RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: I used to be off till the New Year then Starmer introduced his most shameful transfer but. The resurrection of ‘Prince Of Darkness’ Peter Mandelson cannot wait… so I’m again

Yes, I know we said I’d be back on New Year’s Eve, and I will. But some things won’t wait.

Keir Starmer must have calculated that Christmas coinciding with me taking a week off was as good a time as any to bury bad news.

That’s obviously why he chose the festive season to announce Peter Mandelson’s appointment as Britain’s next ambassador to the United States.

Maybe he thought we wouldn’t notice until it was too late, although that hasn’t stopped gullible political hacks who ought to know better welcoming the move.

Nothing should surprise us about Starmer, a complete and utter lawyer who poses as a pillar of moral rectitude yet acts otherwise.

The Prime Minister’s decision to send the comprehensively disgraced Nonce Finder General Tom Watson to the Lords tells you all you need to know about his disdainful regard for common decency. Making Mandelson Our Man In Washington is more of the same.

Since news of the appointment seeped out at the weekend, there’s been a conga line of useful idiots claiming that ‘Lord’ Mandelson is the perfect man for the job.

For as long as I can remember the Boys (and girls) In The Bubble have taken dictation from Mandelson, perpetuating his own, self-serving myth.

He’s had more lives than the cat in Tom and Jerry and should have been dead and buried politically years ago.

As I wrote in 2009, when Gordon Brown, a fundamentally decent man, was panicked into bringing Mandelson back into Cabinet and elevating him to the peerage: ‘Screaming Lord Mandelson represents everything rotten about our so-called democracy – arrogance, cynical contempt for the paying public, institutionalised dishonesty, an exaggerated sense of entitlement and the complete absence of shame.’

To which no-one replied: ‘Come on, Rich, tell us what you really think.’

It was simply accepted as perfectly natural that an unelected recidivist, twice forced to resign from the Government in disgrace, should be parachuted into the House of Lords as de facto Deputy Prime Minister and proclaimed ‘the most powerful man in Britain’.

Mandelson’s career has been a catalogue of car crashes, duplicity, scandal and self-enrichment. He has the survival instincts of a post-apocalypse cockroach and has an unmatched ability to suck up to a succession of credulous benefactors, of whom Starmer is simply the latest dupe.

Mandelson styles himself as a Machiavellian figure but, as I once described him, he’s more like Shakespeare’s Iago, played by Kenneth Williams.

The notion that he is some kind of political genius is patently absurd, as is his ridiculous nickname ‘The Prince of Darkness’, wheeled out again over the weekend by lazy and easily impressed lobby hacks.

Don’t make me laugh. As the old line has it: The best trick the Devil pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist.

Whenever Mandelson has pulled a malevolent stroke, as the posse rounds the corner there he is in his full glory, trousers marooned round his ankles and smoking gun in his hand. Even when one of his dastardly schemes has come off, he can’t help boasting about it.

Do any of those currently hailing his appointment as our ambassador to America have any idea of his history? Do they even care?

I saw one young political ‘commentator’ on TV describe Mandelson as the ‘Architect of New Labour’, thus showing her naive ignorance.

The battle for the soul of the Labour Party was fought, hand to hand in some cases, by reformers in the trades unions, such as Eric Hammond and John Spellar of the electricians, Brian Nicholson of the transport workers, Terry Duffy and Bill Jordan of the engineers, and Jack Henry of the builders. Trust me, I was there.

Mandelson was still writing questions for Brian Walden, in his capacity as a researcher on ITV’s Weekend World programme.

After subsequently being hired by Neil Kinnock as a press officer, Mandelson immediately started to take credit for developments which were nothing to do with him. His main contribution was to replace the Red Flag with a red rose on the letterhead.

When Kinnock lost the 1987 election, Mandelson turned against him, going behind his back to union leaders in an abortive attempt to remove him. The union bosses rumbled his disloyalty and refused.

