And Starmer isn’t the only Labour figure to have a recent swing. In January, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, declared he would “rewire” the civil service — in front of a neon sign reading “move fast, fix things” — with no “sideways shimmy to another team or department if you fail to perform”.

The archetypal mandarin, then, is lazy, obsessed with process over outcome, and something of a stranger to their office desk. (Plus, the PM seems to be implying, secretive and conniving.) For a clever graduate, in this telling, the civil service offers an easy life: a well-pensioned, squishy middle ground between the corporate grind and the high-status penury of the arts. The last jobs-for-life left in 21st-century Britain. 

Is that account accurate? Pilfer an unattended lanyard and slip into SW1’s stately buildings. What you see will, in fact, have more in common with the artsy end of the employment spectrum than with the corporate world. Job cuts, low pay and scant promotion prospects have turned working for a nuclear-armed state, one that oversees the world’s sixth-largest economy, into something approaching a hobby career.

Behind the edifices of creamy Portland stone which run along the 640 meters of Whitehall are the offices from which much of the world was run for much of the past two centuries. Their present condition could be a metaphor for the nation. “You’ll have some nice parts where you can host dignitaries,” says James*, a youngish diplomat at the Foreign, Common and Development Office, of his department’s headquarters at King Charles Street. “But where you work, there’ll be damp; the toilets will be blocked; the wi-fi [will be] pretty crap.” It’s very Slow Horses, James says, in both office décor and the corresponding gallows humor.

These offices are staffed by much the same people as any halfway-prestigious private company: graduates, usually with humanities degrees from decent universities, in smart-casual dress, or a suit (but no tie) for big meetings. They write reports, send emails, and do generic admin. In this case, not in service of selling vacuum cleaners or bonds, but serving the political wishes of the government of the day by helping them formulate policy, then carrying it out. Everything from drawing up a new geopolitical strategy, to making sure a Commonwealth reception is stocked with enough sandwiches, can fall under a civil servant’s brief.

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Rachel* joined the civil service — the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to be precise — from a different industry, and worked there for a couple of years in her mid-twenties before going back to the private sector. The money was one motivation for leaving: her salary when she quit was around £45,000, a lot less than what followed. Another was that familiar beast of Whitehall: bureaucracy, especially after Labour returned to power in 2024. “We would say all the time, ‘We never thought we’d miss the old Tory SpAds,’” she says. “[But] they were just so much easier to work with than the [Labour] ones.” Her team went from being able to liaise directly with government special advisers — political appointees working for Tory ministers — to being instructed to instead contact a minister’s private office of civil servants.

It was an “added layer of communication”, Rachel says, “which slowed everything down so much”, negated the actual hard work her team was doing, and contributed to a frustration which had her eyeing up the exit. The main reason she left, though, was the department’s promotional system, or lack thereof. “Essentially, someone has to leave the job for a promotion to become available.” 

Rachel’s is not the kind of story you want to hear if you care about Britain’s state capacity: someone talented and hard-working, who’s left money on the table to enter public service, being spat out. For what it’s worth, Max*, a twenty-something at the Treasury, thinks the idea that maddening layers of process drive civil servants out of the business — if you can call it that — is “slightly overdone”. James similarly believes that “the machine can move fast with the right incentives, or responding to the right demand signal”. True as this might be, a reputation for bureaucracy, even undeserved, will have its own damaging deterrent effect on those considering entering Whitehall.

What is agreed upon is the money problem. Max says that the lowest rungs of the Treasury are poorly paid even by general civil-service standards, with starting salaries well under £30,000. (Their US equivalents in Washington start on between the equivalent of £42,000 and £52,000, depending on their education level.) “I know of people who were actually cutting into the savings they had made from previous jobs in order to afford to be in London to work at the Treasury.” As much as people might want to work there, plain financial reality might quickly force them out. The result? “A big blob of the Treasury is actually south-west London private school types,” Max explains, “who can afford to grit their teeth and power through.” Pay-to-play is bad enough in arts and media. Do we really want it corroding the government’s economic engine?

James works abroad, in what’s called a “hardship area”: essentially, a poor, chaotic country which an urbane diplomat needs extra inducement to move to. It means a rather cushy setup: his accommodation is paid for, he gets around 40 days of annual leave, and he also receives a “flight package” to cover trips to the UK and elsewhere. And if you’re a diplomat with kids being educated where you’re stationed, the government has an obligation to maintain that same level of schooling. If they were at a fancy international school abroad, that often means the British taxpayer continuing to cover a private education when the family moves back home. But the Foreign Office has “taken a real hit” budget-wise, says James. “You are starting to hear stories of seniors being told the office won’t cover their kids that are upper-sixth at private school because it’s costing too much.”

With Foreign Office restructuring plans entailing a headcount reduction of up to 25% in the next few years, there’s a de facto “promotion freeze”, says James, with a lot of voluntary exit packages waved around threateningly. Similarly, says Max, the Treasury’s self-image as one of the “big-dog departments” means that people prefer not to move anywhere else in government. As a result, promotion within it is “very, very difficult” — creating additional pressure on those who can’t afford to wait things out. The City, with its big salaries, is ready to embrace those who bail.

The cost-cutting is affecting the quality of the civil service’s staff. Whitehall has traditionally leaned on high-caliber individuals who don’t have the stomach for 100-hour workweeks in the City, but the ever-increasing financial tradeoff is slimming down their number. Max says his senior bosses in their forties would generally affirm that “the top, top, top people from the various unis they went to would all try and get into the civil service”. He doesn’t see many quite as “high-grade” people closer to his own age. James makes a similar point: the FCDO has a class of “very competent” managers from their mid-forties to early sixties. “Would those people necessarily be doing the job now if they started with me? I think, increasingly, the civil service will become less attractive to that cohort.”

