When Keir Starmer sat down with his new foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, in his No 10 study on Thursday morning the writing was already on the wall for Peter Mandelson.
The prime minister had spent the evening before reading through the new emails – in all their nauseating detail – between his ambassador to Washington and the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Just hours earlier, he had told the Commons he had full confidence in Mandelson.
Yet, on reading how the Labour veteran had urged Epstein after he was charged to “fight for early release” and told him his friends would “stay with you and love you”, it was clear that he had no option but to sack him.
It means Starmer has lost two of his key people in less than a week. Mandelson was central to building his relationship with Donald Trump, and Angela Rayner – who stepped down as deputy prime minister last week – helped the government connect with the British people.
With Mandelson gone, questions remain about what Starmer knew and when. No 10 insiders insist he had not previously seen the latest Epstein emails, which were not even available to the ambassador because they were from a long-closed email address, when he appointed him.
They say he took prompt action in light of new information, but Bloomberg had contacted Mandelson about the emails on Monday and had then gone out to offer his mea culpa interview the next day, presumably with No 10’s blessing.
While the timing of when exactly Downing Street was aware remains unclear, potentially more damaging for the prime minister in the long term is that his own political judgment – already under question after numerous self-inflicted errors – is now even more in doubt.
When he picked his US ambassador in December – moving on the well-respected and plugged-in senior diplomat Karen Pierce from the role – Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein and his reputation for attracting scandal were well known.
Ministers warned Starmer at the time that Mandelson would be a “high risk, high reward” choice, but he decided to press ahead regardless, having been reassured that his pick would be the “Trump whisperer” he needed to navigate the high-stakes relationship.
Was that a mistake? It is hard now to see it as anything but. Starmer allies, trying to shift the blame from the prime minister, suggest it was his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who was instrumental in the original appointment and who pushed to defend him this week.
They also point out that the prime minister was not close to Mandelson, whom they believe had privately been critical of him by suggesting he wasn’t up to the job. Even in public, Mandelson wasn’t exactly polite about him, saying before the election that he could do with shedding a few pounds.
Constitutional niceties aside, the role of ambassador is in the gift of the prime minister. And there is no more important posting for the UK than Washington DC. So the decision was ultimately Starmer’s, and many inside the Labour government believe the buck has to stop with him.
The implications of this particular scandal reach further than British politics. One senior Whitehall insider said sacking Mandelson could be catastrophic for the government’s relationship with Trump, who is more deeply embroiled in the Epstein scandal even than he.
Others believe it is better to have drawn a line under the row before the US president arrives for next week’s state visit. In the end, the bigger danger for Starmer was to have it still hanging over him while Trump was here.
The fallout in the Labour ranks over the emails was immediate and angry. Before Mandelson’s sacking was even announced, the junior minister sent out on to the morning broadcast round, Mike Tapp, said he was “really disturbed” by them. The former frontbencher Andy McDonald said there was “widespread revulsion” in party.
Privately, MPs went further. One said: “It’s obvious from space that the PM must sack Peter Mandelson. The No 10 position appears to be ‘we knew about this but appointed him anyway’. It is completely indefensible and untenable. This risks being Chris Pincher on steroids.”
This is perhaps the biggest risk of all for Starmer. His MPs acknowledge that, unlike Conservative predecessors, when things go wrong he acts quickly and decisively. Both Rayner and Mandelson were gone in days. Under Boris Johnson it would have been months.
But to take a step back, many MPs will question why such rapid action is needed so often. Rayner’s tax affairs was a scandal no one could have foreseen. But Mandelson’s latest messy exit was entirely predictable – and people will ask why Starmer did not see it coming.
