Let us be done with Labour’s latest contortion. As the Mandelson affair metastasises into one of the gravest political crises of this government, Starmer loyalists have begun muttering that the real culprits sit somewhere deep in the security apparatus, anonymous officials who supposedly failed to flag risks, faceless agencies who somehow dropped the ball.
This is profoundly misleading, unfair, and worse, it drags Britain’s intelligence and vetting institutions into a political decision that was never theirs to make. Ministers choose ambassadors. Officials advise. That distinction matters, and the attempt to blur it now looks less like clarification than deflection.
Peter Mandelson was not an obscure technocrat quietly eased into a backwater posting. He was a towering political figure, a former Cabinet minister, twice forced from office in earlier decades, a man whose name alone provoked headlines.
Yet it was Keir Starmer who selected him for one of the most prestigious diplomatic roles in the world, ambassador to Washington. He was not appointed by a panel of spooks in a basement office, but by the Prime Minister himself. Political appointments are called that for a reason. They are political judgements, signed for and signed off at the very top.
In this case the top was Keir Starmer.
He chose Mandelson.
He announced Mandelson.
He defended Mandelson.
And now, as his appointment collapses in spectacular fashion, there is an attempt to redirect responsibility downwards, to hint that if only the vetting had been sharper, if only the intelligence community had joined more dots, the Prime Minister would have been spared embarrassment. That is not how the system works. Before any deep security checks conclude, a Prime Minister receives summaries in his red box, propriety notes, open-source digests, reputational risk assessments compiled from publicly available material and from the candidate’s own declarations. Parliament has already been told such a document existed in this case. That is not some exotic artefact of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, it is routine Whitehall housekeeping.
Routine, and therefore impossible to plead ignorance of.
Because much of what has detonated this affair was not buried in classified intercepts or whispered by covert sources. Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had been documented for years in newspapers, television documentaries, court filings, and photographs that circulated long before any ambassadorial announcement. MPs raised concerns. Journalists put questions directly to the party leadership. Front pages did what front pages do. This was not a hidden risk. It was a conspicuous one.
Which leads to the most awkward question of all. Did the Prime Minister himself ask?
Not whether an official drafted three queries.
Not whether an aide relayed written answers.
But whether the man who would shortly dispatch Mandelson to represent Britain in Washington pressed him personally, face to face, about the most toxic element of his recent past remains the central question. Did he ask whether contact continued after Epstein’s conviction, whether stays at those properties had occurred, whether private flights were taken, whether financial ties existed, whether the public narrative was complete, and whether the habits that had forced him from office twice before had truly been left behind. These are not lurid curiosities. They are exactly the questions one asks before entrusting someone with the most sensitive diplomatic role in the British gift.
Of course red flags were going off all over the place. Mandelson had already been forced out of office twice, first for failing to disclose a substantial loan from a colleague whose business interests intersected with his department, later over accusations of lobbying for wealthy businessmen seeking British citizenship. His whole political career had already been shadowed by questions of judgement. It is therefore reasonable to ask why Starmer was so determined to elevate him to Washington, and to involve him in the most delicate questions of British statecraft.
Starmer’s emerging defence appears to be that he relied on the process, that he required more formal vetting to surface concerns. That stretches credulity. The controversy was already in the air. Starmer had been asked about it publicly. His own MPs had asked him. The headlines were unavoidable. To suggest that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom required MI5 or MI6 to alert him even further to the existence of widely reported scandals is to drain the word leadership of its meaning.
This is where the attempt to shift blame becomes not merely implausible but damaging. Britain’s intelligence community does not pick ambassadors. It does not weigh political calculations about reputational risk versus diplomatic convenience. It provides assessments. Which they did. Then ministers decide. If Mandelson misled officials, that is serious. If vetting processes were in an any way inadequate, that must be examined. But neither point alters the central fact that everyone was asking questions about the Mandelson appointment at the time and the final call rested in Downing Street… nowhere else.
You cannot preside over an appointment when it suits you and then point to the machinery of state when it explodes. You cannot praise the process while it produces the result you desire and denounce it when the same process yields catastrophe. Above all, you cannot allow a narrative to take hold that casts Britain’s security professionals as the architects of a political choice they did not make.
The buck does not stop in a filing cabinet. It does not stop with a civil servant summarising newspaper articles into a risk note. It does not stop with an official checking boxes on a form.
It stops on the Prime Minister’s desk.
If Mandelson should never have been appointed, responsibility lies with the person who appointed him. If the warning signs were obvious, responsibility lies with the person who chose to wave them through.
Leadership, in the end, is not about delegating blame when events go wrong. It is about owning decisions when they turn out to be disastrous. Keir Starmer made this call, and no amount of finger-pointing at the intelligence services will change that simple, brutal, unavoidable truth.
Claire Bullivant
Photo Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