What does keep people involved? Something that money can’t buy, obviously. The same thing that makes people stomach shit pay and shit hours in capital-P Politics: proximity to power. Particularly if you’re at the FCDO, Treasury or Cabinet Office — the latter acts as a hub for much of the running of government — you can plausibly claim to have your ear next to the heartbeat of the state. You are the person, says Max, chatting to the person “who’s chatting to the Chancellor about [something] at 1pm”. It means that “at dinner parties, people will often want to hear about your job”, says James, in a way they don’t if you tell them you’re just another corporate lawyer. 

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Of course, being close to power is not the same as having it, and confusing the two can be farcical. The department’s middle management, Max says, has plenty of “existential, balding, early-thirties men who aren’t quite clear where their life is headed. A lot of them do tend to enjoy having a Treasury email address. I think an exact thing a manager of mine said at one point was, ‘I have a Treasury email address, and they need to respect that.’” Above them, among the department’s senior staff, is a tinge of fatalism. “If you have chats,” says Max, “they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, things are shit.’ But even how they speak about it, you can kind of tell they enjoy knowing the ins and outs of why things are the way they are, and aren’t quite exactly like public discourse suggests.”

Alongside that is what Max calls a “weird scoffing” about the private sector; of seeing it populated by “bullshitters to the nth degree”. This antipathy, he suggests, “energizes a lot of people in different ways”. Are they so wrong to feel that way? The big-picture story of the past decade has been that states — their borders; their armies — actually matter again. Britain’s own state has again reached the size to which it swelled in the Seventies, with public spending around 45% of GDP, though much of that now goes on hospitals and care-home beds rather than typical appendages of Leviathan’s might.

What we are now learning is that size doesn’t always translate into efficacy. Advocates of a muscular, activist state must prevent that muscle from running to flab. The public sector’s inability to recruit the best people, largely because of the economic (some might call it parasitical) dominance of the City and adjacent industries, has a tangible impact on state capacity — on sovereignty, even. A weeks-long delay on sending a British warship to the drone-hit military base in Cyprus; the Office for National Statistics declining to the point where UK employment figures are almost guesswork — these and other examples of the Government’s eroding ability to exert control at home and abroad are partly a resource problem, but they are also crises in competence.

Maybe this only increases the importance of being closer to what’s left of our sovereignty. “There’s a widespread recognition,” says Max, “that this government, that government, all these governments are shite, and we break our backs trying to make them look decent. So do you want to be as close to the levers of power as possible? Or do you want to be in the backwaters feeling the frustration the country’s feeling?” The most basic, most essential kind of power there is — “the power of the government over the freedom of its subjects”, as Tom Wolfe put it in The Bonfire of the Vanities — will always retain some faint flash of glamour.

*Names have been changed

The disruptive ambitions of “aggressive, hostile powers” were a clear concern of Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent under-secretary to the Foreign Office, in his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee yesterday. But he is now dismissed from his post, along with the weight of institutional expertise he carried. Sir Keir Starmer explicitly blamed Robbins for the fact that he was not until recently told of the damning UKSV assessment which deemed Mandelson high risk before his departure for Washington. A career civil servant, long steeped in the nuances of internal process, Robbins offered explanations with the eloquent but slightly stunned air of a man roughly pushed out of a space capsule, suddenly breathing different air. Yet as his quizzing by MPs shed light on the battle between the Government and civil service, it was the civil service that came out bruised but on top.

At the heart of this row are two different understandings on process, both flawed in different ways. The Government is simply careless of process, unless its pious invocation serves to advance a policy goal — which is why, for instance, a particular interpretation of “international law” was so loudly and persistently invoked over the doomed Chagos deal. With the Mandelson fiasco, though, Starmer’s inner circle has been exposed as unusually contemptuous of the civil service, along with its operations and safeguards. It is a dispiriting development from a Prime Minister elected in large part because of his professed adherence to ethics.

In response to pressure from No. 10, the civil service didn’t jettison process. But it did burrow deeper into it, finding procedural levers which technically permitted it to give the government what it so badly wanted. By Sir Olly’s account, an uneasy Foreign Office tried at times to stand its ground, and at others worked diligently at the flexible outer limits of permitted procedure to fulfill the Government’s requests. Ironically, it was for pursuing the latter path that Robbins has now found himself shoved into a pothole. Yet neither strategy exactly inspires full confidence in how the British state works.

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Before the question of the Peter Mandelson appointment ever reached Sir Olly’s desk, barely a week into his new job in January 2025, it had flouted normal process in almost every way possible. As a candidate for ambassador to the US, the UK’s most sensitive diplomatic posting, Mandelson was already a dubious choice. From his earlier resignations to his infamous “Prince of Darkness” nickname, it didn’t take tremendous insight to guess that Mandelson might run into some difficulty with higher-level vetting.

Aside from his now notorious friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson had business links to China and Russia through his Global Counsel consulting firm. This was flagged early during due diligence, of which Starmer was made aware. Even the most naïve inhabitant of 10 Downing Street would surely have taken a cursory look at the Mandelson CV and thought “one to watch” — and Starmer was no greenhorn but a former director of public prosecutions. Quite apart from this, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary in November 2024, had openly warned the Prime Minister that if he intended to make a political appointment to the post of Washington ambassador, then the Foreign Office would develop a vetting plan to reveal any issues “of which you should be aware before confirming your choice.”

Case’s advice was ignored, for reasons which Starmer still hasn’t explained. The fact is, No 10 wanted their man in post quickly. Mandelson, a long-standing mentor to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was seen as a potentially invaluable, politically sinuous Trump-whisperer: the whiff of sulfur was a key element in his appeal. Downing Street publicly trumpeted the appointment in December, long before Mandelson’s full vetting was completed. Robbins said that some in the Cabinet Office queried whether Mandelson needed vetting at all, something Number 10 denies. Either way, Mandelson’s transition to Washington was clearly treated as a done deal, including giving him advanced access to high-level briefings. By late January, when responsibility for high-level vetting arrived in Robbins’s in-tray, the political stakes were very high indeed. There were frequent phone calls and “constant pressure” from the Prime Minister’s office, Robbins said, asking when the vetting was going through.

