Keir Starmer’s defense of his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington — that he did not grasp the depth of Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — does not withstand the weight of what was already widely known. The scandal now engulfing Downing Street is not a bolt from the blue; it is the foreseeable consequence of elevating a man whose entanglements, instincts and methods were part of the public record. And it has exposed the operating system of this government more starkly than any policy fight or parliamentary defeat.
This is the difference between a standard-issue political embarrassment and a governing crisis. Scandals typically follow a familiar path: a confidant stumbles, the leader expresses shock, claims ignorance and tries to draw a line. Often, that holds because the damage is one step removed, a failure of judgment on the margins. But Starmer could not plausibly claim not to know who Peter Mandelson was when he handed him the most symbolically charged diplomatic post in British public life.
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The facts were hardly obscure. Mandelson left Tony Blair’s Cabinet in 1998 over an undeclared £373,000 loan from a wealthy colleague. He reveled for decades in the company of the rich and connected, rarely appearing troubled by the compromises that proximity to money often exacts. And, crucially, he maintained a friendship with Epstein — the convicted child sex offender — even after Epstein’s imprisonment, a relationship that had been reported since at least 2019.
Starmer now suggests Mandelson misled him about the depth of that relationship. But Mandelson’s elastic relationship with the truth, which earned him the “Prince of Darkness” sobriquet, was part of his political legend. To appoint a figure known for negotiating with facts and then claim to have been deceived is not a defense; it is an admission of failed due diligence at the highest level.
That is why this episode has landed with such force. It arrives not as an outlier but as the culmination of a string of missteps that have weakened the prime minister’s authority. It also implicates the person closest to Starmer’s daily political decision-making: Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, who according to multiple accounts personally advocated Mandelson’s appointment despite raised eyebrows among senior colleagues and concerns inside the Foreign Office.
By itself, that would be damaging. But McSweeney’s problems go deeper. When fresh revelations about Mandelson’s Epstein ties emerged in September 2025, several Cabinet ministers pushed for Mandelson’s dismissal. McSweeney initially sought to slow-walk the decision, according to people familiar with the discussions. Even for allies inclined to forgive, that looks like personal loyalty clouding professional judgment.
Their intertwined history helps explain why. In 2001, Mandelson took the young Irish political operative under his wing as McSweeney worked on Labour’s opposition research operation. A former Blair adviser once described McSweeney as “the new Peter Mandelson,” and Mandelson was effusive in turn: “I don’t know who and how and when he was invented, but whoever it was … they will find their place in heaven.” For two decades, they moved in overlapping orbits — backstage, where proximity to power can matter more than formal titles.
The appointment also came at a cost. Karen Pierce, the outgoing ambassador, wanted to stay and had been praised as a “Trump Whisperer,” credited with helping keep working relations with Washington steady. The Foreign Office was content to keep her in post. Yet Mandelson took the job in February last year and was gone by September, his tenure bracketed by controversy.
Why take the risk? On paper, the logic was brutally transactional. Donald Trump respects wealth, spectacle and the theater of power. Mandelson has spent a lifetime cultivating the wealthy and powerful, hopping between yachts off Corfu and drawing rooms in Davos, fluent in the language of elites. If the White House rewarded dealmakers and showmen, why not send one?
The flaw was not just moral; it was strategic. Ties to Epstein transformed the appointment into political nitroglycerin. Any payoff would have had to be exceptional — a breakthrough in trade talks, an unmistakable improvement in access — to justify placing such a compromised figure at the heart of the UK-U.S. relationship. Instead, the risk detonated in the way that spectacularly bad bets generally do: with reputational damage at home and diminished credibility abroad.
Even that analysis, though, understates what the episode reveals. It is not simply a misjudged personnel call; it is a window into how this government works. Mandelson’s own memoir, “The Third Man,” intended to engrave his statesmanlike legacy, instead sketched a portrait of a courtier whose influence derived from proximity rather than authority. He was perpetually seeking validation — even, as newly released U.S. Department of Justice emails suggest, sending a draft of that book to Epstein for feedback, only to be told it was “gossipy and defensive” and “troubling.”
McSweeney appears to have absorbed this method: make yourself indispensable to the person who holds power, shape choices from the wings, prize access and narrative over the hard graft of institution-building. For a time, that can work. But it leaves a leader dependent on the instincts of courtiers, and it blurs accountability when choices go wrong.
The costs are immediate and concrete. In Washington, where memory is long and politics unforgiving, the United Kingdom now looks less sure-footed. Allies who value steadiness saw an ambassador sent for his social fluency rather than his diplomatic ballast — and then removed under pressure. At home, Labour MPs ask an unnerving question out loud: Who is really in charge in Downing Street? The opposition scarcely needs to embellish; it can simply point to the appointment file and the timeline.
Starmer still has options, but each requires more than cosmetic change. First, acknowledge the error without euphemism: this was not an unforeseeable oversight; it was a bet placed with open eyes that failed. Second, restore process. Re-empower the Foreign Office on senior diplomatic appointments and publish a transparent, codified set of conflict-of-interest checks that no adviser, however senior, can override. Third, rebalance the center. Courtiers thrive in ambiguity; clear lines of authority, minutes of key decisions and documented advice chains make it harder for personal networks to substitute for institutional judgment.
Finally, decouple the performance of power from the practice of it. The temptation in the Trump era — and in the influence economy that surrounds it — is to mistake access for outcomes and glamour for leverage. Britain’s interests are better served by patient diplomacy than by showy emissaries whose contacts come with baggage and expiration dates.
The real indictment of the Mandelson appointment is not that a single bad call backfired. It is that the call reflected a worldview: that power is something you perform in exclusive rooms, mediated by gatekeepers who trade in proximity. Voters did not elect that worldview. They elected a promise of clean, competent government with priorities ordered by the public interest.
Governments are judged by whom they elevate and what they tolerate. In choosing Mandelson for Washington and defending that decision until the last possible moment, Starmer’s team elevated the wrong virtues and tolerated the wrong risks. The question now is whether the prime minister can reassert a different set of values — transparent, institutional, and focused — before the story of this government hardens into a tale of courtiers who mistook access for judgment and spectacle for statecraft.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
