Politics: enjoy the show
By Richard North - April 17, 2026
The brouhaha over Mandelson’s vetting reminds me of a cartoon I saw a long, long time ago. It showed an evidently irate lady standing at the complaints’ desk of a department store, being addressed by an insouciant young man, holding a bottle of some unspecified nature.
The man is saying: “Laboratory tested, madam? Of course it was laboratory tested, just as it says on the label. It failed dismally, mind you. But it was laboratory tested”. Now the old joke repeats itself: “Vetted, sir? Of course, Mr Mandelson was vetted…”. You know the rest.
The worst of it all is that it isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference – at least in the short term. Olly Robbins, the FCO permanent secretary has stepped down – his fate uncertain for the moment. In the meantime, Starmer will lie – or not. It is impossible to tell the difference, and the results are always the same.
Maybe, after the expected wipeout at the local elections, enough Labour MPs might finally bite the bullet and mount a leadership challenge. According to the rule-book, at least 20 percent (currently 82 out of 405) must nominate a rival candidate to trigger a contest.
But Starmer must know he’s on a safe wicket. No Labour prime minister has been successfully removed from office in the party’s entire history. And given the low grade of any potential replacements, and the lack of unity which would have enough MPs lining up behind a single challenger, the party might decide to hang on to nurse – for fear of something worse.
The revelations about Mr Mandelson failing the vetting process, however, have been enough to drive the most of the other news off the front pages, as the hack ensemble luxuriate in a domestic scandal, leaving more important, driving world-shaping events into the relative obscurity of the inner pages.
Whether or not this scandal will finally see the end of the loathsome Starmer is neither here nor there, though. Nothing is going to stop the pundits indulging in an orgy of speculation, with the Telegraph’s Tom Harris leading the field.
Under the heading, “Starmer can’t survive the Mandelson crisis now”, his sub-head tells us that “Amber Rudd had to resign as home secretary for inadvertently misleading Parliament. The Prime Minister’s failings appear much worse”, a theme which Harris explores with verve.
At the time Mandelson was forced to resign, Starmer defended his decision to appoint him, telling the House of Commons that he had been through “a due diligence” exercise. “And then there was security vetting by the security services,” he told the Commons on 4 February this year.
As we now know (whether we want to or not), the prime minister failed to inform MPs that Mandelson had failed that vetting. By merely stating that “there was” such a process, the country was being invited to believe that the former ambassador had been approved.
We were not told, says Harris, that the Foreign Office had invoked a rarely used power to override the Security Service’s recommendations. Thus, we are being asked to believe either that the prime minister was unaware of the failure of his nominee to pass security vetting or that he didn’t feel the fact was important enough to report to the Commons.
Harris isn’t alone in venturing that this is a scarcely credible position. Even if he had been unaware of Mandelson’s failure to pass muster with the security services, the fact that he subsequently implied to the House – and the country – that Mandelson had been vetted, with the implication that he had passed such vetting, means that he conveyed information that has now been proved wrong.
Says Harris, there is solid precedent for ministers falling on their swords for inadvertently misleading the House, and we do not need to go all the way back to the 1954 Crichel Down affair to find it.
When Amber Rudd, the home secretary under Theresa May, turned out to have misled the home affairs committee over government targets for the repatriation of illegal immigrants, she resigned, despite the broadly accepted view that she had not knowingly lied.
In Starmer’s case, he argues, the Mandelson controversy has metamorphosed into a crisis entirely thanks to his own poor judgments. He acknowledged publicly that Mandelson’s association with Epstein was known when the decision was taken to appoint him as ambassador. But even this did not seem, to Starmer, enough to change his mind about the appointment.
The great unanswered question now is: had Starmer known about Mandelson’s failure to pass security vetting, would he have proceeded with the nomination? After all, his (Mandelson’s) admitted friendship with Epstein, who (supposedly) took his own life while waiting to go on trial for rape and child trafficking, seemed not to be enough to dissuade Starmer from his plans to appoint Mandelson to Washington.
Harris nevertheless notes the reluctance of the Parliamentary Labour Party to initiate a full-scale leadership election, or at least to send Starmer the message that it is time to go.
This, we are told, has been explained by the absence of an obvious successor – which is plausible enough. But if Starmer cannot produce reasonable and convincing answers to the many questions raised by the latest developments in this scandal, Harris argues that there will be no such reticence after polling day in the local and devolved elections. Starmer, he says, will have no option but to resign.
For the rest of the papers, it is too early for them to have published editorials, but no doubt they will follow – anything will serve as an excuse not to write the Middle East and developments there – especially as Trump seems to be on the up.
With the ceasefire holding with Iran and a ten-day pause agreed between Israel and Lebanon, there is in any event a natural hiatus, which gives us all a chance to take stock. It may be the last chance we get for a while so, I suppose, we might as well sit back and enjoy the show.
