Keir Starmer has to go because of his political complicity with the disgraced peer, argues Mike Phipps.

It has dominated the headlines all week, but there is still more to say about Jeffrey Epstein. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote on Saturday: “The sexual trafficking plotted by him and his fellow criminals is the most egregious example of a global network of wealthy and powerful men that thinks it can act with impunity.”

Egregious, yes – but it is just one example, and not only about the trafficking of children. Peter Mandelson’s apparent passing of secret, market-sensitive information to his friend Epstein and encouraging him to “threaten” the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, his Cabinet colleague Alastair Darling, underlines a culture not just of corruption, but of impunity.

And why wouldn’t Mandelson feel impunity? On two previous occasions he had acted improperly, over a scandal involving an undisclosed loan which precipitated his resignation from government in 1998, and again following accusations of using his position to influence an application for a passport, forcing him to resign again in 2001.

So why did Gordon Brown give him a peerage and bring him back into Cabinet as Business Secretary in 2008? Brown says: “I did so in spite of him being anything but a friend to me, because I thought that his unquestioned knowledge of Europe and beyond could help us as we dealt with the global financial crisis. I now know that I was wrong.”

Plausible – but this is not the full story. Anyone who lived through those times will remember that the leadership of the Party at this time was riven between the rival camps of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – based less on political differences and more on the very issues of career and ego that Brown seems to deprecate in his article. Bringing Mandelson back was an olive branch to the Blair camp, a calming measure that would stop what appeared to be Mandelson’s derogatory briefings against Brown’s team in the media. Brown’s appointment was motivated at least partly by factionalism.

Mandelson’s media operations against people in the Party whose politics he disliked intensified when Jeremy Corbyn became leader. “I work every single day to bring forward the end of [Corbyn’s] tenure in office,” he boasted. Yet many of those who now voice their belated disapproval of this corrupt man were more than happy to go along with this.

Mandelson was operating behind the scenes to get Corbyn’s replacement selected after 2019. Keir Starmer may complain that he was lied to, but it was his decision to fast-track Mandelson’s appointment as US Ambassador, without the inconvenience of parliamentary scrutiny. Starmer – and his team of advisors, headed by Morgan McSweeney – were in debt to Mandelson, without whose factional machinations the election as Labour leader of a vision-less, uncharismatic bureaucrat would have been considerably less likely. This is the real experience that Mandelson brought to the government and which Starmer’s team prized so highly. It helps explain why Mandelson was later allowed to pore over spreadsheets of potential Labour candidates, deleting the names and destroying the careers of those he disliked.

Simon Fletcher, who served as Jeremy Corbyn’s Chief of Staff, says: “I think they brought Mandelson in because it would provide a frisson from the association with Blair-era New Labour. They knew it would be received badly in many parts of the Labour movement but they would think that was a net positive – it would build on the conflict over suspending Jeremy Corbyn to show they were prepared to embrace the previously unthinkable.”

It’s not just that Starmer is weak…

There is a belief among some Labour MPs that Keir Starmer turned to Mandelson because, as a relic of New Labour, Mandelson had a bit of vision, which Starmer so clearly lacked. On this analysis, Starmer is in trouble for being useless, not up to the job.

That’s not good enough. If that were the only problem, the solution would be to replace Starmer with someone more competent at communicating the message, like Wes Streeting. But, this is not about messaging – it’s about the whole direction of travel of the government. Keir Starmer has to go because of his political complicity with Peter Mandelson.

Nor is it enough to say that only Starmer’s Chief of Staff should take the rap. McSweeney should have been sacked months ago, not least for apparently failing to brief Starmer before the latter went into the Commons to defend Mandelson in September, unaware that his officials had been told 24 hours earlier of a fresh pile of evidence of supportive emails from Mandelson to Epstein, casting new doubt on the former US Ambassador’s integrity and probity.

Mandelson was a central part of the factional apparatus that propelled Starmer to power and it is this political bond that has been central to the construction of a culture of impunity. It’s the same arrogance that led Labour Together, the faction led by Morgan McSweeney, to allegedly hire a PR firm to investigate journalists who were looking into the group’s funding.

It’s the same contempt for public accountability that has led the Starmer leadership to leave a trail of broken promises in its wake. The progressive prospectus on which Starmer was elected as Labour leader six years ago was cynically abandoned once he got the job. The Labour manifesto promising “Change” has equally been sidelined in office in favour of private sector-led ‘solutions’ and authoritarian Reform UK-friendly policies.

How ironic it is that Keir Starmer’s allies are saying that if he were replaced as leader by, for example Angela Rayner, a general election would be needed to gain a fresh mandate. As Andrew Fisher points out, cuts to Winter Fuel payments, disability benefit cuts, cutting jury trials, digital ID, raising employers’ NI, freezing tax thresholds, contracts with Palantir – none of these were in Labour’s 2024 Manifesto, none of them had a popular mandate.

Gordon Brown’s proposals go some way to addressing the lack of transparency and the need for accountability in appointments, as well as reining in the power of lobbyists.  A robust debate is needed on whether they are enough, but they need to be implemented immediately if any sense of trust is to be restored in political life. These reforms to public life should be accompanied by a comprehensive change of culture inside the Labour Party itself, which has seen top-down factional authoritarianism replace open and democratic selection processes. The culpability of Starmer and McSweeney in both these areas demonstrate that they cannot be the people to pioneer these reforms. They must go.

With Andy Burnham blocked from returning to the House of Commons by Keir Starmer himself and Angela Rayner still recovering from an ethics issue, some might argue that it would be futile for progressives in the Party to call for Starmer to resign if they don’t have a replacement candidate to field. This would be an entirely wrong approach.

The scale of the current turmoil marks a crisis of confidence in our political system and the ability of anyone to fix it.  MPs who understand this must start from a point of principle and step forward: Keir Starmer has forfeited the trust invested in him and must be replaced, not just for the good of his Party but in the interests of the country. The sooner this is done, the better, and a new government with a new leader can get on with the job of delivering Labour’s electoral mandate. It’s a huge opportunity over the next three years to bring about the change people voted for and still desperately want.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

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