Updated ,first published
London: A comedian could not have done a better job than Keir Starmer when scripting the British prime minister’s earnest line to parliament on Monday about the scandalous mistake that might cost him his job.
“Many members across the House will find these facts to be incredible,” Starmer told the House of Commons on Monday.
That drew jeering laughter from the enemies in front of him, while the allies behind him stared stonily ahead. In defending himself on the charge of misleading parliament, Starmer uttered the very words that undercut his case for being believed.
The rejoinder is easy to script. Starmer and his government are simply unbelievable. In years to come, observers will truly find the facts to be incredible when they consider how he soared to power in 2024 with a record majority and became Britain’s most unpopular prime minister less than two years later.
But Starmer survived the inquisition in parliament on Monday about the process to appoint Peter Mandelson to be ambassador to the United States – a catastrophic decision given the former Labour cabinet minister’s friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
For all the media noise about the process and the revelation that Mandelson failed security vetting by a key government agency, Starmer was always likely to survive the immediate pressure.
The latest revelations have highlighted the foolishness of the appointment. Starmer named Mandelson to the post on December 20, 2024, but he did this as a captain’s call, and the decision was made public before Mandelson was subject to official security vetting.
Mandelson was denied clearance by UK Security Vetting, a government agency, on January 28, 2025. We do not know the grounds for rejection. The fact of the denial remained unknown to Starmer, his cabinet ministers and the public for more than a year.
Two days after that formal rejection, officials at the top of the Foreign Office confirmed Mandelson had cleared the process to take the job. In effect, they decided that other factors took priority over the security vetting.
The permanent secretary, Olly Robbins, is being blamed for not telling Starmer that Mandelson had failed vetting. On Tuesday, Robbins, who was sacked last week, told a parliamentary committee he had experienced “an atmosphere of pressure” coming from Starmer’s office to approve Mandelson’s appointment.
Mandelson, dubbed the “prince of darkness” in Labour circles for many years, was always seen as a political appointee who could schmooze US President Donald Trump, regardless of any doubts about his character. His friendship with Epstein was known when he was appointed, but it finally caught up with him when new documents were revealed last year. He was removed on September 11, 2025.
For months, Starmer admitted the appointment was a mistake but argued the process was fine. “Full due process was followed,” he told the House of Commons on February 28 this year. Outside parliament, he said security vetting “gave him clearance” for the post. This was false.
One newspaper, The Independent, revealed last September that Mandelson had failed the vetting, but the government fobbed it off. A second outlet, The Guardian, revealed more last week, including that the Foreign Office overturned the vetting decision, and the government could no longer ignore the mess.
Starmer’s defence on Monday boiled down to blaming officials. Bizarrely, even though he admitted it was incredible, it is the likely explanation.
First, the Foreign Office chose to clear Mandelson despite the vetting failure in January 2025. Then it kept this secret from the foreign secretary at the time, David Lammy, and his successor, Yvette Cooper. It also kept it from Starmer.
Then, when Mandelson was removed in September 2025, the Foreign Office withheld the information again. It did not own up to the facts when asked by The Independent that month, and it obfuscated when asked about the vetting by a parliamentary committee led by a senior Labour MP, Emily Thornberry. She, rightly, felt misled.
Worse was to come. In February this year, when Starmer said in public that Mandelson had cleared vetting, the Foreign Office did nothing to tell him the truth. Starmer used an appropriate word for this: it was staggering. Officials chose not to advise the prime minister that his public statements were false.
This is why Starmer asked parliament to accept the incredible with these words: “It beggars belief that throughout the whole timeline of events, officials in the Foreign Office saw fit to withhold this information from the most senior ministers in our system of government.”
Starmer could be lying, of course. If he is, he has handed his political fate to any official or colleague who can show that he knew what he denies knowing. He is by nature a sincere lawyer, not a mad political gambler, so his version of events is likely to stand.
Case closed? Not quite. There remains something utterly unbelievable about Starmer and his government. They swept to power with high hopes, yet they rule with no compelling sense of purpose. They stagger from backflip to blunder, never controlling the politics despite their majority in parliament.
Collective malaise
This is a collective malaise more than the failure of one leader. So, the argument about the Mandelson process is actually a minor drama. It is best seen as an astonishing distraction from the hard decisions Starmer and the cabinet need to make if they are to have any hope of delivering on their promises.
Britain is groaning under the weight of an unsustainable national budget that is in permanent deficit and is loaded with debt. The parliament is unable to agree on ways to save money on welfare or manage the growth in disability payments, while talking about the need to spend more on defence.
Wages are barely moving in real terms. The cost of living can be crippling for families trying to rent a property or buy a home. At least 800,000 young people are not in education, employment or training. Voters want to slow migration, but Britain relies on migrants to make its food, deliver its groceries, care for its hospital patients, drive its Ubers and clean its streets.
Parliament stopped to hear Starmer explain security vetting on Monday, in a moment broadcast live to the public. But it is fair to say that Britain might want to spend more time on some of its bigger problems.
In any case, the prime minister’s fate was never going to be decided by his enemies in parliament. It is going to be determined by his colleagues, if they ever agree on who should replace him and whether to do the deed.
One of Starmer’s most vigorous enemies, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, knows this. He did not bother going to parliament on Monday because he was campaigning for support in regional England.
More important than the opinions in Westminster will be the ballots from voters at the elections on May 7 for scores of local councils as well as parliaments in Scotland and Wales. While local issues are the nominal topics, the elections are being turned into a verdict on Starmer. If the public want him gone, they have a simple way to let him know.
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David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.