There is no doubt that Sir Keir Starmer made an appalling mistake in appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. The prime minister already knew that Lord Mandelson had been close to Jeffrey Epstein, even after the American financier was found guilty of procuring a child for prostitution.
He did not know how deeply implicated Lord Mandelson was in the abuse of women and girls, but for the leader of a government claiming to take violence against women and girls more seriously than its predecessor, the appointment was a bad misjudgement.
Equally, Sir Keir made a great deal of his being a government of integrity, putting the sleaze of the Conservative years behind it. That claim did not survive his acceptance of free gifts, which became a public scandal in the early days of his administration. But now it has been shredded comprehensively.
Again, Sir Keir did not know that Lord Mandelson was leaking government secrets as first secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, but his “due diligence” investigation of Lord Mandelson’s business interests does not seem to have been as thorough as it should have been. No doubt we shall find out more when the documents and messages relating to his appointment are published.
The problem for the prime minister is that this misjudgement comes on top of a series of unfortunate events that have conspired to award him the title of “the most unpopular prime minister ever” – even though Patrick English of YouGov has pointed out that, on his firm’s data, Sir Keir still has some distance to go to outdo Liz Truss.
Before the latest eruption of the Mandelson scandal, the unpopularity of the Labour government had already produced a great deal of interest in Sir Keir’s leadership prospects. The twists and turns of the story of Andy Burnham’s attempt to become the candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election added to the ferment in Westminster over the possibility that the prime minister might be challenged as leader of the Labour Party.
Some of Sir Keir’s diminishing band of supporters might blame the media for fanning the flames of pointless speculation, but that will not wash. The prime minister has made too many avoidable mistakes to expect the leadership question to fade away.
It may be that Labour MPs and indeed cabinet ministers are not helping, by giving journalists, including those at The Independent, their views on and off the record about the leadership issue. Even Gordon Brown, his predecessor, implied on Saturday that he had to prove himself “in the next few months”. But a Trappist silence from the entire labour movement would not change the reality that Sir Keir is in serious trouble.
On the other hand, much of the speculation has raced ahead of itself. For all his self-inflicted problems, Sir Keir won a handsome election victory less than two years ago, inheriting a difficult fiscal position from the Conservatives, and is entitled to ask for more time to prove that he can learn from his mistakes.
One thing that we should have learned from the recent Conservative era is that rapid turnover in prime ministers does not solve the country’s problems. Furthermore, it is not obvious that any of the candidates jockeying for the succession would do a better job than the incumbent.
We cannot change prime minister every time one makes a mistake, or even a series of mistakes, and we should not tear up the fabric of government until we are very sure that there is someone else available with the leadership qualities and policy programme needed to stitch it together again and do a better job for the people.