Even as No. 10 apparently sought first to ignore, then rush, then pressure the process around the appointment, it completely lost sight of the essential principle such a procedure is meant to uphold: that individuals deemed dangerous to national security must not be placed in positions of high trust and influence.

Robbins, in contrast, was clearly concerned with national security. Even during his grilling from MPs, he expressed anxiety that the spotlight on the details of developed vetting might be of undue interest to malevolent foreign states. When the negative UKSV evaluation trickled in, it must have proved an awkward moment. But the Foreign Office had the final say, and Robbins said that its own security team had expressed full confidence that they could “manage the risks” from Mandelson, which is why he signed the appointment off.

The most obvious flaw in the process arises from how the UKSV assessment was passed on to Robbins. He learned of it, he said, in terms of an oral briefing from a Foreign Office security official who described the UKSV judgment on Mandelson’s status as “a borderline case” but “leaning toward” recommending clearance be denied. By this reading, the final call might still be up for grabs, with mitigations. But that is far more tentative than the actual UKSV document now being circulated, in which the “overall concern” about the candidate was marked “high” and the outcome was “clearance denied or withdrawn”. It appeared Robbins was discouraged from seeing the physical UKSV document, according to department protocol. Yet while he rightly defends the high confidentiality of developed vetting, there seems no reason why a hard copy of the outcome alone should not have been made visible to him.

Was the secrecy of the process such that Robbins himself was misled? Either way, the debacle suggests that for all the British state’s theoretical commitment to correct procedure, its fulfillment is highly dependent on the government’s respect for it. And the more that is known about the Mandelson affair, and No. 10’s behavior around it, the more apparent it becomes that the impatient or deliberate casting aside of proper protocol and safeguards is not a bug of Starmer’s government — but a feature.

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In his testimony, Robbins said that Downing Street made inquiries as to whether a “head of mission” diplomatic role might be found for Matthew Doyle, then serving as the PM’s head of communications. Robbins had explained that this would be hard to defend at a time when he was in danger of making very senior and experienced diplomats redundant. There was also a suggestion from No. 10, Robbins said, that Mandelson might make Doyle part of the US embassy team. In the end, Doyle was elevated to the House of Lords, where he was subsequently denied the Labour whip after campaigning for a candidate accused of paedophilia. But Robbins saw the Doyle discussion as part of a wider push to put political appointments in roles previously occupied by civil servants, which had generated discomfort in the Foreign Office.

Beyond Starmer and McSweeney, meanwhile, there are other signs that members of the Prime Minister’s inner circle are resistant to external examination. Consider Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser (NSA). He has often been quoted as observing that Mandelson’s appointment process was “weirdly rushed”. But his own has not been without controversy. His appointment as NSA is the first time that the role, created in 2010, has been given to a special adviser and political appointee; normally it’s occupied by a career civil servant.

Unlike his predecessors, and despite repeated requests, Powell as NSA hasn’t once publicly appeared before the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) — though he has agreed to attend in private. Having appointed a special adviser to the job, the Government has since argued that it is not “appropriate” for serving special advisers such as Powell to give evidence before select committees. It seems comfortable with an unusual degree of opacity surrounding his international operations.

In late March, a JCNSS report expressed concern over the national security threat from China, and the balance which the Government is striking between security and trade in its dealings with Beijing. It was published days after Powell met the Chinese foreign minister in Beijing, a trip not publicly disclosed in advance. The “lack of clarity” over who was responsible for national security, the report said, “hampers the possibility for external scrutiny and challenge.”

In opposition, trust and transparency were Labour watchwords. Yet the disabling of Starmer’s ethical antennae will surely go down as one of the tragedies and mysteries of modern British history. A lawyer by profession – and by all accounts a conscientious one – did he allow himself somehow to be persuaded that this is how clever people do politics? If so, his team of young bucks and old Blairites has not served him or the country well. During the Prime Minister’s painful, tight-lipped performance in the House of Commons on Monday, he was asked if there could be other instances in which people had failed UKSV vetting with national security implications. He flatly indicated that this, and more, would form part of the coming review. The questions summoned by the erstwhile Prince of Darkness still have a very long way to run.

Downing Street this week has essentially confirmed this assessment. The recurring nightmare of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal cannot be banished with a backroom reshuffle alone. In an effort to rescue Starmer’s zombie premiership, the current line is, in essence: the Prime Minister did nothing. He knew nothing. He was not told, he did not ask, and he could not have reasonably been expected to do so. Nobody told him and so the man deemed responsible, Sir Olly Robbins, has been fired.

So we’re back to an unedifying ministerial dance of defending the least bad of two options. The first is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed “our man in Washington”, despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, and with the Prime Minister ignoring his inability to pass the vetting process. The second option — and this is the official position of the Government — is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed US ambassador despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, but with the Prime Minister unaware that he had failed his deep security vetting. While the first implies that Starmer has misled Parliament and the public repeatedly, the second merely signals utter incompetence.

For a Prime Minister who lacks the ability to define his own politics and communicate a moral purpose for his government, either account is terminal. In contrast with the ideological crusading of Brexit, Corbynism, and Liz Truss’s doomed Reaganite experiment, the Prime Minister promised to tone down the big ideas, dial down the politics and lock in. He based his appeal on personal probity and his supposed abilities as an administrator. To that end, he said, “there’s no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be”.

But this “post-ideological” offer is ironically rooted in a premise that is, in fact, deeply ideological: if we strip back the partisanship, steering the ship of state is a technical problem to be solved by getting to grips with the details. Certainly, it explains Starmer’s embrace of our system of rule-by-committee. The relevant stakeholders shall be consulted.

But politics is not the equivalent of watchmaking, tinkering with the nuts and bolts of a complex machine until it ticks soundly. Rather, it is a never-ending process of managing and choosing between conflicting interests. There are (or were) people around Starmer who clearly understand this. Morgan McSweeney, for one, was fully plugged into the weird Matrix of Labour factionalism, with all its competing visions of Britain and the world. Here’s another irony, as Starmer’s aides pushed hard for Mandelson as an appointee. Whatever the Prime Minister’s own commitments to post-ideological technocracy, the people around him knew Mandelson represented a kind of politics that they themselves were invested in — the world of Cool Britannia, liberal globalization, and the transatlantic alliance.

