The Labour Party always prided itself on its incorruptibility, at least in comparison to the Tories. But the long fallout from the Peter Mandelson affair has been so unsettling because it confirms what many had long suspected: that the same political culture has now embedded itself inside Labour.

The allegations are serious. They center not only on Mandelson’s well-documented association with Jeffrey Epstein, but on what the so-called “Mandelson files” reveal about the circumstances of his return to influence. That is, the extent to which due diligence was overlooked, warnings were missed or ignored, and the degree to which access, networks and proximity to power appear to have smoothed a path back into the heart of Government. On Sunday, it was reported that a phone belonging to Morgan McSweeney — and containing messages relating to Mandelson’s appointment — was stolen last year. We may never know the full picture.

This is not simply a question of individual judgment. It raises broader concerns about how decisions at the top of the party are made: who is listened to, whose interests are prioritized, and how far informal networks of influence have come to shape formal political outcomes. Even within Labour, there are signs of unease. Angela Rayner acknowledged last week that the party must be mindful of how it is perceived, warning against a political culture that appears too close to power and too distant from the everyday concerns of those it claims to represent.

Of course, this culture did not appear overnight. The party had weathered financial scandals before the Tony Blair years, but it was the architects of New Labour who argued that the political settlement forged after Margaret Thatcher had fundamentally reshaped the terrain. Close engagement with the City, with major corporations and with concentrations of global wealth was presented as the price of governing. Lobbyists and political intermediaries became part of the ecosystem through which those relationships were managed. At the time, this was defended as pragmatism. Labour had to demonstrate it could be trusted by markets and capital if it was ever to return to power.

But that logic carried consequences. When political credibility becomes tied to the confidence of financial markets and corporate actors, it creates a structural tension. The closer a party edges towards those centers of wealth and influence, the harder it becomes to act independently of them. Policy risks being shaped not simply by what voters need, but by the priorities of political insiders. It is precisely this proximity — between political power and concentrated wealth — that lies at the heart of the concerns now surrounding Mandelson and, more broadly, Labour’s current direction.

Put simply, Mandelson should never have been welcomed back into the party. Keir Starmer already faced an uphill battle with the public: last year, polling found that almost two-thirds of voters feel the Prime Minister doesn’t respect them. The consequence of the Mandelson scandal has been a further widening of this distance between Labour and the people it once claimed to represent.

Thanks to these political choices, Reform UK has captured much of the ground which Labour should naturally occupy. But the early anti-establishment rhetoric of Nigel Farage’s party has softened as it absorbs elements of the Tory Right. The economic program taking shape around it increasingly resembles a hyper-charged version of the same Thatcherite orthodoxy: deregulation, corporate access, and a political culture entirely comfortable with wealth and influence.

Labour ought to be able to expose that contradiction. But a party that has spent the past several years constructing its own version of the same arrangement is in no position to do so. This is the integrity gap — that chasm between what politicians say and the public believes — and William Gladstone’s old warning still holds: “Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.”

The Mandelson files should be understood in that light. They illuminate a wider system in which power, wealth and influence circulate across party lines — and in which the language of public service has become increasingly detached from the reality of how and for whom decisions are made. Once people come to believe the ecosystem is rigged, they stop trying to reform it. Instead, they start looking for someone willing to tear it down.

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Clive Lewis is Labour MP for Norwich South.

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