Everything Donald Trump touches dies. He put his name on the Kennedy Center in Washington, prompting artists and performers to flee in such numbers that the venue will now shut down for “approximately” two years. The Washington Post under owner Jeff Bezos sought to ingratiate itself with the second Trump presidency; this week it announced 300 layoffs and the withering of that once great institution. And now we can add one more, unexpected item to the list poisoned by the touch of Trump: Britain’s Labour government.
It’s easily forgotten, but it was because of Trump that Keir Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson to serve as the UK ambassador to Washington. The prime minister decided it would take a snake to navigate the serpentine backchannels of the new administration and that Mandelson had the skill set. The result is an irony rich enough to make you retch. The Epstein files, which contain more than 38,000 references to Trump, his Mar-a-Lago estate and other related terms, seem set to bring down a national leader who is not mentioned by Epstein even once.
Which points to a related irony, no less bitter. Because politics is Newtonian, with elections often won by those who represent an equal and opposite reaction to what has gone before, Starmer reached Downing Street in part because he was a boy scout – the squeaky clean antidote to the sleaze of Boris Johnson. His pitch to the voters was that he was not exciting, but he was trustworthy, a former prosecutor free of the whiff of scandal. For him to be linked, via Mandelson, to the netherworld of Jeffrey Epstein and the vile abusers of women and girls who filled it is not merely embarrassing or compromising: it destroys his chief claim to the top job. As the Economist asked this week, if this can happen, then “What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?”
Hence the number of Labour MPs willing to text journalists – anonymously – declaring the prime minister a dead man walking. The only question, they say, is when, not if. We’ll come to the question of timing, but that Starmer is doomed is not the only conclusion that suggests itself. There’s a risk that other lessons will be drawn from this terrible episode – lessons that have to be resisted.
The first is the one you could hear on phone-in shows all week and which has an immediate, easy appeal. It says, with a world-weariness that poses as wisdom: what has happened is no surprise because that’s what they’re all like. All politicians are in it for themselves. Sure, Mandelson was more blatant – grovelling to billionaires, hustling for big-money jobs and seats on the board when he was barely out of the ministerial door – but the rest are no different. Starmer himself recognises how widely that belief is held. He reportedly told his cabinet: “The public don’t really see individuals in this scandal, they see politicians.”
That has to be fought. Partly because, as anyone who has spent much time with actual politicians knows, most are not like Mandelson. Plenty are weird; quite a few are consumed by ambition and the desire to climb the greasy pole. But so lacking in scruples that they would not only be best pals with a convicted child abuser but pass government secrets to him at the height of a global financial crisis? No, that is the exception, not the rule.
“Plague on all their houses” cynicism has to be fought for another reason too: because it is the seedbed for Reform UK and Nigel Farage. The only way they can prevail is if the British electorate decides that all politics, and all politicians, are rotten to the core. Farage feeds on such sour cynicism; he needs it to spread. It might seem smart, undeceived and suitably sophisticated to depict Mandelson as just the most visible fruit from a wholly poisoned Westminster tree, but do that and you smooth the way for a nationalist authoritarian government headed by a man whose favourite world leaders are Trump and Vladimir Putin.
There is, incidentally, a factional version of the all-as-bad-as-each-other position and it’s already audible within the Labour universe. It holds that Mandelson might not be typical of all politicians, but he is typical of the New Labour tendency – in thrall to wealth, denuded of values, heedless of the vulnerable. But that too is a caricature, one that forgets that an even bigger figure in the creation of New Labour was Gordon Brown, a man obsessed with tackling poverty and whose lack of interest in material goods is renowned. It matters because, as Ed Miliband learned, trashing the reputation of New Labour does not endear voters to Labour – it just discredits the whole party.
As for Starmer, his concerns are more immediate. There are things he can do. He can encourage his allies to scare Labour MPs thinking of toppling him by urging them to contemplate the alternatives. Wes Streeting, longtime mentee of Peter Mandelson? Angela Rayner, driven out as deputy PM by financial scandal? Miliband, rejected by the voters more than a decade ago?
Starmer can hope that the Labour chair of parliament’s intelligence and security committee decides to take months rather than days to work through all the documents they have been asked to review, in the hope that the fury currently felt by Labour MPs slowly subsides into mere sullen discontent. Or he can cast aside his human shield by demanding the resignation of his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who pushed so assiduously for the Mandelson appointment.
But those moves have one thing in common: they merely buy time, postponing the day of reckoning. There is one other argument Starmer may be tempted to offer in his defence, though it’s one he would surely not dare make.
He could say that what has enraged so many, including among his own MPs, was his admission on Wednesday that he had known, when he appointed him, that Mandelson had continued his relationship with Epstein. But, Starmer could say, pointing his finger at the benches in front of and behind him, so did all of you. It had all been laid out, in detail, two years before Mandelson was posted to the US, in a JP Morgan report covered in the Financial Times. Why did so few of you protest at the time? Why, on the contrary, did the Westminster village, including Farage by the way, along with most of the media, support the appointment, declaring it a masterstroke?
It’s not as though association with Epstein after the latter’s imprisonment was previously understood to be acceptable: look at the response to the then Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview in 2019. Yet the outrage of that moment had clearly faded six years later. Just before Starmer sent him to Washington, Mandelson had been the chancellor of a British university and the co-host of a Times podcast; he was on screen throughout the BBC’s election night coverage in July 2024. What was once deemed disqualifying from public life was regarded so no longer.
That raises much larger, and darker, questions than “How long has Starmer got?” Put simply, why did the pain and torment endured by so many women and girls register only fleetingly? What is it about the suffering of women at the hands of rich and powerful men that made it so forgettable?
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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