Peter Mandelson: The anatomy of a fall
Mandelson’s fall is now another stick with which to beat a vulnerable and useless Prime Minister, writes Eliot Wilson
There will be no sixth act. Lord Mandelson (so he remains, though he is leaving the House of Lords and being removed from the Privy Council) has demonstrated a capacity for resurrection which would be the envy of Lazarus. But the lingering death of his diplomatic career – he managed 212 days as ambassador to the United States – and of his public life in general because of his links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein is a death too far.
The downfall of the man who revelled in his reputation as New Labour’s “Prince of Darkness” is a sordid and sorry one from which no-one has yet emerged with much credit. But what does it mean? Beyond the departure of Mandelson, all sulphur and cologne, what are the wider implications?
Last week in this paper, John McTernan, a Labour insider who was Sir Tony Blair’s political secretary in Downing Street, concluded that “factionalism is the besetting sin of the current Labour government”. Arguing that Mandelson had been appointed to the Washington embassy solely because he was part of Sir Keir Starmer’s clique, McTernan declared: “The slow-motion tragedy of Keir Starmer’s government is that there is no ideology, no ‘Starmerism’, but plenty of fighting – almost all of it against people within the Labour party.”
I’m not so sure that is the whole story.
Let me first say where I agree with McTernan. There is no coherent “Starmerism”, and the Prime Minister struggles to assemble or communicate a big-picture vision and purpose. There is also a distinct group from whom Starmer has drawn several key advisers. And it is undeniable that Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson was a catastrophic error of judgement; although, as I’ve said before, he has form on that.
A history of Labour factionalism
On the other hand, you may be thinking that accusations of empty, internecine factionalism are gamey meat from a man who was a close aide to Tony Blair in 2005-07, or who wrote in an imagined memo to Sir Keir Starmer on his election as Labour leader, “This is the time to purge the party machine and put your own people in charge… as we said when we expelled Militant, there’s no problem with a witch hunt when there really are witches to hunt”.
One noticeable aspect of the long-running psychodrama between Blairites and Brownites was that, while there were philosophical differences between the two principals, they were not chasmic. The intensely bitter war seemed to stem largely from ambition, Brown’s belief that Blair had promised to hand over the premiership earlier than he did, and endless Whitehall turf wars.
The factionalism which grips the government – and has affected every Labour government in some way since 1924 – is not the superficiality of Starmer as a middle-aged Regina George and a cohort of mean girls
I have no love whatsoever for the current government or the Prime Minister, as regular readers will know. He is simply unsuited for leadership, having never learned how to be a politician, and the ideas he does have are mainly damaging, foolish or impractical. While there may be “no ‘Starmerism’”, McTernan leaves unexplained what holds “the faction that ran the Labour Party in opposition, and ran the government” together.
That faction is a kind of Continuity New Labour, which doesn’t accept that it largely won the armed struggle. Look at some of the people Starmer has brought close: Pat McFadden, McTernan’s immediate predecessor as political secretary to Blair; Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Downing Street chief of staff; Alan Milburn, the most able of the Blair government’s true believers; and of course Mandelson, who saw in Blair the raw material of the New Labour golem and shaped it brilliantly.
This is not a Blairite government. It lacks the competence, talent and sureness of purpose for that. But some of its fundamental instincts are half-remembered Blairism: structural reform of the NHS, a desire to control the welfare budget, attempts at reassuringly iron discipline in fiscal policy.
The proof is in Starmer’s opponents and their bêtes noires. He was forced to gut what became the Universal Credit Act 2025 to appease MPs who would not countenance serious cuts to welfare, yet it was still branded “morally wrong… cruel… [and] unnecessary”. Attempting, cack-handedly, to acknowledge soaring public concern on immigration, he was accused of “echoing Enoch Powell”. Plans to draw on the independent healthcare sector to address NHS backlogs were inevitably described as “privatisation”, with a sanctimonious snipe that “Bevan must be spinning in his grave”.
The tragedy of the Mandelson affair is the fate of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, as well as the circumstances which allowed him to prey on them for so long. Lower down the order, there are serious questions of conduct and constitutional propriety about the way Mandelson behaved as business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, sieve-like in his leaking and pseudo-Machiavellian in his manipulation.
What McTernan misdiagnoses, I think, is the still-lower, grubbier level of fallout. The factionalism which grips the government – and has affected every Labour government in some way since 1924 – is not the superficiality of Starmer as a middle-aged Regina George and a cohort of mean girls. It is malcontented left-wing MPs who believe that a Labour government should never cut anything and that “taxing the rich” will pay for everything; Mandelson’s fall is now another stick with which to beat a vulnerable and useless Prime Minister. As I said, no-one emerges from this with credit.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian, a senior fellow for national security at the coalition for Global Prosperity and the contributing editor at Defence on the Brink