Mandelson later ingratiated himself with Tony Blair, won a safe seat and joined the Cabinet after the 1997 Labour landslide.

That didn’t last long. He was forced to resign after it was discovered that he had taken a secret home loan from Cabinet colleague Geoffrey Robinson and lied to his building society on an application form to obtain a mortgage. There was also another scandal about avoidance of stamp duty when the property was eventually sold.

Having put him out to grass, Blair brought him back with indecent haste, only for Mandelson to have to resign for a second time after being accused of selling passports to Indian billionaires in exchange for a donation to the Millennium Dome fund. (M’learned friends insist that I add that Mandelson was subsequently cleared by an ‘independent’ inquiry.)

From there, he was sent to the EU as a British trade commissioner, where he accepted private flights and freebie holidays from a Russian aluminium baron before, purely coincidentally, lowering import tariffs on Russian aluminium.

After luxuriating on a yacht owned by financier Nat Rothschild, he leapt to the defence of hedge funds. After immersing himself up to his scrawny neck in the hospitality of Tinseltown movie tycoon David Geffen, he announced a clampdown on internet video piracy.

When Labour lost the 2010 election, Mandelson claimed the party had actually won and the country was crying out for a ‘progressive’ alliance. When that didn’t work he set up a company called Global Counsel, offering ‘advice’ to assorted foreign regimes and businessmen.

I’m Mandy, Buy Me.

Enough mugs were willing to pay him a small fortune (for what?) and he ended up with a multi-million pound house near London’s fashionable Regent’s Park.

So what qualifies him to be Our Man in the US? About the only thing he’s got in common with Trump is the refusal to accept the result of legitimate elections.

It wasn’t just 2010. Mandelson, along with Starmer, spent the best part of four years trying to overturn the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum.

He is a Euro-fanatic, something which will soon bring him into head-on conflict with Brexit-loving Donald J. Trump, who thinks Britain must choose between the EU and America if we want a trans-Atlantic free trade deal.

Mandelson’s also a confirmed fan of mass migration, once boasting that Labour scoured the world for immigrants. That should go down a storm with Trump, who plans to resume building a wall along America’s southern border and deport millions of immigrants who have gained entry illegally.

He’s also got previous for insulting Trump, calling him a ‘danger to the world’ and ‘little short of a white nationalist and racist’, injudicious remarks unlikely to get his name on the guest list at Mar-a-Lago.

Nigel Farage has, patriotically, offered to smooth Mandelson’s introduction to Trump in Britain’s best interests, but he should be wary.

Don’t do it, Nige, he’s not worth it.

Most people who come into contact with Mandelson eventually live to regret it.

Last time I saw Mandelson he was having lunch with Ginge Rayner, who was leaning in like a lovesick schoolgirl, hanging on his every word.

Was he plotting against Starmer? Who knows? All we do know for certain is that Ginge is out in the cold these days, her nominal job as Deputy PM being done by one of Starmer’s cronies.

Mandelson has obviously decided to throw in his lot with Starmer for now and has got his reward in Washington. That won’t stop him turning on the PM when he senses the game’s up.

Oh, and don’t forget, while Prince Andrew has been cast into the outer darkness, Mandelson, too, was in convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book and was a willing recipient of his hospitality. The only thing we can be sure of is that he wasn’t there for the under-age girls.

Starmer has since disappeared on holiday and hasn’t properly outlined his reasons for appointing Mandelson.

He recently sacked Transport Secretary Louise Haigh, the bird with the burgundy barnet, for fraudulently obtaining a mobile phone.

So perhaps he can explain why he thinks someone who was forced to resign as a minister for fraudulently obtaining a mortgage is a fit and proper person to represent our country as Ambassador to our closest ally.

Of all Starmer’s recent decisions, including scrapping the winter fuel allowance for pensioners and knocking out the Chagos Islands to the Chinese, sending Mandelson to Washington is perhaps the most shameful yet.

And it won’t look any better come New Year’s Eve, either. See you then.