Distilled Public Disillusion

Steph Spyro writes:

A suspended Labour peer was welcomed to drinks with No 10 staff last week, it has emerged.

Sir Keir Starmer's former director of communications was welcomed into a gathering of senior No 10 officials and party staff last week despite being suspended as a Labour peer.

Lord Doyle was ousted from the party for his links to a convicted sex offender.

The former aide had previously supported Sean Morton, a former Labour councillor in Moray, northeast Scotland, after he was charged with possessing and distributing indecent images of children in December 2016.

Despite the charges, Doyle campaigned for Morton when he ran as an independent in May 2017, knocking on doors wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Re-elect Sean Morton”.

Despite the suspension, Doyle attended leaving drinks briefly at Labour HQ attended by Jill Cuthbertson, the acting Downing Street chief of staff, Lord Alli, the Labour donor, and former Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

The Times, who first reported the story, said the gathering was held for Marianna McFadden, the party’s deputy general-secretary and wife of work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden, who is exiting her role.

MPs reacted with fury earlier this month after the disgraced peer was spotted attending the House of Lords.

Lord Doyle's suspension from the upper chamber in February coincided with Lord Mandelson's sacking as US ambassador, and saw Kemi Badenoch accuse the Prime Minister of "stuffing government with hypocrites and paedophile apologists".

Messages between Doyle and Mandelson were released in the latest tranche of documents published by the government in relation to the latter's appointment to the top job in Washington.

Doyle said: "Mandelson's appointment should never have happened and I regret the message it sent to Epstein's victims and beyond.

"It was clearly wrong and I apologise for any part I played in that process."

Glen Owen and Dan Hodges writes:

Potentially explosive evidence about Peter Mandelson's alleged efforts to influence a Cabinet reshuffle to secure more political influence for his allies has been kept out of the public eye.

Messages between the disgraced former ambassador to the US and Sir Keir Starmer's one-time chief of staff Morgan McSweeney were expected to be released as part of a second tranche of documents made public last week.

But their absence has sparked mystery in Whitehall, with suggestions they were being held back as the police probe into Mandleson's alleged misconduct in public office widens its scope. However, that was dismissed by a Met source last night.

The messages are understood to show that while in his Washington job, the Labour grandee lobbied for Peter Kyle to be made business secretary – a role he was duly given in last September's shake-up.

In his previous job as science and technology secretary, Mr Kyle had been a cheerleader for the artificial intelligence sector that had been a lucrative source of income for Lord Mandelson's consultancy business.

Messages show he publicly spoke out in support of the controversial technology after Mandelson suggested he should.

One minister told The Mail on Sunday last night: 'Peter thought it was impossible to properly promote the AI agenda unless Kyle was business secretary.'

In one message, Mandelson is thought to have said to Mr McSweeney: 'Are you taking Peter away from me?'

A senior Government source last night told the MoS that the reshuffle messages had not been published because police 'have held [them] back' so as not to prejudice the ongoing criminal investigation into the peer's communications with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein when Mandelson was in Gordon Brown's government.

However, a senior source involved in the investigation told the MoS the messages were not currently part of the probe and had not been held back at their request. But they did say the messages might be 'reviewed' later.

Mandelson co-founded an advisory firm called Global Counsel which had commercial dealings with AI giants OpenAI and Palantir.

In February 2025 – two days before Mandelson took up his role as US ambassador – the peer told Mr Kyle that his keynote speech to the Munich Security Conference would 'benefit from more positive language about AI upfront'. Mr Kyle responded: 'That's all v good advice which I'll action.'

Six days later, Mr Kyle used his address to welcome a 'new era of wealth and prosperity' aided by the technology.

By that point, Mandelson had stepped down as a director of Global Counsel, but still retained a large shareholding.

A Cabinet Minister told the MoS: 'Peter had been working closely with Kyle. He had been lobbying for him to [be] business secretary.'

The withheld messages from Mandelson to Mr McSweeney are understood to include the line: 'Have you solved the Darren problem?', relating to Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury at the time. He was made chief secretary to the PM in the reshuffle.

Mr Jones was revealed last week to have contacted Mandelson when he was sacked over his Epstein links with the fawning words: 'You've been doing such a great job, and you worked wonders with Trump. I'm so sorry about today.' The disclosure came after Mr Jones had denied sending such a message.

Last week's tranche of messages also showed Mandelson apparently lobbied on behalf of Jon Garvie, a former colleague at Global Counsel who is now strategy director of the government's National Security Secretariat.

