Shameless Mandelson could still finish Starmer

And now, you’re about to be fired, and that’s all of your own making too: dishonest conduct in the last public office you held is now front-page news. The world knows about it, and the scandal has damaged the prime minister who personally hired you and shaken the stability of his government.

Your departure means that someone new is going to have to build relationships for the UK in America, dealing with the most unreliable and hostile White House administration of all time. And they’ll be starting months behind everyone else, all thanks to you.

In anything approaching this kind of scenario, most of us would be consumed by shame and remorse. We would struggle to get out of bed in the morning, let alone hold our head high. We would look for somewhere to curl up, unregarded, and wait everything out. Peter Mandelson, though, is not most men.

Instead of running for cover, Peter Mandelson was making demands – and backing them up with threats. The Foreign Office, he insisted, needed to handle his return to the UK in disgrace with sensitivity – and a huge payout. 

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He wrote: “My chief concern is leaving the US and arriving in the UK with the maximum dignity and minimum media intrusion which I think is to the advantage of all concerned, not least because I remain a crown/civil servant and expect to be treated as such. How is the FCDO assisting in this?”

Mandelson was quickly making legal threats to officials, telling them he had consulted with senior barristers – including a King’s Counsel, no less – leading one official to note “there is some carefully placed language around the public implications of not reaching a settlement, and the nature of an employment tribunal case”. 

With jaw-dropping chutzpah, his initial demand was that he should be paid up for the entirety of his four-year government contract (of which he had served just eight months), and his threats went beyond just the legal sphere. “There is a potential, absent a positive indication, Peter goes public on some of his claims so there is some urgency,” the official concluded.

In the end, Mandelson walked away with £75,000 of taxpayers’ money as a settlement for his dismissal. The new information that came to light, and which led to that parting of ways, included evidence that he had leaked sensitive cabinet documents, during a global financial crisis, to Jeffrey Epstein – then already a convicted sex offender, and a personal friend of Mandelson. 

Mandelson, of course, had known the whole time that he’d done that, even if the rest of the world didn’t. In the decade and a half between his public postings, his friend Epstein had become the world’s most notorious paedophile and sex trafficker, as the full scale of his criminal operation slowly trickled out into the public domain. 

It took not just a complete absence of shame, but also an utter dearth of self-preservation or common sense for Mandelson to volunteer himself for a role in public life once again, knowing what he did about the skeletons in his own closet.

And yet he did it anyway, because Peter Mandelson has always been that person. It has always been apparent that Mandelson never thought he did anything wrong on either of the first two occasions he was unceremoniously sacked as a government minister. 

None of it stopped him from staying at Epstein’s New York apartment – while Epstein was in prison – when he was a serving Cabinet minister in 2009. His answer to the Financial Times just a year ago on Epstein – “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all f*** off. OK?” – told anyone who cared to know just how sorry he ever was, which was not at all. 

That air of superiority, that imperviousness, and that disdain for what mere members of the public might think have always been there. The release of the first of what is likely to be many documents relating to his time as ambassador revealed his demand for a £500,000 payout, but it revealed nothing new about his character.

The reality is that it was all of these character traits that made No 10 think Mandelson would be a good appointment as ambassador while Donald Trump was in power. If you set a thief to catch a thief, appoint a narcissist to charm a narcissist. 

Keir Starmer can say he didn’t know the facts when he appointed Mandelson as often as he likes, but it will never ring true. Peter Mandelson has been the same person this whole time.