LATIKA M BOURKE: Starmer pledged a new start in UK politics. Mandelson’s appointment shows that was a lie

Dull, dour and dry, Keir Starmer’s great virtue in politics has always been the sense that he was not a creature of the political class and was in the job out of a sense of duty, rather than self-advancement.

At worst, this sometimes manifested as sanctimonious, pious and holier-than-thou, but at best, he came across as someone quite decent.

But now it is all shattered with his indefensible defence of what he did and didn’t know about Peter Mandelson’s character and relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, before appointing the Labour grandee as the UK’s Ambassador to the United States nearly one year ago.

Lord Mandelson’s diplomatic career didn’t last long. Sir Keir sacked him in September, after the first dump of Epstein files showed he kept in touch with the convicted paedophile after he served time for child prostitution in 2009.

“I took at face value the lies that he fed me and many others,” Lord Mandelson told journalist Harry Cole in one of his final interviews before being given his marching orders.

Epstein died in a US jail cell a decade later, awaiting a new trial on child sex trafficking charges. But his radioactive blast continues to emanate from the grave, thanks to the US Congress’s vote to release the Epstein files.

The weekend’s release of 3 million further files exposed the nature of the relationship Lord Mandelson had with Epstein.

They suggest that when Lord Mandelson was business secretary, he forwarded market-sensitive and internal government information to Epstein during the financial crisis in 2009, reassured Epstein that he was lobbying Treasury hard against the tax on bankers’ bonuses and helped an Epstein associate at JP Morgan to buy a UK asset, later saying he wanted to build a relationship with the banking and finance giant as he did “not want to live by salary alone” post politics.

In return, Epstein made payments to Lord Mandelson’s partner Reinaldo Avila da Silva, funds the Labour politician claimed not to remember ever receiving. Lord Mandelson also had difficulty remembering himself being pictured in one of the released Epstein images standing in a T-shirt and underwear alongside a woman in a bathrobe.

When Epstein was released from prison, Lord Mandelson hailed it as “Liberation day!” with an “X”.

Lord Mandelson is now being investigated by the police and will likely have his title stripped. He has quit the House of Lords and the Labour Party.

The stench that has followed Lord Mandelson his entire public life wafted around Keir Starmer, as the UK Prime Minister, who famously vowed to “return politics to public service” on election night, arrived in the House of Commons on Wednesday for Prime Ministers Questions.

Sir Keir insisted he did not know just how involved Lord Mandelson was with Esptein.

“What was not known was the sheer depth and the extent of the relationship. Mandelson lied about that to everyone for years,” Sir Keir protested.

“Can the Prime Minister tell us: did the official security vetting that he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?” Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch asked.

“Yes, it did,” the PM replied. “As a result, various questions were put to him… Mandelson completely misrepresented the extent of his relationship with Epstein and lied throughout the process, including in response to the due diligence.”

“Yes it did” could go down as three words that started the very end of Sir Keir’s premiership.

Sir Keir could not have known that Lord Mandelson had “betrayed our country, our Parliament and my party,” when he appointed him.

But knowing Lord Mandelson’s well-established failures to recognise truth, Sir Keir had just two questions to answer in his mind before settling on the appointment.

Firstly, did Mandelson ever interact with Epstein after the paedophile was convicted and jailed for child sex crimes? If yes, case closed.

As Ms Badenoch pointed out, the answer “was on Google”. In 2023, a leaked JP Morgan report found its way to the Financial Times.

It said that Epstein would call Lord Mandelson “Petie” and that “Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government”.

It added that in June 2009, while Lord Mandelson was still business secretary, he stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse – Epstein was in jail for child prostitution at the time.

Lord Mandelson refused to confirm or deny that to the FT. But had the PM followed up, a seemingly basic and obvious task for a man fixated on process and repairing the reputation of British politics after the Tories’ cronyism, it should have been merely a yes or no response.

He had a second opportunity to test Lord Mandelson’s deceit, when just days before his appointment was announced, I asked Number 10 about a dossier that had been handed by US Senators to the FBI regarding Lord Mandelson’s business dealings in China, through his firm Global Counsel.

Lord Mandelson told me: “‘I have had no business dealings in China.”

When the evidence was presented to Number 10, the foreign office and Global Counsel all effectively adopted a “nothing to see here” approach.

But any sensible prime ministerial team would have at once noticed the alarm siren this episode sounded and what it said about the appointment.

That they didn’t speaks volumes about the political protection racket placed around Lord Mandelson that has now collapsed, and threatens to take Sir Keir down with it.

Fingers of blame are pointed at the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, a protege of sorts of Mandelson’s.

Sir Keir himself appeared to blame the intelligence agencies.

“I think we need to look at the security vetting because it now transpires that what was being said was not true,” he said.

“The impression … deliberately intended by Mandelson (was) to make my team believe that he barely knew Esptein. That’s the picture he painted, that was a lie, but that’s the lie he painted, and that’s the basis on which we made our decision.”

This is a cop out. It won’t wash with the public, and it won’t wash with his MPs, some of whom have already begun calling for him to resign, while others are openly questioning his “judgement”.

Sir Keir has no excuse. Does he really expect that after fashioning himself as a political new-age moral puritan, and that as a former public prosecutor, he does not have the basic wit to ask what was blindingly obvious to those who looked?

There was no doubting his sincerity as he apologised to Epstein’s victims. But it’s not enough. Sir Keir promised to stand for a sort of politics that ended cronyism, that put purpose above party tribalism, but in his gormlessness he embraced the very epitome of that culture by appointing Lord Mandelson despite having every warning sign possible laid out before him that this would all end in tears.