Levi Higham
CW: Strong language.
Sir Anthony Seldon has become very used to this sight by now. Cabinet briefings, outspoken party grandees, and agitated backbenchers are all signs that have often pre-empted the fall of a government. The renowned historian has produced acclaimed accounts of the premierships of every prime minister since John Major, and he is well aware he may need to begin work on another before his most recent, Sunak at 10, is even released this coming August. “It’s a period of huge uncertainty”, Seldon tells me. As I discussed the events of the last couple of weeks with him, he remains confident Starmer is safe, “at least until the May local elections”. “The next difficult time will be July”, Seldon believes, “which is always a bad month for the Prime Minister, and then the Party Conference.”
We do not yet know when the Prime Minister’s time will come, but it appears Seldon is right in that Starmer is safe for now. Last week, the story in Westminster was noticeably more febrile, as speculation had all but concluded that the end was near. On Monday, following the departure of two key No. 10 aides, the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, publicly called for Starmer’s resignation in a move which supposedly had one Labour MP in tears.
Seldon, a veteran chronicler of the New Labour years, will be all too familiar with the striking parallels between our own times and the dying days of the premiership of Gordon Brown. In 2009, James Purnell, Brown’s Work and Pensions Secretary, resigned in spectacular fashion minutes before polls closed in a set of crucial local elections. Like Purnell, I am sure Anas Sarwar thought he had fired the starting pistol on the PM’s downfall. But, as one Scottish Councillor put it, Sarwar “picked a fight with the weakest person in UK politics and still lost”. Similarly, Purnell was not, as he had perhaps hoped to have been, followed by a wave of mass resignations, and a beleaguered Brown was able to limp on until the general election a year later. Why? Because one figure brought Brown’s cabinet enemies back from the brink, and it is the same figure who has pushed Starmer to his: one Lord Mandelson.
The ‘Prince of Darkness’ has cast an indomitable shadow over British politics for 40 years. Having first been appointed as Labour’s Director of Communications in 1985 under then leader Neil Kinnock, Mandelson has long been considered the architect of the party’s modernisation efforts, much to the chagrin of some of the Labour faithful. “My project will only be complete when the Labour Party learns to love Peter Mandelson”, Tony Blair famously said.
It was with the victory of Blair’s ‘New Labour’ in 1997 that Mandelson made the transition into the limelight, serving a vital role in Blair’s Cabinet until his resignation a year later for failing to disclose that he had received a loan from fellow MP Geoffrey Robinson. His return to office in 1999 as Northern Ireland Secretary was again cut short in 2001, when he resigned following accusations that he used his position to secure a passport for the wealthy Hinduja brothers.
It is in Gordon Brown’s decision to bring Mandelson back for the third time in 2008, as his Business Secretary and de facto Deputy Prime Minister, that this current scandal has its origins. Among the three million pages of files released by the US Department of Justice on 30 January were several email exchanges detailing the extensive relationship between Mandelson and convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. This relationship has long been known, but it was the revelation that Mandelson passed on privileged information to Epstein that has led figures such as Seldon to describe it as “the most consequential ministerial scandal in postwar history”.
At the height of the financial crisis, Mandelson sent Epstein an internal government memo recommending that Prime Minister Gordon Brown sell high-value assets to alleviate the strain on public finances. In another email from 2010, Mandelson notified Epstein of the details of a €500 billion (£435 billion) EU bailout to save the ailing Eurozone before that information was made public. These new revelations have not only had embarrassing political consequences for Mandelson, but also potentially criminal ones; the Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation that has included searches of two of Mandelson’s homes.
Crucially, it is not just Mandelson who has faced public backlash following these latest revelations. Renewed questions have been put to the Prime Minister, who appointed Mandelson as Ambassador to the US in February 2025. The relationship between Mandelson and Epstein was widely known at the time, but Starmer pressed ahead with the appointment, with Mandelson telling one Financial Times reporter, “I’m not going to go into [my relationship with Epstein]. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?” When the extent of the ties between the two became apparent in September, following the first round of released Epstein files, Mandelson was sacked, with the government insisting it was because of new information not available at the time of his appointment.
The saga surrounding Mandelson’s appointment re-emerged last week. Starmer faced a torturous Prime Minister’s Questions on the Wednesday, when he acknowledged a 2023 report by the Financial Times, which detailed that Mandelson had stayed at one of Epstein’s properties in 2009 while Epstein was in prison for child prostitution, had been presented to him before he appointed Mandelson to the post in Washington, DC.
However, the PM’s problems only got worse after he left the Commons chamber that day. His former Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, announced she would support a Conservative motion to have Mandelson’s appointment process investigated by the Intelligence and Security Committee, a powerful group of cross-party MPs and peers, rather than internally by the civil service. Numerous Labour MPs followed suit, in a move which perhaps indicates they did not have full confidence in the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office to be completely transparent.
The fallout from the scandal has been nothing short of tumultuous. Starmer faced a further blow on Wednesday, when he admitted he knew that his former Director of Communications, Matthew Doyle, had campaigned for an individual convicted of child sex offences when he appointed Doyle to the House of Lords. For a prime minister who has prided himself on his sense of moral integrity – especially his commitment to protecting vulnerable women and girls during his time as the director of the Crown Prosecution Service – the scandal goes to the very core of Starmer’s political identity.
Needless to say, Labour MPs are not happy, and many have openly criticised the PM for a catastrophic lapse in judgment. Norwich South MP Clive Lewis, admittedly not a natural Starmer ally, left a meeting of Labour MPs on Monday night lamenting that “a lot of people have been persuaded to turn up to Little Bighorn”.
