Bandit Country?

President Karol Nawrocki of Poland says that Ukraine's glorification of the "bandits and murderers" of the UPA makes it "not ready to be part of the European family", and thus unfit to join the EU.

Although Israel is equally critical, its capture of Beaufort Castle is not only a major symbolic assault on Lebanon's and the wider region's Christian and especially Catholic past and present, but also a major strategic capture north of the Litani, effectively laying claim to the whole of Lebanon. Those two aspects are intimately connected.

And those are just today, a day on which thousands more examples could be cited from around the world. In such a world as this, read the Mandelson Files and weep. But don't mourn. Organise.

The Grownups Are Back In Charge?

South West Water will today be sentenced for having supplied water unfit for human consumption, leading to an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Devon in May 2024, making more than 140 people ill and hospitalising four of them. Ofcom is once again to investigate the Royal Mail for having come nowhere near its annual delivery targets, and for having managed the remarkable feat of doing even worse in the year to the end of this March than it did in the year before.

For all the Government's self-congratulation about the railways, the rolling stock remains in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Rent to whom? And for all that one of Tony Blair's many unsavoury employers, the regime of Paul Kagame, will not be paid any more British public money, whatever happened to the £700 million or more that Robert Jenrick paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year?

Yet in the midst of this and so very much more, six pages of the latest Mandelson Files are given over to Georgia Gould, who was then the Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office as well as the Member of Parliament for the good burghers of Queen's Park and Maida Vale, getting the vote out for Peter Mandelson to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford. And he still lost. To William Hague. But Gould is now the Minister for School Standards. By such are we governed.

Patient, Record

The BBC cannot get enough of Nigel Farage, so of course it has not banned him from Desert Island Discs; such blacklisting is reserved for Jeremy Corbyn. Farage was always going to be on it eventually, but he is growing impatient. Many appearances have been amusing at the time, such as Aung San Suu Kyi’s hilariously middlebrow playlist, while others are good for a laugh in hindsight, such as the fact that Nicola Sturgeon’s luxury item was a coffee machine. The coffee was clearly flowing in her household, since Peter Murrell bought 108 toilet rolls hours before she warned against panic buying during the pandemic.

Remaining in the lavatory, more joy in heaven and all that, but what new information caused James Murray to change his mind about whether a person with a Y chromosome and a penis could be a woman? Still, the Single Patient Record is a good idea in principle, even if the concerns about security and confidentiality are more than valid. Unlimited access to identifiable patient data has already been granted by NHS England to the Palantir of Jeffrey Epstein’s Peter Thiel, to the Palantir that was a client of Epstein’s Peter Mandelson, to the Palantir of ICE and IDF infamy, and to the Palantir with which Mandelson and Keir Starmer had off-the-books meetings in Washington while Mandelson was Ambassador there. Expressly in support of Javier Milei, Thiel himself is now based in Argentina, which is the only country in the world that might conceivably invade British territory.

A solution is at hand. The Terrorism Act was not designed to counter or deter the Armed Forces of other sovereign states, even if proscription is a lot cheaper than rebuilding the real means of doing so. But as the proscription of Palestine Action was an all-or-nothing measure that also banned the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult (and how are the presumably urgent battles against those progressing?), so the proscription of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should be an all-or-nothing measure that also banned ICE and the IDF. Palantir is embedded in both, and it is one of several means of enmeshing them with each other, so if they were banned in Britain, then it could not possibly have any part in our NHS or anything else.

Grinding Swords

Reformers, Restorers and all points right, 10 years ago you truly hated Eastern Europeans. Yet Henry Nowak had the most common surname in Poland, while his very Slavic-looking father had a slight but unmistakable hint of the non-native English speaker. And juries were absolutely sacrosanct to you, as they should be, until two of them were unable to convict Mohammed Fahir Amaaz of actual bodily harm, or Muhammad Amaad of anything at all. But now juries are just grand again, because one of them has convicted Vickrum Digwa and his mother, Kiran Kaur. If two juries drawn from the 80 per cent white City of Liverpool could not convict two Muslims of Pakistani descent, although the first one had convicted one of them of three other assaults, then the system was redeemed when two Sikhs were convicted by a jury drawn from the 80 per cent white City of Southampton.