Those two currents — the stakeholder state and the hard-nosed politicking — have long been in tension. On the one hand, after all, New Labour created for itself a kind of diffuse parallel state of arms-length bodies, expert appointees and independent regulators, neutral in theory but which nonetheless reshaped the constitution. The “old Labour” view of meddling, top-down governance would give way to a new understanding of power. “New public management theory” introduced marketization and competition into the public sector. New committees and modern bureaucracies proliferated to oversee the shift. But while ministerial authority was dispersed across this new quangocracy, Blair himself attempted to circumvent the unwieldy machine with his adoption of “sofa government”. He ceded power with one hand, and tried to grab it back with the other.

Starmer has fallen into the same trap. His instinctive legalism holds international law and an activist judiciary as superior to every state on Earth; the law must protect the individual from the unseemly power of the demos. It’s notable, here, that the Prime Minister’s whole professional life — he entered No. 10 at 61 — was spent defending the victims of government overreach. The professional-managerial classes that he represents so vividly are the very administrators of the contemporary, post-Blairite public sector, the very civil servants that may have waved Mandelson through and ruined Starmer for good.

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One of Starmer’s supposed selling points was his experience running public prosecutions at the head of a major public body. This was the serious Roundhead to Boris Johnson’s clownish Cavalier. And yet his grip on power is as elusive as everyone since Blair. The Prime Minister is unable to live up to his promise of delivering easy efficiency through the Whitehall networks. “Mission Units” have been set up, then scrapped. Every new season seems to come with a relaunch focused on a “delivery phase” that never quite arrives.

Here, again, is another irony. For it was the PM himself who last year told the Liaison Committee of his frustration that “every time I go to pull a lever”, the machinery of government is so clogged and sclerotic that “the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”. This is an interpretation of the British state’s cumbersome, bloated nature that’s equivalent to the common spectacle of Conservatives bemoaning the dire state of public services — as if they themselves weren’t responsible.

Even so, even after almost three decades of the quangocracy, these latest revelations have the power to amaze. Defenders of Robbins have emerged to say that it is routine for ministers not to be told of the outcome of deep vetting. Permanent secretaries — the most senior civil servants — can, apparently, overrule vetting advice without the knowledge of secretaries of state or MPs. This suggests a level of dysfunction in the relationship between elected politicians and the deep state that’ll shock most Britons, giving life to Dominic Cummings’s oft-repeated claim: the Government does not run the country.

Next week, meanwhile, Robbins may address the Foreign Affairs Committee investigating the scandal. In other words, this chapter is by no means closed. Bad news, of course, for Starmer — but also his successor. For prime ministers will continue to be hoisted by their own administrative petards until they tackle a central issue of our time: the diffusion of state capacity across the bureaucracy. The spectacle of political leaders claiming impotence in the face of the state apparatus is deadly to democracy, and reversing the trend requires a reassertion of real executive and ministerial authority, to say nothing of a fundamental change in the mindset of a political class that would likely interpret such a development as an authoritarian power grab. On the contrary, it would constitute a return of the political to domains that have for too long remained in a technocratic abyss.

That’s for the future. For now, Labour MPs watch on in grim resignation. Yet there is no alternative: a Blairite health secretary with an ultra-thin majority representing clean-shaven Davos Labour, tainted both by Mandelson and by the fact that he’s disliked by the membership; a more plausible King of the North, but stuck sulking outside of Parliament; a less plausible Angela Rayner, who struggles to convince colleagues that she wouldn’t represent a serious liability in the highest of offices.

And so the Starmer era totters on. Perhaps until May, when a local election disaster awaits his hollowed-out party, or until the clamor from senior ministers reaches a crescendo, as MPs recall their fragile majorities. Until then, Starmer lurches from scandal to scandal, less the hapless child at the front of the DLR and more the passenger on a ghost train, careering wildly across the broken railroads of the British state.

Ideas such as: innocent until proven guilty; the independence of the police force and prosecutors from political pressure and public hysteria; the skepticism of our lively media that will question, rather than swallow, party lines. Epstein mania has swept all these checks and balances aside. Of course, questions of due process and the proper functioning of institutions don’t sell newspapers. But they are more important than ever when the mob decides to pitchfork its victims.

Of particular concern is the hasty arrest of both Mountbatten Windsor and Mandelson under the vague statute of “misfeasance in public office”. This common law offense is notorious among legal scholars for being poorly defined: the Law Commission recently dedicated a whole report to it, concluding that clarity is lacking both around the definition of what constitutes a public office, and what constitutes the “recklessness or willfulness” required to prove criminality. It is not clear, for example, that the largely ceremonial role of UK Trade Envoy that Andrew held even counts as a position of public trust. It’s a woolly law and therefore easy to abuse; the Government had already tabled new legislation to replace it.

In recent years, the statute has been generally used (in 92% of cases) for police and prison officers who have been found in flagrant sexual or financial wrongdoing. In only four convictions out of the 191 since 2014 was the law deployed against senior officials — and no politician has ever been prosecuted under it. In 2008, Damian Green was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office after a civil servant leaked documents to him for political purposes, but the DPP at the time (a certain Keir Starmer) dropped the case as not passing the required threshold for criminality. It’s an unprecedented use of a bad law, and it just happened twice in the space of a week.

We might ask, too, why either man had to be arrested at all. Surely a discreet interview with police could have been arranged with Mountbatten Windsor instead of a theatrical arrest at 8am at his home? As for Mandelson, he maintains that such an interview had already been agreed for the week commencing 9 March, but the police suddenly arrived asserting that an emergency arrest was required on the basis of new information passed to them that he was about to abscond to the British Virgin Islands.

