Keir Starmer’s woes over the Peter Mandelson scandal has certainly sparked one group of people into action – those remaining Boris Johnson supporters keen to contrast the former ambassador’s links with a convicted paedophile with the supposed minor indiscretions that did for their hero’s time in office.
LBC’s Nick Ferrari has led the charge, telling his listeners how Johnson’s crime was “only a glass of Prosecco”, while in the Daily Express, columnist Richard Madeley was full of fury for how Mandelson’s alleged wrongdoing showed how Johnson was a relative saint.
Under the headline “Boris Johnson had birthday cake – Peter Mandelson has Epstein’s friendship”, Madeley asked his readers: “Can we take a moment to acknowledge how outsized the fury over Boris during lockdown now appears?”.
“Well It [sic] certainly puts Partygate into perspective, doesn’t it? A few illicit glasses of sauvignon; a slice or two of forbidden birthday cake… Boris Johnson’s lockdown shenanagins [sic] at No.10 are almost laughably trivial set against Mandelson’s monstrous mendacity.
“It’s easily the worst political scandal of our lifetime. Even Profumo pales in comparison with ‘Petey’ and his oh-so-cosy years of creepy conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein.”
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Warming to his theme, he wrote how “even Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal (the origin of all those “gate” suffixes to subsequent wrongdoing) doesn’t come close to Mandelson’s perfidy and breathtaking immorality.
“Yes, ‘Tricky Dicky’ Nixon was a wrong ’un all right, sanctioning and then lying about a break-in at Democratic HQ in Washington in June 1972… but Watergate was a purely political piece of skulduggery. Mandelson’s betrayal is fundamentally financial and goes way beyond the narrow, dog-eat-dog world of party rivalry.”
Madeley’s defence of Johnson was broadly and unsurprisingly supported by the Express readers’ comments, who agreed their man had been hard done by. “Boris had 1 slice of Birthday cake in No 10 where he lives,” wrote one, curiously in the present tense, while another mused conspiratorially about how “the woman who Boris asked to hold an inquiry was Sue Grey [sic], who at the time was in secret discussions with Starmer and she eventually became his Chief of Staff”.
Alas, what Ferrari, Madeley and the Express’s readers have either forgotten or have chosen to write out of history was… it wasn’t the Partygate scandal which forced Boris Johnson out of office, but his ministers’ patience with being asked to lie about what their leader knew about the behaviour of his deputy chief whip finally snapping.
Ministers were repeatedly sent out onto the media to deny that, at the time of Chris Pincher’s appointment, Johnson had any knowledge of any specific complaints about him being a sex pest. This was despite the fact that Johnson had at the time referred to him as “handsy” and joshed “Pincher by name, pincher by nature”.
This eventually led to 60 resignations of MPs from government positions, 30 by ministers, and Johnson being turfed out of No 10 by his own party. Not “a glass of Prosecco”, whatever his remaining cheerleaders would have you believe.
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