Mr McSweeney told MPs this year that Mandelson had not influenced the reshuffle, insisting: 'I did not respond to any of Mandelson's texts. None of his suggestions actually came out to be the case, so his ideas were not followed up.'

However a Cabinet source said: '[Mandelson] was directly involved. The messages show the people he was expressing an interest in were the same people who did actually get moved'.

No 10 declined to comment last night. A Met Police source said their inquiry is still ongoing.

Mandelson strongly denies claims of misconduct in public office or that he was motivated by financial gain.

And Nick Cohen writes:

The UK has one of the few centre-left governments in the West, and it is failing.

We know what the consequences of failure will be. The US Democrats failed in 2024 and Trump returned. His second term may yet destroy America as a great power and endanger democracy in Ukraine and Europe. In the UK, Nigel Farage and the British friends of Musk and Trump are licking their lips at the prospect of doing the same to the UK.

The reasons for Labour’s collapse are necessarily complicated. But if you wanted to distil public disillusion into one human form, you could say that the British government failed when it embraced Peter Mandelson.

The baffling deference Labour politicians show to this brutal and mercenary old man has caused the biggest scandal of Keir Starmer’s premiership.

If Starmer is forced from power later this year, his appointment of Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Trump’s Washington will be a part of the reason why.

In Anne Applebaum’s grimly resonant phrase, “every election is now existential”. Mandelson may have blown the next one for Labour.

Mainstream commentators have concentrated on the disgrace of Starmer sending Mandelson to Washington in 2024, even though he knew about his association with Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer and his advisors did not know the full gory detail about Mandelson’s closeness to the child sex offender. Or about how he had leaked confidential information from Cabinet meetings to Epstein and JP Morgan.

But they knew enough.

The second aspect of the scandal is barely discussed but is equally telling.

Starmer, along with his chief advisor, Morgan McSweeney, and half the cabinet, treated Mandelson as their mentor.

They did not seek guidance from Peter Mandelson in spite of his embrace of corrupt oligarchs but because of it.

They believed the vicious masters he served made him a “player” with a seat at the table in the “room where it happens” rather than a liability.

Everyone now says that the Starmer government did not have a plan for power. Nothing better illustrates the intellectual vacuity and political insecurity of so many of today’s Labour politicians than their belief that Peter Mandelson, of all people, could fill the void by telling them how to govern.

Facing the threat of the far-right, the first centre-left government in a generation turned for political direction to a 72-year-old, whose heyday was in the 1990s, and who has spent his twilight years as an obsequious servant of the superrich.

The 1990s could not be less like the 2020s, which is why Tony Blair’s interventions in today’s politics are so anachronistic. We had continuous economic growth then. We have stagnation now. We had no external enemies then. We have Putin now. America was a reliable ally then. We have Trump now.

Seeking the advice of Peter Mandelson is as pointless as seeking the advice of Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 

Not that it stopped the Labour party.

This morning’s Mail on Sunday has a piece by Glen Owen and Dan Hodges describing how Mandelson used his influence over Morgan McSweeney to reward his favoured candidates– Peter Kyle and Darren Jones. And indeed, they were promoted in the next reshuffle.

Mandelson also accompanied Keir Starmer to a meeting at the Washington offices of Palantir – the data and analytics firm at the centre of half the conspiracy theories on the planet.

On Thursday, Tim Shipman of The Spectator revealed WhatsApp messages between Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, and Mandelson.

They were from September 2025, when the latest revelations in the Epstein Files had forced Starmer to fire Mandelson.

The files showed that Mandelson had comforted Epstein by saying he was “furious” that the billionaire had been convicted for soliciting a child for prostitution. Far from being shocked by Mandelson’s behaviour Darren Jones was sympathy personified. He was, he told Mandelson, “so sorry” that his ambassadorial career was over.

Jones, who looked like one of Labour’s most competent ministers, was so lacking in self-confidence that he treated Mandelson as a political genius and private confidante.

To understand how bizarre his choice was, consider that Jones was 11 when Tony Blair took power in 1997. He was 12 when Peter Mandelson resigned from government in a financial scandal in 1998 – and perhaps that should that have been a warning – and 16 when he resigned from government yet again in another financial scandal in 2001.

Jones was wasting his time on a man out of time.

He was hardly alone in that.

Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, who I have known for years and thought had more common sense, gave Mandelson the killer line in a message that:

“Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.”

Now it’s out in the open, Labour’s opponents are using it with absolute relish and will continue using it for – oh I don’t know – decades to come.

Labour politicians and, to be fair, much of the London media, bought into the myth that Mandelson was the supreme political operator.

