Keir Starmer shields himself in "ignorance" to try to save his neck over the Mandelson case

LondonThe shadow of Peter Mandelson continues to threaten Keir Starmer. The British Prime Minister appeared this afternoon in the House of Commons to justify what has no possible justification. To the point that the premier himself has described one of his explanations as "incredible." Preemptively, Starmer has accepted, from the outset, that many of the MPs present would find it – entirely "incredible" – that the highest official in the Foreign Office did not inform him that Mandelson had not passed the security agencies' veto to be appointed ambassador in Washington at the end of December 2024.

The essence of his message was that he had been honest, but that he was unaware of the outcome of the intelligence agencies' evaluations, which was not his fault, but that of the officials who did not tell him anything. In summary, Starmer has preferred to appear as a Prime Minister who does not know what is happening around him rather than admit that he deliberately ignored the civil servants' warnings. Or, even, that he consciously took a very high political risk because he believed that Mandelson –the prince of darkness of British politics for more than three decades – was the ideal person to deal with the new Trump administration.

Starmer began his speech admitting, for the umpteenth time, that achieved an overwhelming majority in the general election of July 2024.

Mandelson, 72, was dismissed from his post last September after new information in relation to the Epstein case revealed that he continued to have contact with the paedophile after he was convicted in 2008 for child prostitution.

The new chapter of the serial – which had had other very serious ones, such as when it became known that he leaked confidential information from the Brown government to the American financier when he was a minister – exploded last week.

The newspaper The Guardian revealed on Thursday that officials from the Foreign Ministry deliberately ignored the mentioned veto from security agencies regarding Mandelson's suitability. This lack of trust was not only based on his well-known ties to Epstein, but also on the interests and relationships of some of the companies in which he acted as a counselor with Putin's Russia and Xi Jinping's China. Connections that the UK security agencies considered incompatible with the post at the White House.

A dish best served cold

The official version that Downing Street has striven to disseminate is that, faced with the dilemma posed by Starmer having already announced the appointment, the ministry used an exceptional power to overturn the negative recommendation of the intelligence services. The prime minister's office thus shifts all responsibility to the highest Foreign Office official, Olly Robbins. On the same Thursday, Starmer and the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, asked for his resignation. This Tuesday, this senior official appears before the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee. His testimony will be key to knowing whether the prime minister has told the truth or not. This afternoon, however, he has had to hear himself being called "a liar" in the chamber.

The debate in the Commons has been very heated and reminiscent of some of those that took place during Boris Johnson's tenure as prime minister, when he also preferred to play the oblivious fool who didn't realize what was happening around him, rather than a liar, in relation to the infamous parties during the pandemic.

Both the leader of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davis, respectively, have called for the resignation of the premier. But those who have most harshly criticized Starmer have been his own MPs. The appointment of Mandelson was seen as the latest maneuver by the Blairite wing of the Labour party, which since 2015 had undermined Jeremy Corbyn's authority as much as possible. From this perspective, Starmer has merely been the instrumental actor to purge the left. On Monday, accounts were settled. And depending on what Olly Robbins says tomorrow and the verdict of the ballot boxes on May 7th, they will go all out. Revenge is a dish best served cold.