I’m sleepless, angry and anxious over this – and I know I’m not alone

I’ve heard some MPs, some Tory, some Labour, Nigel Farage, journalists too, call the Peter Mandelson betrayal “the biggest scandal of the century.” Journalist Marina Hyde wrote a brilliant piece in which she said “it’s not even the biggest scandal of the scandal.” She is right about that. The real scandal is the trafficking, the abuse, and the attitudes to women of so many rich powerful men. 

As Amelia Gentleman, in the Guardian, chronicled the way Epstein & Co talked about women in the files. How they see the role of women as being mere logistics, food, drink and sex. It’s horrible. It’s disgusting.

I get angry that we all get tarred with the same brush, now not least because of the Peter Mandelson association, as if anyone who knows him somehow enabled Epstein. It all plays into the narrative that “they’re all the same, all in it for themselves, have no principles.” 

We are NOT all the same. I am very proud of the New Labour project, and many of the things we did, and despite everything believe politics and politicians can be a force for good. 

But this Labour government is now looking like the last Tory one as it lurches from one big bad moment to the next. That makes me angry given the size of the majority the country gave them, the scale of the things that need fixing, and the way so much of the first two years has been wasted.

It’s a week now since we started to take stock of all this, and I still cannot, for the life of me, get my head round how close Peter Mandelson and Epstein seem to have been.

That as I was part of the team trying to advise Gordon Brown after the 2010 election, and in talks with Nick Clegg to see if we could do a Lib-Lab agreement, Peter was talking to Epstein and boasting that he had persuaded Gordon to go. I can’t get my head round him sending Epstein confidential notes about big economic decisions during The Crash. 

I’ve known Peter for more than forty years. We’ve had many good times together, and some bad. Sometimes we’ve gone years without speaking, for example after his second resignation. 

I’ve always known he is tricky, manipulative, can be secretive, as well as charming and clever. But I genuinely cannot fathom some of his exchanges with Epstein. Like when Epstein, on the day he was released, and they were joking about strippers and young girls. Was there nothing in Peter to say “Jeffrey, have you learned nothing?” 

Yet also – and here lies some of my confusion and anxiety – precisely because I have known him so long, I have concern about where this might all end for him. I really don’t get how people can go from boasting of being a “close friend” one day to ”lock him up and throw away the key” the next. 

I was angry and concerned at the decision to appoint Peter as Ambassador to the US. I understood the attraction. He’s a big figure, he had the New Labour connection, he knows trade and the global economy, and Keir Starmer clearly felt he needed more than a conventional diplomat to handle the Trump administration. 

But as risk-reward decisions go, I always had a worry that this would not end well (if not quite like this) and I said so to the people making the decision. Listeners to my The Rest Is Politics podcast may recall how Rory Stewart outed me awhile back because he had heard me talking to one of the decision makers about David Miliband as a prospective ambassador, and I still think that would have been a better call.

And I’m angry with myself maybe. I could have made a big thing about it, but I am conscious, sometimes, of having to balance the public-facing part of my life with the fact I often have privileged access to people who expect at least some element of confidentiality when I am acting either as an activist or being asked for advice, as does happen.

That being said, I’m not terribly impressed with the scale of the dumping and the distancing since the Mandelson scandal broke. Would it not have made more sense for Keir simply to say he made a judgement, in the round at the time, based on the pluses and minuses, which were fully assessed, and it’s now transpired it was a bad judgement, and I apologise? 

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Putting all the blame on the vetting, and being lied to, is what has made this even more a question of his judgement and also the competence of his operation, with all the inevitable changes now under way.

I’m also angry that so many in the media, along with people like Farage and Michael Gove, who said it was a smart appointment at the time, now say it was obviously a bad judgement call. 

I hate hypocrisy and these people are never challenged over that. And of course the media tend, in the main, only to do one volume – very loud and very anti-Labour – which means anyone who has ever had anything to do with Peter Mandelson is somehow presented as tainted for having failed to know what he was up to and with whom. 

I understand the call from Gordon Brown to clean up politics, and at least he had an agenda about how to address it. But there’s a real risk when he makes that call in the way he did that, just as the expenses scandal harmed the reputation of all, not just the cheats, this too plays into the Reform framing: They’re all the same, everyone is corrupt, the system stinks, nobody can be trusted. Their answer? Trust the man who sold us Brexit on a pack of lies, and is now getting money from home, abroad and crypto and boasting about it, and stick him in Downing St.

One thing that especially riles me up is the way the right wing, here and in America, are getting a free pass on all this. 

I got a message from Tommy Vietor, one of Barack Obama’s former staffers and now a successful podcaster with Pod Save America. He said: “If Epstein forces out Starmer and Trump survives, I will explode.” There are so many scandals in these files, yet the Trump-Bannon-Musk-Howard Lutnick crowd is getting off so lightly. 

And of course I’m angry about the way Epstein and his pals like Peter Thiel boast about Brexit being “just the beginning” and wonder, did Peter Mandelson not realise that this was part of his game too?

As for the anxiety, it’s about what happens next and what it means for politics, and for the country.

If Labour do not get their act together, and fast, then Farage is being gifted power, which I believe would be a disaster for this country.

In that scenario, I fear we would soon see in Britain the kind of things currently debasing politics in Trump’s United States; the victory of slogan over substance; open and brazen corruption; the deliberate stoking of division and hate; threats to free media and the rule of law.

It will be another gift to Putin. Another gift to the tech bros to whom this right wing populism is a route to a world in which they, rather than democratically elected politicians, have all the power.

So I totally understand the calls for Starmer to go. So many MPs are angry, so many members of the public are frustrated and disappointed. Me too.

I have felt for some time Morgan McSweeney’s position was vulnerable because whatever talents he has that helped Keir become leader and then Prime Minister, it’s a big problem if you are the chief strategist and the strategy isn’t working, or you are the Chief of Staff and the operation isn’t working. 

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But the job of Prime Minister is a whole different level and those urging for change must have some idea of what happens next, and why it would be better. 

People really underestimate the skills you need for the job of Prime Minister. Maybe Keir Starmer underestimated them too. But I am far from convinced by the names currently in the frame. 

And that leads me to the most depressing thought of all. That because of the nature of our politics, the quality of people going into politics, the nihilism of the mainstream media, the anarchy of social media, with dissonance, hypocrisy, short-termism, naivety, industrialised rage and wilful ignorance off the scale, we are becoming ungovernable.

That neither the parties nor the public are really prepared to face up to the big things that need to happen to turn this country round, given the sheer scale of real problems we actually face. 

So that’s the confusion to add to the anxiety. I am normally quite good at thinking ahead. I can usually see a course. Right now, as I write, I feel that is far from easy. 

So no. I can’t sleep. And I know from talking to plenty of other Labour people, I am not alone.

This is an edited version from the author’s Rest Is Politics monologue.