Table of Contents
As a conga-line of disgraced leaders could tell you, it’s not the initial scandal that gets you, it’s the cover-up. Just ask Richard Nixon. If John Profumo had just admitted to banging Christine Keeler, Harold MacMillan might have held on to government and Stephen Ward might still be alive.
Similarly, the Starmer government’s attempts to cover-up over appointing a creepy friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s is exposing more and more muck that might otherwise have stayed un-raked. The latest tranche of 1,500 pages of documents, dragged into the light by a humble address to the monarch, shows Keir Starmer’s team in full panic mode over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. They rushed the vetting, ignored the red flags and hoped nobody would notice the Epstein connection.
Now the whole sorry mess is splattered across the front pages, along with an unfiltered glimpse into the chaos of the Starmer government, because it seems everyone wanted to chatter, bitch and gripe to a kiddy-diddling creepozoid.
Then cabinet office minister and now pensions minister Pat McFadden had messaged Mandelson in 2025 saying “Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.’’ Later Mr McFadden confided in Mandelson that the government’s budget was “messy”. He said “Everyone seems to think it’s someone else’s job to get the policy right...which is very odd.”
These are not the words of a confident administration. They are the private grumblings of a minister who knows the wheels are coming off. Even Keir Starmer’s little mate, Mandelson, was gossipping behind the back of the PM who bent over backwards to get the Epstein confident into a cushy, taxpayer-funded sinecure.
The documents reveal stark divisions inside Labour’s senior leadership. Mr McFadden confided in Mandelson that the government’s budget was “messy”.
Mandelson opined that Sir Keir would “avoid any encounter with journalists that might involve him answering a question”, adding “no sense of opportunity for personal projection. Just avoid all risk. Always the same.’’ Later he adds that the prime minister “lacks verve as does the cabinet as a whole”.
This, remember, is what Starmer’s friends are saying about him.
Even without the in-fighting, the documents are damning stuff. They reveal that Mandelson failed his security vetting but was appointed anyway. The Foreign Office offered “wiggle room” so he could be briefed up to secret level before the checks were finished. At the end of 2024 he had handwritten to then-foreign secretary David Lammy that the government would “never regret” making him ambassador.
Famous last words. Especially coming from someone who has so far staunchly resisted handing over his own phone for public scrutiny. Everything we know so far is only because a bunch of Labour insiders were too thick to delete the stuff on their own phones.
It’s not the initial scandal, remember: it’s the cover-up.
The fallout from the attempted Mandelson cover-up is so toxic that even the Man Who Would be PM, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, is running for cover. Burnham is attempting to move into parliament via an upcoming by-election, putting himself into a position to challenge Starmer for the prime ministership. So, he’s trying to prove his own purity.
“Change can’t come soon enough,” Mr Burnham posted on social media, adding the revelations will further damage people’s confidence in the political system.
I don’t think it can, mate. How can you “further damage” something that’s already completely and utterly FUBARed?
Starmer thought he was getting a smooth operator in Washington. What he got was a walking reminder that the cover-up is always worse than the original sin. The initial appointment of an Epstein associate to the Washington embassy was bad enough, now the muck keeps rising.
The longer Starmer tries to pretend it isn’t there, the deeper he finds himself in it.
