At yesterday’s cabinet meeting Keir Starmer observed that the public doesn’t see individuals in the Epstein scandal, it sees politicians. Peter Mandelson’s declaration that he has “no recollection” of receiving $75,000 of payments from Epstein would, he warned, cause voters to “lose faith in all politicians and weaken trust still further”.
It was an accurate diagnosis of the public mood – and that for Starmer is the problem. More than a change of ideology, he promised voters a change of standards. In his first speech after entering No 10 he spoke of “a return of politics to public service”, noting that “when the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation”.
Two Labour politicians have defined the start of this year: Mandelson and Andy Burnham. At first sight there might not appear to be a connection between their fates. But voters in Gorton and Denton, where a by-election looms on 26 February, have linked them. In focus groups, says Luke Tryl, the director of More in Common, they drew a contrast between Starmer rewarding Mandelson with an ambassadorship while blocking Burnham – “who actually delivered for Mancs” – from standing for parliament.
For an unpopular Prime Minister, whose fate will in part hinge on the by-election result, such comparisons are dangerous. On one side is Burnham, the most popular Labour politician in the country, elected three times as Greater Manchester mayor, winning 214 out of 215 wards in 2024. On the other is Mandelson, last elected in Hartlepool at the 2001 general election, but wielding remarkable influence over the Brown government and Starmer’s Labour in the years that followed. As a former EU commissioner and peer he is, in many ways, an emblem of a political class that voters have revolted against; Burnham, with his popular touch, has been able to succeed in a less deferential age.
The irony is that it is the mayor who is a more natural political ally of Starmer than Mandelson, who often treated the Labour leader with haughty disdain (“I’m afraid he’s come badly unstuck,” Mandelson told my colleague Anoosh Chakelian in 2021).
Starmer, remember, was never part of the Blairite guild, his first friends in Westminster politics were soft-left figures such as Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan who shared his scepticism of late New Labour. After entering parliament in 2015 he backed Burnham’s leadership campaign rather than that of Liz Kendall.
But Starmer’s relationship with the mayor grew progressively more fraught – an appeal for support in the 2020 leadership election was rejected (“I can’t be seen to be backing a London lawyer against two women from the north,” the mayor reportedly said). Mandelson, meanwhile, sensing political opportunity, dialled down his public criticism of Starmer as Labour drew closer to power and exerted significant influence over strategy. When an anxious government confronted the forbidding prospect of Donald Trump in the White House, the invitation that Mandelson craved came.
And so it is that Starmer is more closely linked with a man who stated “I do not want to live by salary alone” than with one who donates 15 per cent of his salary to a homeless charity each month. For a Prime Minister who aspired to lead a “government of service”, that is a tragic place to be.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: The Epstein files expose the rot of Mandelson’s Britain]
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