The Mandelson Scandal Could Topple Starmer

Britain has an alarming casualty rate as far as prime ministers are concerned. It has lost five in the last decade. It could be about to lose a sixth.

The Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer entered Number 10 after a landslide general election victory only a year and a half ago, yet he has been mired in almost continual scandals, U-turns, and mishaps since the day it emerged in the summer of 2024 that he had failed to declare gifts, including designer clothes, glasses, and accommodation from the Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli, who received a Downing Street security pass.

Now he is in trouble again over security, this time for appointing Lord Mandelson as U.S. ambassador, Britain’s top diplomatic post, despite the former Labour minister’s failure in security vetting. Monday, with his back to the wall in the House of Commons, Starmer insisted that the top official in the Foreign Office, Olly Robbins, had “deliberately” withheld from him the fact that Mandelson had been deemed a security risk. Starmer sacked Robbins last week.

The prime minister said it “beggared belief” that he was not told that Mandelson had not been cleared by the Foreign Office vetting agency, UKSV.  But MPs wanted to know why the PM was so eager to install “the Prince of Darkness,” as Mandelson is often called, in the first place. And in summarily sacking Robbins, was he not simply seeking a convenient scapegoat for his own lack of judgment?

Lord Mandelson came with more baggage than Heathrow Airport. In 1998, he was forced to resign from his cabinet post as trade and industry secretary after it emerged that he had failed to declare a loan of £373,000 from the Labour donor Geoffrey Robinson. He was restored to the cabinet by Labour’s then–Prime Minister Tony Blair as Northern Ireland Secretary, only to resign again in 2001 after improperly intervening in the attempts by another wealthy individual, Srichand Hinduja, to secure a UK passport. Even then, Blair nominated the twice-disgraced politician to be the UK’s European commissioner for trade.