Digwa was convicted both of murder, and of possession of a bladed article in a public place. The jury rejected his claim to have been acting in self-defence, and it equally rejected his claim that the bladed article had been a kirpan, not least because he had at the time been wearing a real one. He had already been barred from the gurdwara, Kaur will be sentenced on 17 July for having hidden the murder weapon, Digwa's brother Gurpreet participated in the original lie, and the behaviour of the family at yesterday's sentencing hearing caused 14 Police Officers to be summoned to the court. All communities have families like that.

People grieve in their own ways, of course, but when you already have a conviction for murder, then is it really worth a civil action for wrongful death at all, never mind if that involved getting mixed up with Elon Musk? The party that Musk has the insolence to support in Britain now wants to ban the kirpan, although, while I am open to correction, I have not been able to find a single case of its use as an offensive weapon since its exemption under the Criminal Justice Act 1988, 38 years ago and counting. As soon as it were used as such, then that exemption would cease to apply in that specific case. But unless you can show me otherwise, then that has never happened on these shores. Musk, Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain might also consider that there were no stronger opponents of halal meat than the Sikhs, and that the original kirpan was a real sword used defensively against Mughal persecution. In wearing the kirpan today, a Sikh still declares such readiness, willingness and ability in principle, all else having failed. Think on.

And think on that Digwa claimed to be a member of the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism. With its obvious attraction to Digwa's type of weapons-obsessed young man such as might accrue to Active Clubs and the like, many members of that order reject the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee's 2001 ban on shaheedi degh, their traditional drink to aid meditation and, interestingly, to make them fiercer in battle. Interestingly, because its base is cannabis.

In The Pink?

That Reform UK is the most popular party among gay and bisexual men will come as no surprise to those of us with ecclesiastical backgrounds. If anything, the wonder is that it is not Restore Britain, and even then only for want of anything even further to the right.

But what of the rest of the Reform electorate? Since the dawn of time, those people have at least pretended not to notice that preponderance in everything from the Conservative Party and the right-wing media, via the public schools and the grander groves of academia, to the Royal Households and the clergy. But that is no longer the etiquette. They never asked what it was about their old party that made it so attractive to men of that inclination. Will they ask about their new one?

Similarly, Reform and Labour are tied for the top spot among public sector trade unionists, who are a pretty middle-class lot and hitherto the core supporters of Tony Blair and Keir Starmer. Labour needs to reckon with their obvious disappointment, but not half as much as Reform needs to ask itself about the attractiveness of becoming their voice and vehicle. Even the broadest church needs walls.

The Tangled Web

Paul Knaggs writes:

The second tranche of documents relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the United States arrives in Parliament this week. It is, according to the government, among the largest publications ever laid before the House. Whether it answers the questions that matter is an entirely different proposition.

THE DRIP AND THE DELAY

Sir Walter Scott wrote it in 1808, and British politics has been illustrating it ever since: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.” The Mandelson affair has become the definitive case study of that tangled web, strand by strand, delay by delay, redaction by redaction.

Monday, we are told, brings the second tranche. A government spokesperson has called it one of “the largest publications ever laid in Parliament.” That is a remarkable boast for a government that initially opposed releasing any of it at all. Number 10 has refused to confirm the publication date, performing the by-now-familiar ritual of managing revelation by controlling the drip. The timing, as ever, is everything: Parliament returns from recess on Monday, and the documents land precisely when scrutiny resumes, not a day before.

The question that precedes every page of every release remains the same one this publication has been asking for months: what is not there? What has been redacted, withheld by the Metropolitan Police as part of its ongoing investigation, or quietly excluded under the elastic rubric of national security? The gap between what was said and what was done is where this story lives. The documents do not fill that gap. They illuminate its edges.