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Alongside the implausibility of this suggestion, and the fact that the UK has a full extradition treaty with the BVI in any case, the police claimed that this information had been passed to them via the Lord Speaker — a detail that Lord Forsyth vehemently denies. So who did provide them with this false information, bringing about a public arrest that would provide humiliating photographs for the media and a confirmation in the mind of the public that Mandelson had somehow met his comeuppance? The proper process had somehow been hacked.

Even more grave are the implications of dumping vast troves of private correspondence and truncated notes by investigators into the public domain, as happened with Epstein’s emails. Day by day, innocent lives are being upended as the media discovers a new intriguing name among the cache; careers are ended on the flimsiest of pretexts, as companies and institutions abandon anyone with the remotest connection with the scandal; wild theories about supposed code words have flooded the internet and deposed rationality. The thrill of glimpsing how the rich and powerful correspond privately with each other may make good copy, but it is not justice. If ever we needed a reminder that the flip side of free speech is a right to privacy, it was surely this. Without privacy, there is no freedom, and everybody will be a little more fearful about writing to friends or associates after this.

This massive release of private emails prompted  another concerning development: in both the Mountbatten Windsor and Mandelson case, the British state is deploying what you might call the Al Capone strategy. The American mobster was never convicted of the murders and gangsterism for which he was notorious, but instead was imprisoned for tax evasion. Most people in the UK by now, having been saturated in media coverage connecting both characters to the “convicted paedophile/sex offender” Jeffrey Epstein, will have made up their minds that both men are guilty by association of some kind of collusion in some kind of sex crime. That’s the “real” taint that is propelling these investigations.

But this is where the Al Capone analogy breaks down: Capone really was a mobster. But there has yet to emerge any firm evidence of sexual wrongdoing on Mountbatten Windsor’s part, and for Mandelson it is not even seriously alleged. Context-free photographs of hanging out on Epstein’s island with young women are not proof of anything at all, nor is settling out of court, nor are suggestive private emails between friends, no matter how distasteful they may sound.

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Instead, the Al Capone approach risks degrading the normal standards of proof for the lesser crime in order to deliver a politically convenient satiation of the wider public anger. Indeed,  there is already the sense that both men have been found guilty of something — notwithstanding the fact that neither has been convicted of anything. But what crime are they supposed to have committed, exactly?

In the case of Mountbatten Windsor, sharing details of his forthcoming trips as UK trade envoy to Epstein and his associates in order to set up meetings would not be particularly surprising or intriguing were it not accompanied by the stench of scandal shrouding Jeffrey Epstein. If all that emerges after this inevitably long, drawn out investigation, is the tawdry reality — and one that we already know — that Andrew had bad judgment in friends and deployed those connections to do business deals, it is neither new nor illegal. It is certainly not enough to provoke a constitutional crisis, with special acts of parliament to remove him from the line of succession. Labour minister Chris Bryant may be right that the former Prince is a “rude, arrogant and entitled man”, as he said in the Commons yesterday: but so what? If we arrested every politician or royal who fell under that category, how many would be left?

Meanwhile, the most serious claims against Mandelson are that he showed no loyalty to the government he served in and shared privileged government information for personal financial gain. Forwarding emails (even non-secure ones) originally addressed to the prime minister to powerful friends, apparently to show how useful you are, is no doubt unedifying. The breezy, disloyal indiscretions in the emails are deeply embarrassing, and would probably have constituted a sackable offense were he still in post. But the fact that Mandelson was indiscreet about the goings on in government, or that he said mean things about Gordon Brown, is hardly news — just ask any political journalist of the past 30 years who delighted in his briefings.

Things obviously get more serious should financial gain be shown. If indeed there were multiple payments of $25,000 from Epstein to Mandelson, that would demand explanation. But let’s apply a dose of reality: most of the indiscretions that have so far emerged would have been mildly interesting, titillating even, to an investor like Epstein. For now, though, there has been no smoking gun to indicate corruption. Most of Mandelson’s “revelations” were widely commented on in the media at the time. The most serious among them would seem to be the theoretically investible insight, confirmed by email by Mandelson to Epstein, that the €500 billion euro bailout would be announced that evening, 9 May 2010. Epstein emails: “sources tell me 500 b euro bailout, almost complete”, and Mandelson replies: “sd be announced tonight.“

Cavalier, sailing close to the wind, but hardly a big scoop — Epstein already had the information, as did thousands of others. The terms of the imminent deal had been discussed on the front cover of the Sunday Telegraph the previous morning, and economic correspondents across Europe were tracking the progress of the talks throughout the day. The day before, at a summit of all 26 EU finance ministers, the terms and timing of the euro bailout had been breathlessly reported on, and the UK had refused to take part. Each of those European teams, with their staff and civil servants and accompanying journalists, would have known as much or more than the outgoing UK Business Secretary. Of course, there may yet be revelations that prove serious wrongdoing. But what has so far emerged is pretty weak tea.

A world in which due process is bent in service of political panics, supercharged by an increasingly deranged social media, is a less just one. Both Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Peter Mandelson have been hung out to dry by their own teams (respectively the Royal family and the Labour party) who have their own agenda, fearful for their own survival. The two men have no allies left. This is precisely when a sober-minded media, police and justice system should be the last line of defense. Right now, they are nowhere to be found.

As the architect of New Labour’s campaigning focus on Tory sleaze, warned his readers: the British voter’s faith in politics is squandered “when those who are elected to serve the public interest see nothing wrong in helping themselves to their own share of the consequent commercial rewards in directorships and consultancies. The idea that there is nothing objectionable about a public figure pursuing a dubious private commercial interest as long as it is declared is one of the most corrupting principles in public life today. As far as the electorate is concerned, many think we have a government that consists of business back-scratchers and a Parliament made up of politicians on the make.”