If Labour MPs are bracing for the Battle of Little Bighorn, they sure have had their fair share of scalps left on the battlefield. Sunday saw the departure of Morgan McSweeney, the Marmite Svengali-like Chief of Staff who has been integral to the Starmer project for over six years. In his resignation statement, McSweeney announced he took “full responsibility” for the advice to appoint Mandelson.
An oft-repeated maxim in politics is ‘advisers advise, ministers decide’, but in his statement, McSweeney’s effective admission that in this case ‘minister decides, advisers resign’ has done little to inspire confidence in Starmer’s judgment. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, somebody whose entire fortune as the leader of her party has been resurrected on the back of the Mandelson affair, drew attention to this last Wednesday. At Prime Minister’s Questions, she aptly pointed to a comment made by Starmer during his time in Opposition, when he boasted, “I never turn on my staff. When they make mistakes, I carry the can”.
While opponents of the Prime Minister have criticised this refusal to take accountability for what was ultimately his own decision, the most concerning aspect of the subtext of McSweeney’s statement was that, fundamentally, it was true. The 18 months of Starmer’s premiership have been notable for a complete lack of strategic vision, and a tendency to be easily swayed. It was McSweeney who persuaded the PM to come out strongly for limited immigration in the ‘Island of Strangers’ speech, a speech now infamous not only for its controversy, but also the fact that Starmer openly acknowledged he did not believe what he was saying. This tendency to shirk key decisions was best espoused by one ally of McSweeney’s, who, last year, downplayed Starmer’s ability to lead from the front: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the [famously automated] DLR.”
Seldon, always one to appreciate a historical parallel, acknowledges the similarities I attempt to draw out between Starmer and Theresa May, somebody who was never quite the same after she had to sack Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, her own all-powerful Chiefs of Staff. But if Theresa May lost her political brain when she sacked her Chiefs of Staff, Starmer has lost his political beating heart. It was McSweeney who pushed Starmer to make the few big calls he has, such as on immigration and welfare, in a strategy geared towards seeing off the threat from Nigel Farage.
In addition to McSweeney, New Labour veteran Tim Allan resigned as the Downing Street Director of Communications early on Monday – Starmer’s fourth in 18 months. Can a replacement get the government’s scattered messaging back on track? They will need to. For Seldon, the ability to “set the direction” and “communicate it regularly and clearly” is the most important job a Prime Minister has.
However, Seldon is quick to observe that McSweeney’s departure may also be a blessing in disguise. “McSweeney was a superb electoral strategist”, he notes, “but his strength was not in governing”. As much of the chaos across the government in the last 18 months can be traced back to a dysfunctional Downing Street operation, a more able replacement “who understands Whitehall, the Treasury and the Country” might help Starmer to become a stronger PM, Seldon acknowledges.
Starmer certainly has capable figures in his new (albeit interim) Chiefs of Staff, Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson. A drive to ‘rewire the state’ might also help. In this, he has a new ally in Antonia Romeo, widely regarded as Starmer’s pick to become the Cabinet Secretary, the most senior official in the civil service. The previous incumbent of that post, Sir Chris Wormald, was pushed out following his own involvement in the Mandelson affair, and Starmer’s general dislike of his approach. It was Starmer’s decision to appoint Wormald in the first place (ironically, on the advice of Lord Mandelson), which attracted some of the strongest criticism from Seldon. In a piece in The Times last September, he wrote the decision to appoint Wormald, “a proven and steady official”, was a missed opportunity to get a figure “who would have driven through reform in a Whitehall that’s in dire need of modernisation”.
The success of Romeo in driving delivery through a sluggish Whitehall machine could make or break the PM’s own survival. In rectifying this, he is admitting it as his own mistake. For Labour MPs, they are witnessing an acknowledgement that the most Starmer-like figure – grey, uncharismatic and indecisive – was not the best person to drive change through the government.
Starmer’s position continues to be precarious, not least because this scandal has by no means concluded. The ISC investigation is sure to rumble on for weeks and months to come, and will ultimately bring to light how botched the Mandelson appointment process was, as well as the extent of the PM’s own role within it. Combine this with what is likely to be a bruising set of elections in May, and Labour MPs may be pushed from restless to rebellious.
Starmer does appear safe until then. Following Sarwar’s announcement on Monday, a hastily formed Praetorian Guard came to the PM’s rescue. His entire Cabinet, as well as senior Labour figures such as Rayner and deputy leader Lucy Powell, performed a vocal defence. A move to the ‘soft left’ will follow, Seldon posits, as that is where much of his Cabinet lies. This is especially true given that figures on the right of the party, such as Health Secretary Wes Streeting, are not seen as particularly loyal, though Streeting faces his own problems regarding his relations with Lord Mandelson. However, as any good classicist could tell you, a strong Praetorian Guard was not always in the emperor’s best interests. As long as they have their daggers pointing outward, and not in, Starmer remains safe.
I can confidently say that throughout my time at Oxford, no deadline has been more stressful than my attempts to write this article. Starmer has weathered the worst vicissitudes of his career over the past few weeks, and although he appears secure for now, the bruising hit to his authority may yet prove to be terminal.
Thus, Starmer is left channelling, of all people, Peter Mandelson himself; “I am a fighter and not a quitter”, Mandelson infamously declared after winning re-election following his first two resignations. Starmer at least can be reassured that he is in a stronger position than the last politician who uttered that phrase, with Liz Truss resigning only a day after invoking the ‘Prince of Darkness’. Yet, for writers like Anthony Seldon, it may be time to start drafting Keir Starmer’s political obituary – albeit still with space left for one final chapter.