In many political scandals there is an agreed absolute stop, a time for the circus to continue: perhaps a resignation, certainly a police investigation. But for Downing Street, Peter Mandelson risks becoming a headache that will never end.
Mandelson’s future in public life is now completely over, or as definitive as you can get for a man who, as the Conservatives say about Boris Johnson, probably needs to be buried at a crossroads with a stake in his heart before you can completely prevent another return.
After resigning from Labor as further revelations about his links to Jeffrey Epstein emerged, Mandelson has now left the House of Lords, and efforts are being made to strip him of his title.
With Mandelson out of the picture, at least until he breaks cover another self-serving interviewthe focus is very much on Downing Street, and how in the world the team around Keir Starmer thought it was a good idea to appoint such a dirty, if well connected, figure to be the ambassador of Donald Trump’s court.
There are two interconnected elements of this public inquest: one internal and the other external.
In the latter, the opposition parties will be happy to punch the bruises, using every parliamentary mechanism in their power to try to tease out new and potentially embarrassing information.
The first stage of this is likely to be a daytime debate in the Conservative opposition on Wednesday, where the Tories are expected to push for the release of internal documents that set out what No 10 knew about Mandelson’s links to Epstein at the time he was given the job in Washington.
Its purpose is to focus as much fire as possible on the personal Starmer. “He either knows and doesn’t care, or isn’t curious enough to care, and doesn’t look good either,” a Conservative frontbencher said.
There was a similar verdict on Tuesday from Nigel Farage, who told a press conference that while he himself was mentioned 32 times in the Epstein files, he never met the child sex offender and “never went to the island”.
While acknowledging Mandelson’s skills as a networker, Farage said Starmer and his team had made a “grave, grave error of judgement” in making him ambassador despite his long record of past misjudgments and bad behaviour.
Significantly, the Reform UK leader said questions should be asked about the judgment not just of Starmer but of Morgan McSweeney, his influential chief of staff.
McSweeney was the focus of much anger from Labor MPs. Some of them said they privately hoped that the day’s debate in the Conservative opposition had produced some internal No 10 documents about the appointment of the ambassador, especially so they could see how it was pressed by McSweeney, a former protégé of Mandelson, whom he regularly consulted before the general election.
McSweeney is already disliked by some Labor MPs, partly as a proxy for their dissatisfaction with the government’s performance, but also because of his role as head of a group in No 10 that is seen as a faction to a sometimes small degree to the left of the party.
Even before the latest Mandelson scandal, there were calls for McSweeney to be sacked if, as many thought, Labor did poorly in May’s elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and English councils.
But, as we saw under Boris Johnson, changing the team around the leader will only buy you a little time if your MPs, and the electorate more broadly, conclude that the problem is not the team but the person they are advising.
This is now the Labor endgame, the place where all conversations about Starmer within the party now end: what else is he? With more evidence of his seemingly poor judgment likely to hit the front pages in the coming days, that clock is ticking even faster.