It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Kier Starmer. He fired Peter Mandelson as our US ambassador in September last year when leaked emails from the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee first revealed he had sent supportive messages to Jeffrey Epstein during his 2008 prosecution and referred to him as his "best pal.” Five months later, Starmer himself is now coming under huge political pressure for appointing him in the first place. I’m not sure what else he could have done. People now accusing the PM of exercising poor judgment over Mandelson all seemed to think his appointment was a good one at the time. Starmer wasn't popular before last week's details emerged, and you can't help but feel Mandelson's behaviour over a decade ago is just a handy cudgel to beat him with.
Dan Hodges, the Daily Mail columnist, was one who now claims that ‘everyone except Starmer knew the truth’ about Mandelson way back in February 2025 when he was chosen to represent us in Washington.
Just beyond parody at this point— Adam Bienkov (@adambienkov.bsky.social) 8 February 2026 at 19:52
Everyone clearly didn’t include Hodges himself. He thought Mandelson was “the perfect choice.”
Another one was Nigel Farage. In December 2024, when it was first announced, the BBC reported Farage saying Mandelson would be a good choice for US ambassador, even though he “might disagree with [him] on his politics” adding that, “he's a very intelligent man.”
Now, the Reform leader's tone has shifted dramatically. He now attacks Starmer’s decision as being “seriously wrong” and calls for the Prime Minister to 'immediately' stand down. Farage told a press conference: “Given all the previous warnings about Mandelson’s behaviour, it [was] a grave error of judgement on behalf of the Prime Minister.”
All of which simply shows you can’t win, when you alone don't possess perfect foresight. Whatever criticisms you might level at Mandelson, you can't deny he's a heavyweight politician.
Now Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, a lightning rod for many when it comes to criticism of Labour policies, has resigned. Apparently, Mandelson and George Osborne were the final two in the frame in late 2024 after Trump's victory, with Starmer favouring the former Tory chancellor while McSweeney wanted Mandelson.
Osborne may have had fewer skeletons in his cupboard, but Mandelson was a former EU Trade Commissioner and trade was always going to play a big part in the ambassador’s work, with Trump threatening to adopt tariffs as his weapon of choice when going after his allies and adversaries alike.
In hindsight, it was a mistake. But apart from a few references at the time to Mandelson being a divisive figure and having to twice resign as a minister, over financial impropriety in a mortgage application and once for helping a wealthy Indian businessman obtain a UK passport, nobody seemed to raise any significant objections. Now, of course, they all knew it was wrong.
Of course, knowing what we now know, that Mandelson was feeding privileged political information to Epstein which could have been of financial benefit to the convicted trafficker who committed suicide in 2019, we can all see it was an error. To read the emails is astonishing, and I doubt anyone thought that such a senior political figure and privy councillor would casually, sometimes within minutes, forward sensitive emails to Epstein, who had served a prison term at the time.
We knew Mandelson was friends with Epstein, and we also know Mandelson misled Starmer about the extent of his friendship with him. But, if a prerequisite of appointing anyone to important roles in government is that they should never have consorted at any previous time with anyone who might ever have committed a crime, it just makes recruiting people that much harder.
And if anyone thinks what Mandelson did is an isolated case, I suggest they are slightly naive. There is not a politician in Westminster who could survive a trawl of all their previous emails or Whatsapp messages. Mandelson's misfortune was to have many of his mistakes made public.
You can hardly be held responsible for all the sins of people you’ve ever been acquainted with. And unless it is all public, how do you find out in which circles potential appointees moved in past decades? You can only demand assurances, and that is what happened.
Now the mob, never entirely happy with Starmer or McSweeney, is in full hue and cry. They both have plenty of political enemies, and now McSweeney is gone, Starmer's time is surely limited.
The question is, who would replace him? Labour is hardly flush with potential prime ministers at the moment. In the past, under previous Labour leaders, you could always point to three or four good candidates, but in 2015, the party actually thought Jeremy Corbyn was the right man. And he was running against Ed Miliband, another mediocrity.
The choice hasn't got any easier. There are plenty of Labour MPs who think they could do a better job of course, starting with Wes Streeting. You can imagine a lot of them are starting to salivate at the prospect of a leadership contest, but I don't see any of them being better at the job than Starmer. He might be lacklustre without the ruthless survival skills that any leader needs, but he's a decent, honest and capable man.
Sadly, that isn't enough nowadays. I suspect he'll be gone by the summer.