That two years later Mandelson was forced to resign for an undeclared loan from a parliamentary colleague, whose entanglement with the late press baron Robert Maxwell’s estate it was Mandelson’s remit, as trade and industry minister, to investigate, is more than just a piquant historical irony. After all, to have been once forced from office for perceived corruption and undue coziness with the interests of the super-rich may just be bad luck. By the third instance, the blame surely falls to the employer: the character of the person involved is all too well-known, and the pattern long-entrenched. As Le Monde, freed from English niceties, characterizes New Labour’s Third Man, he is “the evil genius of the British Labour Party”, a “tactician fascinated by fame and money” who “showed contempt for morality and common social rules.” The scorpion stings because that is its nature; the blinking protestations of the frog, clinging to the wreckage of his premiership, that such an outcome could not be anticipated are too absurd to be entertained.

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Jeffrey Epstein's corrupt overclass

By Mary Harrington

Instead, the greatest, most ironic contrast that strikes today’s reader is not that between the younger Mandelson’s reformist, moralizing tone and the well-established tenor of his political career, but rather the yawning gulf between his domestic reputation and the raw facts of wealth and power unveiled by the ongoing Epstein revelations. The notorious “Prince of Darkness”, the fearsome and powerful intriguer at the heart of British governance, stands revealed in his email correspondence as more Widmerpool than Machiavelli. Westminster’s ruthless operator, the terror of lobby journalism, comes across as a needy, social climbing arriviste, a grasping provincial striver dazzled by the opulent consumption of his rich friends and desperate to grab a slice for himself. So desperate, indeed, that his mentor Epstein even once rebukes him for his constant demands for favors. His New Labour memoir, The Third Man, sent to Epstein for writing advice, is, the two friends discuss, merely a CV for a role at Deutsche Bank. Epstein dangles other glittering prizes before his friend. Would Mandelson like to sell an Israeli oil field for Ehud Barak, Epstein enquires. Why not? Would Mandelson like to involve himself in post-Tahrir Square Egypt, Epstein wonders? Why not? The affairs of nations, once the engine of history, had at the End of History become mere business opportunities: it must have seemed, back in the 2000s, as if the party would never end.

The glittering, amoral world of Epstein and his associates, of the Russian oligarchs and Arab potentates and financiers who flit across the correspondence, is simply the end product of the world of globalization, and of America’s unipolar imperial moment, without which the New Labour project is incomprehensible. When we read Epstein and Ehud Barak venomously gossiping over the extravagant income Tony Blair has amassed as the consigliere of Central Asian dictators, we are granted a glimpse of the true architecture of the world New Labour sold us as unstoppable progress. “We live in the new global economy, and that there is no alternative to that,” the Mandelson of 1996 advised his readers, and this is the result. Just like Blair, whose planned post-premiership career of resolving the Palestine conflict while accumulating wealth was rather more successful at the latter than the former, it was fortunate for him that this brave new world would transpire to be so personally rewarding. Epstein was nothing more or less than a vampiric aristocrat of American empire, extracting whatever he desired from its outer reaches. Mandelson his eager courtier, risen from that same empire’s provincial backwaters. How meager and parochial British politics must seem from this exalted vantage point: it must have been hard to remember that the needs and desires of British voters ever mattered at all.

The age when a former prime minister could retire to obscurity in a quiet cathedral close ended with New Labour. Today, their second acts revolve around the imperial center. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observes in How Will Capitalism End?, corruption, broadly defined, is simply a symptom of financialized capitalism in a globalized world, and the decaying social fabric of its host countries the result of a world in which “the rich may rightly consider their fate and that of their families to have become independent from the fates of the societies from which they extract their wealth.” If British industry did not notably prosper from Mandelson’s time overseeing it, smoothing its wholesale transfer into the portfolios of the globalized oligarchy, so be it. If the MP for Hartlepool more rapidly and dramatically prospered from New Labour’s time in office than did the people of Hartlepool, that is the nature of things. For all that Mandelson can proclaim that the business dealings with Epstein, for which the police are currently investigating him, were in “the national interest”, the governance of Britain does not figure in this worldview as anything other than a career first act, the highest offices of the British state merely a provincial dry run for advancement in the higher world, among the richer people, who actually matter. When even the former Prince Andrew inserts himself in Epstein’s court, seeking rest and relaxation from the onerous privileges of his sinecure, we see, if not the secret harmonies of the world, then its true architecture, beneath the Westminster state’s ornately crumbling facade.

As for the little people, the truculent and aggrieved British voters whose anger was to be assuaged by the scraps from the big table, redistributed as a consolation prize for the loss of their industries and the wholesale recomposition of their cozily insular society, if their time has not yet come, Mandelson’s third downfall is the harbinger of when it will. It is ironic to recall, now that the near-revolutionary tumult of British politics is waved away by the Government’s dwindling band of supporters as a false consciousness imparted by hostile Right-wing agitators, that the younger Mandelson once spun visions of Britain’s near future as dark as anything now found on Twitter.

Imagining the future world of 2005, in which the public had failed to vote a reforming Labour government into office, Mandelson in The Blair Revolution conjured dark prophecies of the forthcoming “millennium riots”, in which “the army had been brought in” and his fictional upwardly mobile family had witnessed “their neighbors running screaming along the road”, their Georgian townhouses set ablaze. As a result, “there had been a middle-class exodus from London to the Home Counties, into hastily built private estates with perimeter fences and private security.” In the real world of 1996, the “breakdown of society in Britain”, typified by “a crime wave [that] was dismissed as exaggerated tabloid scare-mongering”, derived from the simple fact that “the nation has been in relative decline for a century”, and was baldly “a declining, post-imperial, economically second-rank nation, which is also increasingly divided and unequal”.

In his introduction to the 2004 reissue of The Blair Revolution, Mandelson lamented Britain’s “bleak ghettos depressing the spirits of all who live in them, dominated by the fear of crime and racial tension, too often becoming centers of danger and desperation”, language now anathema to his ideological heirs. The British public had begun to despise its political class, he warned: “New Labour’s task now is to ensure that public opinion does not slip back into this sullen mood — or, at least, not permanently — and that a deeper, lasting connection is made between government and governed.” Does Mandelson feel New Labour achieved this, we wonder? Does he believe his wavering place at globalization’s most-luxurious table is justified by the transformations his faction wrought? Mandelson termed his mission a “permanent revolution,” creating “a long-term transformation of Britain” in which New Labour’s ideology “embeds itself in the fabric and social architecture” so that “our changes can be entrenched”. Indeed, he notes, “We want to create institutions across British society that people can point to in twenty and thirty years’ time and recognize as distinctly New Labour landmarks.”

