Keir Starmer feels badly let down. He’s not alone.
The Mandelson affair has more cut-through than any other story I can recall since Brexit. There is a very real disgust in the country at large. For once, the sugar rush of excitement in media reporting is matched pound for pound by the public’s sense of revulsion.
In the last 48 hours, rage has sprung up from friends and relatives whose capacity for indifference to politics sometimes astonishes me. Not this time. The phrase see you next Tuesday has filled my text messages and WhatsApp chats.
That disgust is centred — squarely and correctly — on Mandelson; revealed (if revealed is the right word for a man who revelled in his image as the Prince of Darkness) as an odious, treacherous snake. He betrayed his country and deserves to go to jail. It is hard to think what else “misconduct in public office” could apply to, if not this.
But this revulsion does not exist in isolation. It is amplified, magnified, intensified by a deeper sense of betrayal — not Mandelson’s, but Starmer’s.
Nineteen months of government have managed to turn the wave of relief and hope the nation felt at the expulsion of the Tories into something approaching chronic depression.
As much as ministers continue to plead their inheritance from the Conservatives (housing minister Steve Reed was still at it on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programme, during a real-time evisceration performed — without anaesthetic — by surgeon Amol Rajan), it no longer washes.
The endless list of disappointments, U-turns and failures has overwhelmed the successes and — more importantly — defeated the strategy of steady, visible improvements in real people’s lives. There have been too few of them, and the burn has been far too slow.
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Some argue this is the media’s fault. It really isn’t. The right wing malcontent press in this country is like the weather: shake your fist at the clouds all you like, tomorrow they will still piss down on you regardless.
This government has been either too arrogant, too complacent, or too plain incompetent to bother delivering a compelling narrative about what it is actually doing.
At a time when we need a honed, heavyweight political slugger to knock Nigel Farage out, our prime minister is staggering like a punch-drunk boxer from one corner of the ring to the next.
It may suit the challengers for his job to let him twist a little more in the wind, until after the coming disasters of the Gorton and Denton by-election and the subsequent mauling Labour will surely receive at the May local elections.
At face value, having 400-odd MPs behind you might seem an unassailable advantage for any prime minister. But not when they start getting their knives out. And the knives are now out.
The Mandelson affair would be an existential crisis for any prime minister at any time. But a strong, successful, inspiring and relatable prime minister survives this. Keir Starmer will not.
Yes, the prime minister feels let down by Peter Mandelson.
But the country feels let down by the prime minister.
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