The government initially opposed this disclosure. It required a parliamentary ambush to extract it. That fact should preface every sentence of every analysis of what is published.

WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW

The first tranche, published in March, was instructive enough. It confirmed that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had been advised, nine days before Mandelson’s appointment was confirmed in December 2024, that the peer’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein posed a “general reputational risk.” The advice note informed the Prime Minister that Epstein and Mandelson’s relationship had continued across 2009 to 2011, that Mandelson reportedly stayed in Epstein’s house while the predator was in prison in June 2009, and that Mandelson was known as an advocate for closer UK-China relations.

Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, described the appointment process in a summary of a fact-finding call as “weirdly rushed.” Powell noted he had raised his concerns with Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s then-chief of staff, and been told the issues had been addressed. They had not been addressed. They had been managed. There is a difference, and it is not a small one.

We now know that UK Security Vetting concluded Mandelson presented a “high” overall concern and recommended his clearance be denied. The concerns included his business ties to Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, his connection to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, his relationship with former Israeli military intelligence general Tamir Hayman, a one-million-pound loan to invest in an Israeli start-up, and a potentially compromising relationship with a British individual. The vetting agency said no. The Foreign Office, then under David Lammy as Foreign Secretary, said yes. Sir Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office permanent secretary, overruled the vetting recommendation and granted Mandelson his clearance. Robbins has since been sacked. Lammy remains in Cabinet.

The vetting agency said no. The Foreign Office said yes. That sentence alone should end several careers. / Starmer told the country he knew nothing about the failed vetting until the Guardian’s confirmation broke in April 2026. Opposition parties disputed this promptly and with cause, pointing to exchanges showing Downing Street had been contacted about the failed vetting seven months earlier. David Maddox, political editor of The Independent, broke the story of Mandelson’s failure to clear MI6 vetting on 12 September 2025. It was raised in the House of Commons four days later. The Prime Minister and his office were not uninformed. They were, at best, incurious.

THE MINISTERS WHO WENT QUIET 

The second tranche brings something the first did not contain: Mandelson’s direct communications with ministers and government officials during his time as ambassador. It also brings, according to reporting by The Telegraph, a revelation of a different order. Cabinet ministers attempted to conceal their messages with Lord Mandelson from Parliament. 

Government officials dealing with the Mandelson files were forced to ask ministers to hand over their messages more than once, after initial reluctance. Under the terms of the humble address motion, ministers, officials and special advisers were required to submit all WhatsApp and email messages exchanged with Mandelson. Yet civil servants received “nil return” responses from some ministers known to have a close relationship with the peer. Some argued that their conversations with the US ambassador were not strictly ministerial, and therefore fell outside scope. Civil servants, The Telegraph reports, were dismayed. 

This is the texture of a cover-up. It does not require a single smoking gun. It requires a pattern: initial opposition to publication, belated compliance, narrow interpretations of scope, ministerial reluctance, and civil servants pressing again and again for material that should have arrived without asking. Every delay, every reinterpretation, every nil return is another thread in Scott’s web. 

The Intelligence and Security Committee accused the government of applying redactions far too broadly, of withholding documents it had no authority to withhold. The watchdog was not speculating. It had seen the material.

THE NETWORK NOBODY NAMES 

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has resigned from the government. There is a thread running underneath all of this that the document releases will not resolve, because documents do not answer structural questions. They record transactions. They do not explain the obligations that preceded them. To understand those obligations, you need to look at who funds whom, who is married to whom, who was placed where, and who held the whip when the vote came.

Labour Together, the think tank built by Morgan McSweeney and then run by Josh Simons, now a minister in Starmer’s government, funded 111 Labour MPs ahead of and during the 2024 general election. Of the 123 total parliamentary candidates the organisation backed, 111 won their seats. That is not a network. That is a parliamentary army. Labour Together donated more than two and a half million pounds to Labour ahead of the 2024 general election. Fourteen serving ministers received financial support from the organisation, including Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, Yvette Cooper and John Healey.

Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones, who is now responsible for propriety and ethics in government, received 57,400 pounds from Labour Together ahead of that election. Jones is now in charge of publishing the Mandelson documents under discussion.

Among those backed and endorsed by Labour Together for the 2024 election was Imogen Walker, elected MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley with a majority of 9,472. Within months of taking her seat she was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. By September 2025 she had been elevated to assistant government whip. Imogen Walker is married to Morgan McSweeney. Wikipedia records that McSweeney used his position to aid his wife’s selection as a Labour candidate. That is a fact, not an allegation. It sits in the public domain, and it sits uncomfortably there.

But Walker’s support did not come only from Labour Together. As Labour Heartlands reported in February 2026, in June 2024, just weeks before polling day, Peter Mandelson personally attended a fundraiser for Walker and her fellow Scottish candidate Gregor Poynton. Mandelson, the man whose relationship with Jeffrey Epstein would bring down this government’s first year, was in the room, microphone in hand, raising money for the woman who would become the wife of his most loyal protege. The photograph exists. The event happened. The connection is not alleged. It is documented.

Starmer put McSweeney in control of selecting Labour’s candidates. He included his wife, Imogen Walker, in that selection This is the network made visible. McSweeney learned politics from Mandelson. McSweeney built the machine that made his wife an MP. Mandelson fundraised for her. Walker became a whip. And on 28 April 2026, Parliament voted on whether to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee over his conduct in the Mandelson affair. McSweeney spent the day testifying before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, admitting his “serious mistake” in recommending Mandelson’s appointment. While he did so, his wife worked the lobbies. The motion was defeated 335 to 223. Fifteen Labour MPs defied the whip. The Speaker noted that some members voting against investigation were heckled with cries of “shame” as they walked through. It was raised from the floor of the House that McSweeney’s wife, now a whip, was among those pressing Labour MPs to vote against any scrutiny of the man her husband had championed and Mandelson had fundraised for.

Mandelson fundraised for the woman who became the whip who enforced the vote to protect the Prime Minister who appointed Mandelson on her husband’s advice. At some point, coincidence stops being a useful word.

THE FAMILY THAT GOVERNS 

It would be easy to dismiss the following as mere coincidence, and some will. Dismiss it if you like. But account for it first.

Rachel Reeves is Chancellor of the Exchequer. She is married to Nicholas Joicey, a senior civil servant who is Second Permanent Secretary and Group Chief Operating Officer at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and who was formerly a speechwriter to Gordon Brown when Brown was Chancellor. The Chancellor’s husband sits at the heart of the civil service machinery the Chancellor oversees. Her sister, Ellie Reeves, is Solicitor General, appointed in September 2025. Ellie Reeves is married to John Cryer, now Baron Cryer, who served as Labour MP for Hornchurch and then Leyton and Wanstead, and who was Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 2015 to 2024 before being elevated to the House of Lords following the 2024 election.

But of course it’s just like one big family.

The Commons and the Lords, taken together, contain an extraordinary concentration of relationships that the mainstream record rarely joins up. Sisters who are government ministers. Husbands who are peers. Spouses who are senior civil servants. Wives who are whips. It is perfectly normal, of course, for spouses to keep their maiden names. It is perfectly understandable that people who work in politics meet partners who also work in politics. None of this is, individually, improper. But the aggregate picture is one that any serious democracy should be willing to examine honestly, rather than treat as impolite to mention.

These are not accusations. They are facts, properly sourced and verifiable. The question they raise is not whether any individual acted wrongly, but whether a political culture that concentrates power so tightly within a network of family, financial, and ideological loyalty is capable of subjecting itself to meaningful scrutiny. The answer, on 28 April 2026, was 335 to 223. The whip held.

I point these things out as I point out the corruption and decay in a house that is our seat of democracy.