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Why Farage is a Burkean

By Aris Roussinos

Indeed we can: New Labour’s monuments are all around us. The tragedy of modern Britain is that Mandelson and his clique succeeded. The wreckage of our society is a testament to the success of their project, a series of time bombs buried within Britain’s social and economic architecture. The Britain of 1996, the dismal object of Mandelson’s declinist rhetoric, now looks like a vanished golden age: an even partial return to it is the highest aspiration of Right-wing populism. The current prime minister’s project of governing Britain as if it were still 1997, taking off where his ideological forebears were so rudely interrupted by the British voter, was doomed from the start, because Starmer is fated to rule the volatile and rebellious country that New Labour created. The least popular prime minister since polling began is now condemned to eke out his mandate without power, at the helm of a fractious and moribund party that despises him, lurching from crisis to crisis, until the electorate’s final sentence of execution rescues him from his purgatorial reign.

A badly run country has become an ungovernable one, ill at ease with itself and looking inward for enemies. Lord Mandelson’s one, unintentional gift to Britain is in hastening the collapse of the rotten and crumbling superstructure of the politics he helped construct. The reams of internal correspondence soon to be released will provide Reform, the de facto party of opposition, with ammunition in its mission to undo the Blair Revolution Mandelson once flaunted. As the director of Labour Growth, Mark McVitie, rightly observes, the scandal is “the latest and most grotesque signifier of a political culture that cannot carry on in its current form”, and “what is undoubtedly worth saving in the liberal democratic settlement will not be saved by the people who have presided over its decay”. But the domestic tragedy of British dysfunction is inseparable from the country’s willed transformation into the fawning servitor of a corrupt transnational order. That it takes an American scandal to demolish the Government’s last lingering traces of legitimacy, our peripheral backwater administration haunted by the nefarious pleasures of its metropole, is only fitting. In his career’s final act Mandelson has become, just as Le Carré perceived, the squalid archetype for the British state itself.

In Westminster pubs and corridors, a febrile atmosphere has taken hold. Everyone is full of righteous indignation: the New Labour cliques are sulking, feigning ignorance of Peter Mandelson’s mendacity and his well-documented friendship with a convicted paedophile; meanwhile, members of Labour’s Left flank are excitedly discussing how they might leverage the scandal, which is surely larger in magnitude than the Profumo Affair, to their own political advantage.

But it is a scandal that bodes ill for the entire party establishment. The provisions of the “humble address”, the parliamentary procedure by which the Conservatives forced Number 10 into transparency, will reveal thousands of messages between Mandelson, ministers, and Downing Street advisers. The process of releasing communications will go on for months, with Labour’s reputation already in tatters. The next election could be an extinction-level event. The paranoiac dreams feverishly of seedy cabals, elite depravity and unimaginable, casual venality. But at what point does subscription to these apparent irrationalities become, in fact, rational? Make no mistake: for a polity that already suffers from a deficit of trust in its politicians, this is fuel to the most deranged of fires, and the Labour Party faces incineration. As British politics fragments, Labour has lost its hegemonic hold over the Left. The Greens are fighting hard in a crucial by-election in Gorton and Denton. “This is grievous,” one of Labour’s parliamentarians tells me via text.

And so, sensing the mood, and surrounded by the unmistakable stench of decay, MPs mull a post-Starmer future, asking what comes next.

Wes Streeting, the heir apparent, is tainted by his long-running association with the Prince of Darkness, his mentor of many years. Angela Rayner, spearheading Commons compromises and permanently flanked around the Parliamentary Estate by a praetorian guard of supporters, is increasingly spoken of as the new leader-in-waiting. One MP tells me the way could now be “clear for Ange”. Known as “Angie” to the comrades, Rayner would recenter the Labour Party firmly within its soft-Left comfort zone. But there’s little or no plan beyond vague assertions that her “fresh” approach would do much beyond stopping the party “trying to out-Reform Reform”, signaling higher taxes, higher spending, laxity on welfare, and a friendlier welcome for migrants.

Then there’s Al Carns, a barely recognized defense minister and military man. Carns only entered Parliament in 2024, but is also being seriously floated as an option. This in itself speaks of the widespread desperation on the Labour benches, and reveals a kind of military fetishism, a fantasy that a heroic man in uniform can deliver the party from certain collapse where mere civilians have failed.

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The dark shadow of the Blairites

By Aaron Bastani

Keir Starmer’s leadership is “hanging by a thread”, one backbencher texts me. As it is, Starmer owes his survival so far to the generally bovine nature of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Almost everyone in the PLP agrees that “it’s over”, that the authority of the Prime Minister is irrecoverable. But in the absence of a standout alternative, the MPs lumber on, zombie-like. Many are unsure of how or when to trigger the inevitable, too scared to take the initiative, afraid for their own careers as well as for the unknown trajectories of a leadership contest that would be fraught with dangers and would plunge the country into a deep uncertainty.

How would a restive public respond if the party of government, which promised respite from endless Tory infighting, entered into a fratricidal contest at a time of deep national malaise? That contest would take the form of introspective debates in which candidates would fall over themselves to cater to the tastes of the party selectorate: 200,000 overwhelmingly middle-class urban progressives whose views little resemble those of the wider public. Fundamentally, the PLP hesitates only because it is paralyzed by the paucity of better options. But the herd will move eventually. A critical mass will form.

It will be a fitting epitaph for the reign of both Starmer and McSweeney that they were brought low by the ghosts of New Labour. These are nostalgic emissaries from a faded, halcyon age of “Nice” growth (no inflation, consistent expansion), when Tony Blair played politics on easy mode with a buoyant global economy and a unipolar geopolitical moment. He still managed to badly damage the body politic with the blunders that were the Iraq war, PFI, and the accelerated hollowing-out of the country’s manufacturing base. But rather than exorcising those specters, the current administration brought the Blairite old guard — not only Mandelson, but Jonathan Powell, Tim Allen, and their second-generation sycophants — back in. In lieu of a real vision, Starmer and McSweeney had promised quiet competence and a steady hand. Their alliance with the old guard delivered neither.