If that was ever true, it stopped being true before many readers of this piece were born. Since the early 2000s, Mandelson has not guided the Labour party to victory or advised its sister parties in Europe and Australia, or gone to help Democrats fight Trump in the US.

He has served the global oligarchy. And was amply rewarded for his pains.

The Epstein files showed that he leaked market-sensitive secrets from Gordon Brown’s cabinet for money – the most shocking breach of trust I have seen in British politics. He followed that stunt up by lobbying on behalf of Epstein and JP Morgan to stop Brown and his chancellor, Alistair Darling, taxing bankers’ bonuses. (Mandelson recommended the use of “mild threats” to intimidate his own government.)

He worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and stayed on Deripaska’s superyacht off the coast of Corfu in 2008 when he was EU Trade Commissioner. He was on the board of the Russian conglomerate AFK Sistema, and lobbied Putin.

Meanwhile, as if to ensure that he spread his favours globally without fear or favour, Mandelson also befriended the Chinese finance minister Lan Fo’an.

It wasn’t just the money that appealed. You can make money without grovelling to Epstein and Russia. It is perfectly clear from his messages that Mandelson is a power worshiper of the most brutish kind.

Look at the way he talked about Wes Streeting. The then health secretary was appalled by the destruction of Gaza and the terror attacks on Palestinians living in the West Bank.

He told Mandelson that Israel is “committing war crimes before our eyes.”

Mandelson treated him as a virtue-signalling bleeding heart.

“It is pathetic. I think Wes is experiencing an early mid-life crisis,” he told Pat McFadden.

This isn’t the voice of a mere money grubber. It is the authentic snarl of the power worshipper who revels in the supposed necessity of slaughter and turns, not on the war criminals, but on anyone who raises the smallest humanitarian concern.

Mandelson was not an operator in the world of democratic politics, as his sneers about Streeting proved.

He belonged in the world of autocracy and plutocracy. By embracing Mandelson, and for God’s sake, by trusting him, it was as if Labour ministers were living up to every cliché about the naivety of centre-left politicians, who know only academia and campaign groups, and nothing about the hard business of government.

For what good has Mandelson done the Labour party?

While ministers and advisors treated him as if he were a sage rather than a grifter, the party’s opinion poll rating collapsed to the lowest level in its history.

So much for the acumen of the “supreme political strategist”.

Meanwhile, the public could look at this government and despise it for promising “change” while promoting the friends of the Epstein class and the Russian oligarchy.

I normally dismiss conspiracy theorists. But the worst thing you can say about the dismal story of Peter Mandelson and the Starmer administration is that it justifies every last one of them.

On 20 March, the convicted paedophile Liron Woodcock-Velleman was given eight months, suspended for 15 months. His past “service” as a councillor, and the ruination of his “promising” political career, were accepted in mitigation. No wonder he and his parents were celebrating. Like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe. Last May, the supposedly hard-as-nails Shabana Mahmood tried to give nonces “chemical castration” instead of prison, where that proposal was received, not only by the inmates, as well as one might have expected. As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not, or they are given the cushiest jobs inside, they are housed in the newest or the most recently refurbished wings, they have gym when ours has been cancelled, and so on. Why?

At committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, Woodcock-Velleman gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate. When Labour returned to office in 2024, then Anna Turley was both a Director and a Trustee of Hope Not Hate. As an ultimately successful parliamentary candidate in 2015, the then Ruth Smeeth described herself as “the Deputy Director of Hope Not Hate”. The American Embassy classified her as “strictly protect”. As Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, she was recently made a Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office while remaining a Whip. Not bad for having lost her Commons seat to Jonathan Gullis. Even with the departure of Josh Simons, there are now four Parliamentary Secretaries under Darren Jones, and three Ministers of State. That amounts to a Prime Minister’s Department with, including Keir Starmer, nine Ministers, the most of any Department. They must do something. What is it?

Woodcock-Velleman’s offences were strikingly similar to those of another Labour councillor in London, Sam Gould, who offended while on the staff Wes Streeting. Streeting would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was not much more than six years ago. But in 2015, Streeting had chaired the Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. On Tuesday 2 September last year, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

Phillips had been supported for Leader by Hilary Armstrong and by Armstrong’s erstwhile staffer, Peter Kyle. Both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle were introduced to the House of Lords by Armstrong, whose Whips’ Office in the Commons had included all three of Phil Woolas, Ivor Caplin and Dan Norris. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote for the Iraq War. Norris does not turn up to Parliament, but he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips; there was a blip on 10 March, but normal service was restored from the next day. Armstrong was the political patroness, both of Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Kyle. Armstrong remains an active Labour member of the Lords, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. Every accusation is a confession.