BRIAN READE: ‘Starmer cannot lecture Farage and Badenoch on their lack of morality’
Labour was sold as the party of equality and redistribution, says Brian Reade, so how did Keir’s wing ever think Blair and Mandelson were their saviours?
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s authority has been shot to pieces (Image: WPA Pool, Getty Images)
During Labour’s honeymoon following its 1997 election landslide some commentators referred to Tony Blair’s inner-circle as Camelot. It was based on a comparison with the young, glamorous court that surrounded John F. Kennedy’s time as president, and Peter Mandelson would delight in telling people he was Bobby Kennedy to Tony Blair’s JFK.
The major difference being that both JFK and Bobby were killed by assassins’ bullets while Blair and Mandelson killed their credibility through narcissism, ambition and greed. Blair, starstruck by American attention, sold Britain a war based on lies while Mandelson was twice sacked after money scandals involving rich friends. Yet despite those events happening more than 23 years ago the pair are still at the centre of Labour’s never-ending, death-cycle psychodrama.
Blair has openly opposed Keir Starmer’s refusal to join Donald Trump’s blind bombing mission in Iran saying he should have unquestionably backed him to the hilt. Which means Blair learned nothing from his own catastrophic error in becoming George Bush’s Middle East poodle. But then, when he has so eagerly agreed to be Trump’s poodle in the same region by being paid to join his Board of Peace, it’s clear Blair has once again chosen personal gain above his party and country.
Meanwhile Mandelson’s reputation sinks deeper into the sewers as he refuses to recognise his calamitous error of judgment in taking money from, and staying close friends with, a convicted paedophile, somehow believing he is a victim and demanding more than half-a-million pounds compo for his sacking as ambassador.
And what does Blair have to say about the Epstein scandal? Nothing. JFK II can happily slag off a Labour leader’s refusal to break international law but stays silent on Bobby II’s close relationship with an illegal sex trafficker.
How did Keir Starmer’s wing of the Labour party ever believe these two were its saviours when there was so much evidence they were power-crazed, gold-diggers using Labour as a way to ingratiate themselves with rich elites? Labour is supposed to be the party of equality and redistribution, yet Blair with his lust for freebies in rich men’s villas and Mandelson, with his passion for hanging out on oligarch’s yachts, seem to have been obsessed with wealth and kudos being redistributed to them.
Starmer’s weak and shameful refusal to stand up to his chief adviser, Morgan McSweeney, and rush through Mandelson’s appointment to Washington despite many warnings, leaves him deeply isolated. He can no longer lecture opponents like Nigel Farage or Kemi Badenoch about their lack of morality or judgment. He can no longer say, when more damning Epstein documents become public, that first and foremost his thoughts are with the victims because we know, when appointing Mandelson, they weren’t.
His authority, which was already on life support, is now shot to pieces and the disastrous decision to bar Andy Burnham from standing in a Manchester by-election that Labour were humiliated in, leaves him surviving only at the whim of his restless backbenchers.
In 1996, Blair famously said: “My project will be complete when the Labour Party learns to love Peter Mandelson.” Well, it’s fair to say that the Blairite, Third Way Project and all the over-romanticised Camelot fiction that went with it has just died an ugly death.
Starmer’s Prime Ministership may not be far behind. If so, there can be few complaints and even fewer tears.
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