With the Prime Minister denying any knowledge of the Mandelson vetting farce, Kevin Crane assesses his chances of survival

A recurring joke in the classic sitcom ‘Fawlty Towers’ would often see the main character – a hapless, incompetent and poorly-mannered hotel owner called Basil Fawlty – realise that he had made an error far, far too late for other people to not to notice and then resort to blaming someone else as a face-saving exercise. This was usually one of his unfortunate employees, but if one of them could not be located, Basil would resort to blaming imaginary people, leading to sights of him absurdly demanding answers and explanations from thin air. I assume Keir Starmer has seen the show, and I wonder if he realises that he is acting this embarrassment-comedy out in real life.

The prime minister of Great Britain wants us all to know that he is absolutely furious that he was not told that his appointee for the job of ambassador to the United States failed official security checks. Who he is furious with is, however, a touch vague. No one, it seems, can exactly confirm who specifically appointed Peter Mandelson to the ambassador’s job, or why the failed security check wasn’t a barrier to do so. You might say to yourself “I’d hate to be that guy” once they identify him, but whoever the guilty party is they are currently experiencing an amazing run of good luck, since there just doesn’t seem to be any information available to reveal anything about him.

It is very strange that Mandelson, one of the highest-profile political figures in Britain for the past thirty years, has become such a black hole of information. But what can you do? It’s all just been factors far beyond anyone’s control. Who was to know that ex-Starmer aide and Mandelson best-pal Morgan McSweeny would have his work phone stolen mere weeks after having to step down as a result of revelation that good old Petey was extensively named in the Geoffrey Epstein dossiers? What were the odds that Mandelson’s multi-million-dollar political lobbying company, which was being hastily wound-up at the same time, would unfortunately lose it’s email archive? Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying there’s a coverup, only that all the events we would expect to see in coverup have happened. And isn’t that just such a shame for Starmer and his sinking government?

One of the few things Sir Keir is very clear on in this situation is that he is not going to resign, which is increasingly coming across as a bold assertion. His likelihood of staying in Number Ten for much more than a few weeks is low… and the longer he hangs on, the more acute the political crisis for him and the Labour Party is likely to be.

If BoJo couldn’t survive…

It’s important to restate that the Starmer/Mandelson scandal is about as serious as political controversy can get. Mandelson came under scrutiny because he was associating with Epstein, a known and later convicted paedophile sex trafficker, but what came out about him was even worse than simply those facts. Communications uncovered by US investigators appear to reveal that Mandelson was sending confidential economic policy information, while serving as a senior member of the British government, in order to enable Epstein and other financiers he associated with to manipulate markets and get rich off the backs of the public. Establishment figures have been noisily speculating that this went beyond misconduct and actually constitutes treason.

Even before his relationship with Epstein was made public, Mandelson was known to have mixed his political dealings with private business interests freely. He was sacked from government a (probably record-breaking) three times and later parlayed his contacts into the aforementioned lobbying company, called Global Counsel, which provided privileged information and access to any powerful figures rich enough to afford it: law, ethics and human rights concerns being no object. It really is not a surprise that the British secret service, performing any sort of dispassionate analysis of this man’s record, concluded that he was not a trustworthy candidate for an ambassadorial job.

For a bit of perspective, it’s worth thinking back four years to the fall of a previous prime minister: Boris Johnson (I know, it feels longer ago, doesn’t it?) resigned over scandals that were less serious than this. Specifically, he was ousted over a combination of “Partygate” and the appointment of sex-abuser Chris Pincher as a senior government official.

Both these incidents were undoubted wrongdoings by Johnson. The former was the habitual breaking of COVID-era lockdown rules by him and his staff at Downing Street, the second involved him directly lying about one of his cronies’ conduct. They were not, however, vast international and system-level outrages on the scale of what Mandelson is accused of and of having been enabled to do.

How much do politicians even matter anymore?

How is it that up-to-that point very popular PM like Johnson got ousted for so much less than the never-popular leader Starmer has so far? There are probably two related differences: the relative strength of their respective parties, and the perceived usefulness that they have to powerful individuals in the British state.

As hard as it is to remember now, the Tories actually felt pretty confident in the earlier part of 2022. They had decisively walloped Labour in the general election a couple of years before, survived the Pandemic with pretty strong public support (misplaced, as we now know, but real at the time) and their ranks were full of ambitious individuals keen to further their careers and political agendas.

This a world away from the Labour Party of 2026: a party that knows it essentially won the last general election with an illusion of mass support, that is presiding over an economy that is making most people significantly poorer and unhappier, and that is limping towards its worst local election results ever in a few weeks. There is also nothing of the energy and enthusiasm on Labour’s parliamentary benches that there was among Johnson’s Tories: most Labour MPs can’t imagine themselves as PM and know full well no one else does either. This is a party that cannot ditch it’s leader as a result of fundamental weakness, not strength.

Behind these situations, however, is potentially even more important factor: Starmer is still serving a purpose for the ruling class, in a way that Johnson had been deemed not to do any longer. It was not widely discussed in the media in 2021-2, but the financial establishment and their fanatical supporters in the civil service and Treasury had been falling out-of-love with Bungling Boris long before the public did. As the pandemic measures were being withdrawn, they wanted a very hard return to pre-2019 austerity measures. Johnson made himself into an obstacle to this, because he wanted to stay popular and had gotten something of a taste for audacious state economic intervention during the lockdown period. This was the background to a narrative supporting his ouster being constructed, which his natural fecklessness simply made easier.

There is, in contrast, no particular urgency from within the permanent state of the financial elite to see the back of Starmer. And of course there isn’t: he does everything they ask of him. He is a relentlessly austerian who absolutely wants to make the working class pay for the capitalist crisis. So, while Labour politicians pathetically collude in allowing the official most-hated prime minister in modern history to cling to power, they come under no institutional pressure to stop. The cries from every single opposition party for Starmer to resign can be dismissed as noise while there are no real consequences for him staying in office.

If the people want Starmer to go, they need to bring a fight to him

Consequences will arrive eventually, of course. As I said previously, Labour is poised for an utterly catastrophic election result in May, in which they will lose London on a scale not seen since the 1960s and Wales for the first time ever. It may be that Labour MPs do finally move to get rid of Starmer once he has acted as the lightning rod for that particular catastrophe.

Whether they do or not, however, the fact remains that Labour is determined to stick to Starmer’s policy agenda come what may. The party has, if anything, entrenched it’s viciously right-wing economic agenda since the global energy crisis Trump has created in the Middle East. Even supposed leadership-hopeful Wes Streeting, who had been trying to create more left-ish credentials for himself last year, has now openly said that Britain must cut welfare to fund warfare. Streeting’s leadership ambitions had been on the wane for a while, not least because he is also a well-known Mandelson protegee and as such also tarnished by the same swirling vortex as Starmer. Ultimately, if we actually want restitution for the Mandelson scandal, getting rid of rotten individuals like Starmer, McSweeny and Streeting would only ever be first steps. The objective has to be to harness public anger against this Labour government, which Mandelson did so much to create, and channel it into the movement for an alternative.