These were “serious appointments”, we were told, aimed at bringing depth of experience and a focus on delivery. Still, Downing Street has floundered, and will go on floundering, whipped around like a plastic bag in a storm, until it ejects a Prime Minister who is palpably unsuited to the job, and who has become a national hate figure with polling as dismal as Liz Truss’s at her nadir. He is the sad captain of a rudderless ship endlessly buffeted by events beyond its control. Even if the ship is blown to calmer waters, its crew would have little sense of which shores they are trying to reach.

New Labour had its fair share of scandal, but it also had a vision of modernity, of what the country should be, and its place in the world: mass higher education for a new, shining “knowledge economy”; openness to globalization; “Cool Britannia”; the “People’s Princess”; humanitarian interventionism; football, lager and guitar bands; the “special relationship”. To paraphrase John Goodman’s line in The Big Lebowski: say what you want about the tenets of New Labour, Dude, but at least it was an ethos. Mandelson could wax lyrical about the vagaries of Thatcherism in Marxism Today because he had a consistent worldview, combined with a philosophy of power, depraved and abhorrent though that philosophy was. Starmerism is, in contrast, a gray blur, a void. It’s no wonder he and McSweeney began to try and resurrect New Labour throwbacks early on. But the decision is now haunting them.

McSweeney himself is a close confidant, a protégé even, of Mandelson. Both carefully cultivated a reputation for “the dark arts” of political subterfuge; both were consiglieres of powerful superiors. Early in his career, the Irishman made his name as an enthusiastic young spreadsheet-filler, gladly updating the “Excalibur” database through which Mandelson kept tabs on Blair-skeptics in the 2000s. As McSweeney punched newspaper filings into his computer, “Petey” was partying with a sex trafficker.

We were told that the Cork man was of pure “Blue Labour” stock. But while there have been sporadic echoes of this positioning in Starmer’s premiership, they have been limp, reluctant and unconvincing. How could it be otherwise when those stilted speeches have come from the pursed lips of a dull, Remain-campaigning, North London-dwelling human rights barrister?

But the issue surely speaks to a problem with McSweeney himself: the PM’s chief aide is a successful electoral tactician and factional fighter, and a master of the party machine, but he is a man with no hinterland, no intellectual or ideological scaffold. He is a political cipher, a fixer for competing Right-wing factions coming together under the nonentity of “Starmerism”. Internecine war against the Left has been his and their raison d’être. Dirty tricks and spin have been his modus operandi, the ends always justifying the means. But that is not a plan for government. It’s not a plan for the country. McSweeney is likely to resign over his pro-Mandelson maneuverings, perhaps buying the Prime Minister a little more time in office. But Starmer will flail uncontrollably without the architect of his ascendancy. McSweeney offered little other than an empty electoral victory, but without him the Prime Minister will be revealed as even more hollow and insubstantial than his aide. The writing is on the wall; the only question is what lies beyond the wall.

New Labour’s days are over, their epoch long since passed. The smooth, polite advocates of Blair’s Davos-friendly progressivism cut lonely figures in today’s harsher, meaner world of hard power, nation-state revival, big government interventions and Great Power realpolitik. To that extent, Streeting is hindered not just by his personal and professional links to Mandelson, but by his ideological associations with a project that is hopelessly out of step with an age of deglobalization, statism, and ubiquitous, cross-party calls for “reindustrialization”.

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Starmer has written Labour’s suicide note

By Jonny Ball

The New Labour philosophy will be the downfall not just of Mandelson, but of this government. Its apparatchiks were enchanted by wealth. Proximity to the ultra-rich — not so much the captains of industry, but the money-men of high finance — was central to their ideological project and became embedded in their lifestyles. The post-2010 trajectories of Mandelson and Blair are the most extreme symptoms of a whole philosophy and guiding culture based on a union between the erstwhile social-democratic Left, global elites, and high finance. They were “intensely relaxed” about the filthy rich, not for strategic or electoral reasons, but because they “really do believe in it”.

They made a Faustian pact with the City and an accommodation with market liberalism, while in their private lives they were cavorting with two-bit oligarchs, despots and other malcontents. It wasn’t merely a pragmatic approach to modern statecraft — they were intoxicated by it all. They convinced themselves that they were the indispensable missing link between the dusty town halls, the old-fashioned parliamentary committee rooms, the dry social-democratic conferences, and the new, dynamic, globalized cash nexus with ultra-high-net-worths sitting atop of it all, apparently owning the future. We’re now witnessing their comeuppance on the national stage.

One parliamentary staffer speaks longingly of their desire for a unifying program that suits a dirigiste era: a civic patriotism and a firm-but-fair migration system coupled with investment-led regional growth, industrial strategy, and bold interventions around which Labour’s disparate strands could finally coalesce. In this wistful reading, the soft Left, Blue Labour, elements of the old trade-union Right and even the more strategically minded Corbynistas could get behind a project of national renewal, with only the thoroughly discredited and out-of-step Blairites outside of the tent. But this program is nowhere to be seen. The most plausible candidate that could have articulated such an offer was blocked from standing for Parliament in Manchester last week.

Mandelson used to tell the cynics who never quite accepted his vision — those who worried about the party’s historic base in the post-industrial towns and cities of Britain — that Labour didn’t need to worry about courting the working class, since they had “nowhere else to go”. Meanwhile, Blairism’s éminence grise had many places to go: Epstein’s island, his New York mansions, his private jet. Now, Labour’s people have plenty of options, too: Reform, the Greens, furious abstentionism and a heady mix of zany political entrepreneurs and hyper-online conspiratorialism. “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” Wilson said. That was forgotten long ago. Mandy may have forgotten Labour voters, but they certainly won’t be forgetting him.