How did ‘Mr Rules’ let the Mandelson scandal happen?

Now that the Peter Mandelson scandal has erupted back on to Britain’s front pages, can we once and for all dispense with the notion that Keir Starmer is a ‘forensic’ political operator who follows rules and procedure to the letter?

Starmer’s former UK ambassador to Washington was arrested yesterday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, allegedly for passing on financially sensitive information to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson himself denies any wrongdoing, and no one is suggesting that Starmer should have known about the precise contents of any private emails with Epstein. But shouldn’t our ex-prosecutor PM have asked a few more probing questions of Mandy before offering him one of the most coveted jobs in the British government?

What the prime minister surely knew when he appointed him last year was that Mandelson continued to have a relationship with Epstein, after his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor. It was public knowledge – indeed, published in the Financial Times – that Mandelson stayed in Epstein’s Manhattan apartment in 2009, during the financier’s first spell in prison. Starmer must also have known the Epstein Files were a bomb waiting to go off, with US president Donald Trump having campaigned for their release during the 2024 election.

And if the PM was unaware of any of that publicly available information, then he must at least have known that Mandelson was a magnet for sleaze scandals, having been sacked twice by Tony Blair and accused of dodgy dealings with a Russian oligarch when he was posted to Brussels as Britain’s European commissioner. Plus, there is the small fact that the man was literally nicknamed ‘the prince of darkness’…

Even if ‘forensic’ Keir somehow missed all of this himself, such things are supposed to be caught when the Foreign Office carries out due-diligence checks on appointees. Except, according to the i newspaper, vetting that would normally take months was carried out in weeks – fast-tracked under pressure from No10. Security-service insiders suggest that a ‘full and proper’ background check would have turned up some of the allegations that were later made public in the Epstein Files. But of course, that process was expedited to put ‘Petey’ in a plum job.

None of this is to suggest that we should overly fetishise bureaucratic hiring rules or vetting procedures. Who the PM should appoint as our man in Washington is a question of political judgement above all else. But isn’t ‘Mr Rules’ precisely what Keir Starmer promised he would be in Downing Street? Indeed, that cringe-inducing moniker was given to him by one of his own shadow ministers in 2020, for his apparently strict observance of the coronavirus regulations, in contrast with his cake-scoffing, Estrella-swigging opponent, Boris Johnson. Starmer was similarly hailed by pliant media for his ‘detailed and forensic’ questions at PMQs, for his ‘clinical’ and ruthless ‘cross-examinations’. Yes, the lawyerly Labour leader might be a bit dull and lacking ‘the vision thing’, Starmer’s fanboys might concede, but at least he would cross every procedural t, and dot every legal i. He would bring the eye for detail of the barrister, the ‘fearsome’, forensic acuity of the prosecutor to the job of prime minister.

The fact that Starmer can’t even get that right isn’t just a sign of his incompetence (although he certainly brings that in spades). It’s that those lofty appeals to ‘rules’ and ‘procedure’ have always been pure wibble. Rules are made to be broken, as the saying goes, and it is politics that dictates whether a rule breach is deemed a trifling non-event or a scandal that leads heads to roll.

We can see this most clearly in the civil service – the wing of the state that claims, quite implausibly, to stand above the political fray, bound only by hallowed rules and codes of conduct. Some of the recent scandals coming out of the Cabinet Office’s comically misnamed ‘ethics department’ would be considered too on the nose if they were written as satire.

The Sunday Times reported last weekend that Ellen Atkinson, the government’s head of propriety and ethics, was actually promoted to the job ‘in breach of its own ethics rules’ (the appointment was not advertised to any external candidates). Atkinson replaced Darren Tierney who, in 2022, is alleged to have ordered staff to break into a safe holding a copy of an investigation into alleged bullying by Dame Antonia Romeo, who Starmer appointed last week as his new cabinet secretary. The document said she had a ‘case to answer’. Tierney had the investigation and other files destroyed. Naturally, he says he acted within the rules – a claim dismissed as ‘extraordinary’ by a former civil servant speaking to The Times.

Before her appointment, Romeo was also accused of misusing taxpayer money for expenses and using her position to promote woke ideology. She reportedly told one underling to attend a ‘gender-nonconforming book club’ as part of a performance review. Which brings us back to Starmer who, just as when hiring Mandelson, is reported to have ‘forced through’ the process to give the cabinet secretary role to Romeo, his preferred candidate.

The picture that emerges here is one of fast-tracked appointments for me, ‘ethics’ and ‘procedure’ for thee. More often than not, rules, regulations and process matter only in as much as they advance or impede the interests of the Blob and its allies.

In the end, the Mandelson affair matters, not because Keir Starmer may have followed the ‘wrong’ processes in hiring his ambassador, but because he lacked the political nous to see why some sort of scandal involving the prince of darkness was inevitable. It is yet one more failing among many showing why he is so unsuited for high political office.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.