The Government faces a brutal round of local elections, a foreign war that Britain didn’t start, has driven up energy prices and inflation, and the Prime Minister is in crisis due to the House of Commons fraud – it’s all starting to feel very much in 2022.
For Boris Johnson, it was a birthday cake and a karaoke machine amid the Covid lockdowns that destroyed his repeated assertions that the rules had been followed at all times. For Keir Starmer, the memorable points in the story are not so overtly comic – but in a way no less farcical for that.
On Thursday 16 April we learned that Peter Mandelson, a man who was twice forced to resign as a minister in Tony Blair’s government after scandals, failed the extended vetting required for him to take up the role of UK ambassador to Washington in 2025. However, his appointment was signed off anyway, apparently without anyone in Downing Street knowing.
This missing information, which was only revealed by the Cabinet Office on Tuesday, means Starmer has repeatedly made misleading comments to parliament and the public. On 10 September 2025, as revelations about Mandelson’s long relationship with disgraced sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein were beginning to break, the Prime Minister told the House that “the full due process was followed” – a line repeated several times by officials and ministers in the following days. In February, amid yet more explosive details about leaks of sensitive government information when Mandelson was last in government a decade and a half ago, Starmer was even clearer about the appointment process: there had been “security vetting carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise that cleared him for the role”.
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Except there wasn’t. Clearance was actually denied. The government’s line is that someone in the Foreign Office (Permanent Secretary Olly Robbins, who started in his role just weeks before Mandelson officially started his ambassadorial gig and had just been sacked) overruled the vetting decision in January 2025 without telling anyone at No 10. No one bothered to tell Starmer in September either, when he insisted the due process of the Commons was followed. Nor did they illuminate it before his comments to the media in February 2026.
According to Starmer, this is both “condescending” and “inexcusable”. There is no dispute (although Robbins’ allies are now suggesting that the civil servant was strangely not allowed to inform the government of the results verification procedure). The Prime Minister is also “absolutely furious” about it.
“Furious”, perhaps, as Boris Johnson claimed in December 2021, when a video emerged of government aides joking about how to answer questions about the deadlock-breaking Downing Street parties? Is it “controversial” to Starmer in the same way that Johnson claimed to be “shocked” by the revelations of the lockdown breach? Is there really any difference between Starmer’s strident defense that he didn’t know Mandelson’s vetting had been denied and Johnson’s emphatic line: “I repeat that I have repeatedly assured myself since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no Covid rules were breached”? How would the Keir Starmer of that era have reacted, stripping Johnson of the whole row at PMQs for his muddled party history, to the excuses he himself is using now?
We know the answer – because it was Starmer, with that lawyer’s eye for detail and forensic ability to target weak spots that worked so well in the opposition, who set the traps that eventually ensnared the Tory prime minister in his deceptions and half-truths. Many things helped bring down Boris Johnson’s dysfunctional government, from the kamikaze machinations of Dominic Cummings to the sexual harassment row involving Chris Pincher, not to mention a terrible round of local elections. But Starmer was the crusader leading the charge against the party, reminding the nation every day what the enveloping scandal revealed to us about the man who held the highest office in the land.
Partygate was so corrosive because it embodied what was already known about Johnson: that he was reckless, frivolous and fundamentally frivolous, the kind of character who could well be imagined throwing crazy parties where children’s swings broke and then pretending to have no memory. In a very different way, Mandelsongate reveals something similar about Starmer’s true nature. The most positive reading of what we’ve learned in recent days – the only reading that exonerates Starmer from deliberate and conscious deception of parliament – is of a man with such a tenuous grip on the government he’s supposed to be running that major decisions are routinely made without ever crossing his desk.
From the failed winter fuel reforms to the “stranger island” speech he claimed he hadn’t read, Starmer’s impatient approach to governance has become a hallmark of his time in office. We know Starmer didn’t like Peter Mandelson either; we know the appointment was pushed by top aide Morgan McSweeney against ethics advice; we know it was announced publicly before the extended vetting process had begun. Could the incoming head of the FCDO have felt pressure, either overt or implicit, to spare the Prime Minister the embarrassment of choosing a new US ambassador, and could the culture of abdication and ambiguity that Starmer has spread prevent that information from leaking? With a different leader, one would have doubts. With that, it seems clearly believable.
Starmer would be horrified by the party comparison. He built his brand in Westminster as Johnson’s polar opposite: a politician lacking in brilliance but guided by old-fashioned ideas of duty, principle and process. I’m sure he feels utterly betrayed by the circumstances that have brought him to such a similar place, when his defense is based on being kept in the dark about information that any competent leader would be expected to know. If the Mandelson scandal is to trigger his downfall (which, given the mutinous noises coming from Labor MPs, is very possible), he will no doubt see it as a great injustice.
The rest of us will see the irony. Scandals unravel political careers when they reveal something fundamental about their architect’s unfitness for office. Starmer helped Johnson learn that the hard way. Now you are learning it yourself.
(Further reading: Partygate has taken us all for fools)
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