Keir Starmer faces every challenge with the cold, calculating mindset of the lawyer and prosecutor he was for years. And he resists admitting that political responsibility does not necessarily always have to respond to an irrefutable logic. He is starting to gain a reputation for looking for someone else to blame every time he has problems. And this Monday, in one of the most delicate appearances of his mandate, he has been accused by the opposition of looking for another scapegoat to cover up the umpteenth scandal surrounding Peter Mandelson, his disastrous appointment and dismissal as ambassador to Washington, and his murky relations with American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
“If I had known that Mandelson had not obtained the necessary green light in his internal security vetting, I would not have appointed him ambassador,” Starmer said in the House of Commons. “A deliberate decision was made to conceal that information from me. It’s not that I hadn’t asked about it or that I had let it go. It was a decision, reiterated on several occasions, not to share that information,” the prime minister accused.
Starmer pointed directly to Oliver “Olly” Robbins, until a week ago the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office. He was the highest-ranking official in that department, and the only one with authority to ignore the veto on Mandelson issued by the UK Security Vetting Department (UKSV), the independent body that thoroughly examines the personal history of candidates for public office.
“I asked him on several occasions why he hadn’t told me, and he assured me he couldn’t do so due to legal imperative. I don’t agree,” Starmer said in Parliament. “Without revealing the details of the investigation, he could have warned me about the veto,” he explained.
Legal complexity, political mess
The problem for Starmer is that the Mandelson affair is poisoned from its origin, and any new indication that his appointment as ambassador to Washington was pushed through against all evidence calls into question the prime minister’s apparent poor judgment when making decisions. For this reason, once again, the prime minister began his appearance by again apologizing for the error of choosing that character.
More serious and painful than the parliamentary attacks from opposition leaders have been those from relevant members of the Labour Party, who have questioned why the former minister and historical politician was appointed high diplomatic representative to the Donald Trump Administration, despite his murky relations with Epstein or his business dealings with China and Russia.
Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who chairs Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, directly pointed to Starmer’s and his team’s obsession with placing Mandelson in Washington against all odds as the main reason for this new fiasco. “For certain members of the prime minister’s team, securing that position for Mandelson was a priority that outweighed all others, and security considerations took a backseat,” she asserted.
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The former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn; his right-hand man and former Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell; or Diane Abbott, the first black female MP to sit in the House of Commons, now expelled from Labour ranks, have attacked Starmer, harshly reproaching him for resorting to a politician like Mandelson, who carried a controversial history. He resigned twice from Tony Blair’s governments due to his dealings with billionaires. And his intimate relationship with Epstein was well known before Starmer considered him for the Washington post.
Starmer finds it difficult to escape a trap where any escape entails scratches. Because even if he convinces his own that Robbins did indeed conceal fundamental information about Mandelson’s failed security vetting, the resulting image is that of an overconfident prime minister who did not show enough interest or ask the necessary and obligatory questions of his team when a public outcry began to emerge around the appointment of the former Labour minister. “I know it’s impossible to believe that I was kept in the dark all that time,” he admitted in the House of Commons, thus provoking laughter from the opposition.
“This prime minister has thrown all his staff under the bus. A man who, from opposition, promised to take responsibility for all his organization’s mistakes, has ended up firing his Cabinet Secretary, his Chief of Staff, his Director of Communications, and now, the Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs,” said Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch during the parliamentary confrontation. “A former Attorney General so lacking in curiosity that he asked nothing during Mandelson’s vetting process,” she concluded.
Spokespersons for the Liberal Democrat Party, the Scottish National Party, and the Greens have joined the accusation against Starmer for not having control of his government. All are demanding a resignation that, for now, will not happen.
The Labour Party faces crucial elections on May 7 —municipal in England, regional in Scotland and Wales— in which all polls predict a collapse attributable to Starmer. Until then, none of his internal rivals will decide to make a move, but the expressions and discouragement among Labour ranks were evident during Monday’s parliamentary debate.
And the week’s agony is not over yet. Olly Robbins, the former senior Foreign Office official whom Starmer blames for the entire fiasco, and whom he summarily dismissed, appears this Tuesday before Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. For now, he has already sought legal advice and has made it clear that he resists being the prime minister’s new scapegoat.
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