Sir Keir Starmer sought to deflect criticism of his decision, a year ago this month, to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington by saying how angry he was that he was deceived.
It was a risky approach because it suggested weakness on the prime minister’s part. Is it not his job to judge whether someone with Lord Mandelson’s record might be not quite straight with him?
What Sir Keir did not say – presumably because it sounds too calculating – is that he gambled last year, thinking that the benefits of having Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the United States outweighed the risks of further disclosures about the nature of his relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.
What he could have said is that it was a gamble that did not pay off – but instead, he took refuge in process. “We went through a process,” the prime minister told the House of Commons – a process that was subverted by what he described as Lord Mandelson’s lies.
Either way, the appointment of Lord Mandelson was an error of judgement by the prime minister, and the question now is how Sir Keir shows that he and his government have learned from their mistake.
The prime minister has tried, in the past few days, to stay ahead of the wave of outrage that threatens to engulf him. He condemned in forthright terms Lord Mandelson’s apparent leaking of market-sensitive information as a cabinet minister in Gordon Brown’s government. He threatened to expel Lord Mandelson from the House of Lords before he left of his own volition, and today he announced that the soon-to-be-Mr Mandelson will be removed from the privy council.
Sir Keir was also quick to accept the proposal from Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition, that all documents relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment should be made public. It would have been better if the prime minister had come forward with this proposal himself, but at least the opposition was doing its democratic job.
Sir Keir sought to amend the opposition’s proposal to exclude material relating to national security or international relations, but Ms Badenoch accused him of a “cover-up”. This provoked a substantial Labour revolt in the Commons, led by Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, who demanded that the cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee should decide which documents should and should not be excluded.
The government’s business managers could see the way Labour MPs were going and surrendered to Ms Rayner, who is now an imminent threat to the prime minister’s position.
Matt Bishop, a Labour backbencher, put it well in this afternoon’s debate: “We stood on a promise to do politics differently this time. We said that we would turn the page on the scandals, the secrecy and the sense that there was one rule for the powerful and one for everyone else.”
If the prime minister had been tempted to cover up, he should now realise that his best hope of surviving in office lies in the opposite approach: of openness, contrition and a willingness to learn.
Sir Keir promised openness, although he sought to limit it, and seemed to suggest that the police investigation might interfere with early disclosure. But he told the Commons: “I want to make sure this House sees the full documentation, so it will see for itself the extent to which, time and time again, Mandelson completely misrepresented the extent of his relationship with Epstein.”
The speed with which Sir Keir’s words are turned into action will be a test of his sincerity. He cannot afford to get this wrong.
