Have his enemies done it? Have the rebels managed to find a thermal exhaust port in the Death Starmer that would enable them finally to destroy it? No, would seem to be the answer after yet another morning of increasingly unwatchable procedural drama for the prime minister.
You know what, it’s such a shame procedural rows aren’t a path to growth. The UK would be a global economy unicorn by now. Still, here we go again for another trip down committee corridor, as the displacement activists of the British political system mine further nitty-gritty on how a sex offender’s best pal was accidentally-on-purpose appointed ambassador to the US. If we keep digging, we’re totally going to strike gold and be able to pay for all the infrastructure upgrades and housing and incentives to capital investment that are the only way out of our decline spiral, to say nothing of the defence boosting urgently required. And I’m barely kidding. There’s probably genuinely more chance of those happening via an orgy of recriminatory committee hearings than via the policies of Keir Starmer and his chancellor. If we stuck the prime minister on the psychoanalyst’s couch, I think they’d find he subconsciously provokes these endlessly consuming process crises. It’s certainly more his happy place than big ideas.
To the foreign affairs select committee, then, chaired by Emily Thornberry, which was this morning hearing evidence from Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and last-but-one Foreign Office permanent secretary Philip Barton. Mad that Thornberry has spent the past week being glazed by people who honestly should know better. If Emily were an ice-cream she’d lick herself. Seemingly unable to stop herself providing running commentary on this moment in the sun, madam chair has already informed the public via some state visits to the news shows that former Foreign Office permanent secretary Olly Robbins was “bullied” into giving Mandelson the job (which was not what her witness that day – Olly Robbins – had said). To be clear, this was last week, before McSweeney had even given evidence.
Thornberry may think she knows all the answers – and yet, given her role, could she possibly hold off shitposting them at least until after she’s heard from the witness in question? Otherwise all you can say is that this is a hilarious process to adopt for a committee hearing about process. The pressure was coming from Morgan McSweeney, Thornberry announced to The News Agents podcast last week. “He was a protege of Mandelson … and he was trying to deliver him the job.” Mate, why are you even having a formal hearing? If you want to wang on in undisciplined and self-indulgently process-free fashion, I’d recommend becoming a newspaper columnist or podcaster instead.
Anyway: McSweeney. After all this time, I was hoping he’d have an unexpectedly funny voice, a bit like the first time you heard David Beckham or Mike Tyson talk. Sadly not. He did at least pierce the increasingly spirit-sapping vibe of this story with the occasional flash of emotion, describing the eventual emergence of all the photos and emails involving Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein as like “a knife through my soul”. Nice to feel something, I guess. After watching four hours of these hearings this morning, I wondered whether I ever would again.
Appearing for the session before McSweeney had been former FO permanent secretary Philip Barton, who – like a lot of people with an internet connection – turns out to have had a few doubts about the Mandelson appointment, given his known Epstein connections. “I was worried that this could become a problem in future,” recalled Barton. “I just thought it was a potentially difficult issue politically in the United States.” Meanwhile Ian Collard, former head of security at the Foreign Office, had last night given written evidence to the committee, backing Robbins’s version of events. Oh dear. So Olly Robbins never saw a document saying Mandelson had failed to pass his vetting, yet was still summarily fired by Starmer for not telling him about it.
All of this is starting to feel like a massive waste of energy. What are the conclusions going to be? (Other than the ones Thornberry delightedly emits every time a camera is pointed at her.) That people should be vetted before they are appointed, and not doing it before Mandelson was announced was nuts? Of course it was. You’d think Labour bigwigs would know the rules by now. Just as Trump Always Chickens Out, so Mandelson Always Blows Up.
McSweeney believed this was ultimately about Mandelson’s judgment, not Starmer’s. This must have been the sort of loyalty that endeared him to the PM. Like Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn before him, Starmer has a fundamentalist belief in his own probity, and no amount of sleaze rows or judgment rows or any other type of row is going to dent it. The prime minister seems to regard himself as rather above politics, when in fact he just doesn’t really understand it. The Mandelson appointment was a sixth-former’s idea of realpolitik, replacing a well-regarded ambassador who had proven good relations with the Trump mob (Karen Pierce) with a brand name he’d heard of. In some ways the whole saga has the flavour of Starmer’s bizarre decision to hire Sue Gray as his political chief of staff, presumably because the Sue Gray of Sue-Gray-report fame was someone he’d heard of.
As even Starmer must be able to see now, unless he needs Waheed Alli to freebie him some better glasses, that decision to sack Olly Robbins was a kneejerk spasm of anger that has become an infinitely bigger headache for the PM than if he’d considered some questions before acting. For a cautious guy, Starmer doesn’t half do some impulsive things. This particular impulsive thing has removed the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office in the middle of a war and a global situation of gathering instability, taken us on a frenzied couple-of-weeks detour of self-destructive Westminster drama, and – perhaps most lastingly dangerous – made public a whole load of information about our developed vetting procedures, for which I’m sure our international enemies are most grateful. In between sharing disbelieving laughs that we’re doing it.
Almost two weeks into this convulsion, and one week away from the local elections, the stakes are at once everything and nothing. Relations between the government and the civil servants who it needs to enact its policies – if it has any, it’s hard to remember – are badly damaged. The sole beneficiaries are foreign unfriendly states. As for the British political class, they come off like an exhausted couple who can’t even remember what they’re arguing about any more.
