Starmer's
Mandelson statement to MPs - snap verdict
Andrew
Sparrow
It wasn’t
much of a win, but as Keir Starmer heads back to Downing Street he will
probably count that as a sort of success. Labour MPs did not turn on him; there
was no one on his side calling for his resignation, and those who did speak out
were mostly from the Corbynite left (whose views are discounted by No 10
anyway), and who were more keen to aim their fire at Morgan McSweeney and Peter
Mandelson.
If Kemi
Badenoch thought there was more mileage in this, she could have tabled a no
confidence motion on this which would have to be debated tomorrow, but she
didn’t. She can be brutal in the Commons, but her speech today did not cause
the PM any difficulties.
Last week
she was saying he was clearly lying. If he is, then he is doing it quite well,
because neither she, nor any other MP, made a convincing job this afternoon of
establishing that he has not been telling the truth about what he was told
about by the Foreign Office about the Mandelson vetting process.
On the
narrow process point – it is really plausible that No 10 did not know, and
could not find out, that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting
interview?– Starmer may even have won some people around this afternoon. He
sounded believable.
But, in
other respects, the process point (as well the issue about whether he
inadvertently misled parliament) is irrelevant. Starmer’s problem is that he
decided to approve the appointment of Mandelson in the first place, when it was
already clear that there was ample evidence that his business record and his
friendship with Jeffrey Epstein made him suspect. That, presumably, is why Olly
Robbins decided to facilitate the appointment by using his discretion to
overrule the vetting recommendation.
It seems
the argument of some in Downing Street might have been that Mandelson should
get the job not despite being the sleazy former best friend of a paedophile,
but precisely because he was this sort of character. They weren’t appointing
him ambassador to the Vatican. There seems to have been the assumption that
this was the sort of interlocutor Donald Trump (another ex-Epstein best friend)
might like. You can understand why Starmer won’t put it like that in public.
Whatever
the reason, it turned out to be a colossal misjudgment. Starmer may have seen
off Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey and all the others this afternoon, but this
controversy has only added to the long list of reasons Labour MPs have for
wanting him out before the next election and nothing he said this afternoon
changes that.
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