political identity he had has been consumed by the ex-and post-Blairite figures that seized back control of the Labour Party from Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left takeover that ended in electoral ruin in the 2019 election.

Undone by his decision to appoint as ambassador to the United States the former Labour peer, Peter Mandelson, who was twice sacked from Cabinet during the Blair-Brown years and kept a publicly known friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Sir Keir has found perhaps his only skill — firing people.

The UK Prime Minister has now sacked two chiefs of staff, three communications directors and two senior civil servants.

At every turn, Sir Keir finds someone else to blame, despite publicly acknowledging that he should not have appointed Mr Mandelson, who has been questioned by police for leaking sensitive financial information during his time as a minister to Epstein.

The latest revelation, that Mandelson did not pass the required security vetting, yet still obtained access to sensitive information and proceeded to Washington DC because of the political pressure placed on the civil service to rush the appointment through, is farcical.

Starmer said he was “furious” and should have been told.

Olly Robbins, one of the civil servants fired over the saga, told the House of Commons Number 10 had a “dismissive attitude” relating to Mandelson’s vetting and that he felt an “atmosphere of pressure” over the appointment.

Sir Keir is angry that he wasn’t told about Mandelson’s vetting issues. Mandelson has previously been linked to the sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and told The Nightly on the eve of his appointment that he had never had business dealings with China, despite ample evidence on the Chinese internet.

The civil service is responsible for carrying out the government’s wishes and serving the country. It is arguable that on this occasion the foreign office got it wrong and should have told the Prime Minister.

But Prime Minister Starmer also had every reason to inquire, between September last year when he sacked Mandelson and last week, when The Guardian broke the news that Mandelson had failed his vetting.

Ultimately, nothing excuses the original sin of hiring Mandelson in the first place. Mandelson was not named Ambassador for any other reason than that he was a political appointee and a Blair-era elder. And one with a chequered past.

“Peter Mandelson has a history,” the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott — a leftist Corbynite and first black woman to be elected to the Commons — said.

“Knowing that history, which goes back 30 years, and given what is known, it is one thing to say, as the Prime Minister insists on saying, ‘Nobody told me; nobody told me anything,’ but what this House wants to know is: why did the Prime Minister not ask?”

It was a mic drop moment.

Olly Robbins delivered another when he revealed that the Prime Minister had asked him to find a diplomatic post for Matthew Doyle, one of the sacked communications advisors.

This was to be done behind the back of David Lammy, who was then foreign secretary. The revelation is poisonous for Cabinet relations. Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper, both would-be leaders, distanced themselves from Starmer. Miliband revealed on Sky News UK that he and Lammy had discussed their concerns about Mandelson together before the appointment was made.

Matthew Doyle, another new Labour remnant, was sent to the Lords following his sacking, but was suspended from the Labour party this year for his association with a convicted sex offender.

It is the same sort of cronyism and muck that Labour rightly railed against when the Tories were in power and promised to change.

Stamer is not so much hoist but wizened on his own petard. He is the lawyer who asks no questions, the leader with no agenda, the manager who survives by firing everyone around him.

If there is a redeeming factor, his only skill is to conceal it from the public.

“The more I hear, the angrier I get. I think we need to dispense with any notion that he’s a fundamentally decent and loyal public servant. At the very least, he put civil servants in an impossible position and then threw them under the bus when it went wrong. He’s an arsehole,” one former Labour MP told The Nightly.

Another Labour source likened the government to the DLR, the driverless train line that runs in east London.

“Aloof to the point of fiddling while Rome burns,” the source said. Even loyalists concede the Prime Minister is a wounded figure.

But he will limp on, because there are, staggeringly, no other good candidates. Starmer’s demise is as much about the fight that has raged within the British Labour Party over its centrist or left-wing direction.

The most talented performers are the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, a right-wing figure and the hardline Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who makes Mr Streeting look left-wing.

Defence Secretary John Healy would make a safe pair of hands as a transition leader, but he cut a dispirited figure at the London Defence Conference earlier this month, decaying defence force and no new spending or investments to announce. It was not the appearance of a man winning Cabinet battles.

So Sir Keir limps on. But for what? What battle does he want to fight, what reform does he want to make the case for and see through? It’s not clear.

If only the Prime Minister were not so incurious, he might start asking himself those questions.