WHAT THE SECOND TRANCHE CANNOT TELL US 

No document release, however large, will answer the question that sits beneath every other question: why was Peter Mandelson appointed to the most important diplomatic post in British foreign policy in December 2024, against the advice of the vetting agency, against the concerns of the national security adviser, against the reservations of the Foreign Office’s most senior civil servant, and with full knowledge of a relationship with a convicted paedophile financier that stretched from before Epstein’s first conviction to years after it?

The official answer is that Mandelson lied about the depth of his relationship with Epstein. Starmer has repeated this position with such consistency that it has acquired the rhythm of a prepared statement, which is precisely what it is. The documents show, however, that the risks were known. “General reputational risk” is not a phrase used by civil servants who are uninformed. It is a phrase used by civil servants who are recording, for the protection of everyone involved, that they have told the minister what they know and the minister has chosen to proceed.

The appointment was rushed. The vetting was overruled. The warnings were filed and ignored. The minister who overruled the vetting remains in Cabinet. The chief of staff who pushed the appointment resigned but was back in the building. The think tank that funded those who would later vote to limit scrutiny is under criminal referral. And the wife of the man at the centre of it all was working the lobbies while her husband answered questions about his role in the affair.

Scott’s line ends with a couplet most people forget. After “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive” comes this: “How tangled becomes the web when we attempt to make the world believe.”

The world is watching. The questions will not go away. The silence around Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together will not end because the government has published what it was compelled to publish. Transparency imposed is not transparency offered. The distinction matters, and so does the price of forgetting it.

A government that required a parliamentary ambush to begin telling the truth about itself has not suddenly become honest. It has become unable to sustain the lie at its previous cost.

Sentence, Structure

If Nicola Sturgeon is “serving a sentence for a crime [she] did not commit”, then is she serving it on the same wing as a rapist? She put other Scotswomen in that position. She gave a “no comment” interview to the Police before, days later, sending them a written statement that was copied to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, headed by the Lord Advocate in the Cabinet, which without further examination by anyone promptly decided not to prosecute her. Will this now be standard practice? Someone must have the file that Police Scotland sent to the Crown Office. This is what the Internet is for.

Sturgeon had better hope to have concluded her sentence well before the next Conservative Government, since, in yet another sign of the restoration of Blairism, that party has adopted the old New Labour groupies’ idea of replacing cash benefits with payment cards that could be used to purchase only approved items. Chris Philp wants this to be only for people serving non-custodial sentences or released on licence. But of course that would be only in the first instance. Even for them, would it extend to the state pension? If not, why not? Likewise, Universal Credit payments to those in work, who are two in five claimants. The administrative costs of this whole thing would make it more expensive than the present arrangements, but that is never the point, just as no one who decided anything would care that this gimmick would drive people into the black economy so that they could buy a pint at a birthday party. So much for rehabilitation.

Rather fewer workers might be on benefits if work paid enough to live on. Agree or disagree with equalising the minimum wage regardless of age, but Pat McFadden told Trevor Phillips today that it was not the Government’s job to do. Then whose is it? And why was it in the Labour manifesto? “Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage,” it said on page 45. McFadden also claimed that, “Today, around seven in 10 young people claiming health and disability benefits are still claiming a decade later.” That was a lie. Those people will have been on Disability Living Allowance for under-16s, the application form for which is 40 pages long and requires the support of numerous specialist reports. Nearly half of severely disabled children live in poverty, and nearly a third of DLA recipients in childhood have their claims for Personal Independence Payment rejected when they dare to live another day.

But neoliberalism is reaching its outer limits. There is far more tax fraud then benefit fraud, yet tax frauds get to cut deals with HMRC and pay back as much or as little as they pleased. When he is not endorsing Restore Britain, then Elon Musk is privatising space. And the latest antics of Bonnie Blue, whose endorsement Reform UK has welcomed, are enough to test anyone’s commitment to the “free” market in general and to the non-personhood of the unborn child in particular.