Over the past few weeks, ministers, MPs and journalists have been posing the same question to each other. I was actually asked it on Tuesday evening by a Labour backbencher. ‘Where do you think this Mandelson stuff is going? How do you think it’s going to bottom out?’
My response then was that I didn’t precisely know, though it was obviously deeply damaging for the Prime Minister and the Government. But after watching Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, I have a more definitive answer. It will be the scandal that finally brings down Keir Starmer, and defines his premiership.
The reason I know this is because in one of the most bizarre PMQs sessions in British parliamentary history, Sir Keir didn’t try to dodge Kemi Badenoch‘s questions on the scandal. He didn’t duck, or weave, or deflect. He didn’t even bother to try to mislead the House, as he has done on numerous occasions recently.
Instead, he just refused to reply. On six occasions Badenoch asked him a very simple and direct question. Did he personally speak to Peter Mandelson before he appointed him ambassador to Washington, she inquired.
The first time he mumbled something about the appointment process. Then he talked about the war in Iran. And Greenland. And a Muslim prayer meeting in Trafalgar Square.
But he repeatedly, and deliberately, failed to even engage with the question he’d been asked. Tory backbencher Andrew Snowden followed up, and asked precisely the same question. And got a fresh lecture over the war in Iran for his troubles.
But despite his attempt at ‘pleading the Fifth’, to use an American legal phrase, the Prime Minister’s silence spoke volumes. First, it showed the utter contempt he has for Parliament, and the people it represents.
PMQs frequently descends into political showboating. But it is one of the few remaining ways for the executive to be held directly to account.
Sir Keir was supposedly elected on a mandate of restoring faith in our public officials and institutions. He repeatedly castigated Boris Johnson for his evasion and deceit at the despatch box. And called time and time again for his resignation for misleading Parliament and, via it, the country.
In one of the most bizarre PMQs sessions in British parliamentary history, Sir Keir Starmer didn’t try to dodge Kemi Badenoch ‘s questions on the scandal, writes Dan Hodges
A photo released in the Epstein Files shows Peter Mandelson with the late convicted paedophile
Yet yesterday he took the House for fools. A key prime ministerial skill is the ability to deflect an awkward question, then move on to the topic of your choice.
Almost two years into his premiership, it is not one Starmer has mastered. And with Angela Rayner and her colleagues snapping at his heels, he never will.
The second thing Starmer’s calamitous display underlined was the extent to which his attempts to evade responsibility for the Mandelson saga have finally run out of road. Last week’s publication of the first tranche of the papers relating to Mandelson’s appointment were deliberately timed to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. And now we can see why.
Up until this point Starmer has been attempting to defend the indefensible. But yesterday even the pretence that he had been duped by Mandelson was finally dropped. The saga has become so toxic the Prime Minister can’t even lie about it properly now.
It’s worth remembering precisely what Starmer’s response was when the crisis first broke last September. ‘Full due process was followed during this appointment, as it is with all ambassadors,’ he claimed, when Badenoch began to probe him on the issue.
That statement was a bold, blatant, manifest untruth. Sir Keir knows that if he tried deploying it again he would be laughed out of the chamber. Just as he knows that any other attempt to rationalise how he ignored the warnings in black and white about Mandelson’s relationship with the world’s most notorious child abuser, and nodded his appointment through on the say-so of two of Mandelson’s best friends – Starmer’s ex-chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his former director of communications Matthew Doyle, who had his own friendship with a convicted paedophile – will invite a similar wave of scorn and ridicule.
Yesterday, after the disastrous session ended, Downing Street tried to clear up the mess. Ministers were despatched to pretend that the reason Starmer had been unable to provide an answer to Badenoch’s question was because of the ongoing police investigation. Which itself was an instructive – if utterly self-defeating – ploy.
First, No 10 had previously confirmed to journalists that the Prime Minister had not spoken to Mandelson. So that information is self-evidently not prejudicial to the police investigation. And second, it demonstrates conclusively that Downing Street is cynically using the police to try to implement a cover-up of the whole sorry saga.
A fact that even Keir Starmer’s own ministers are becoming wise to. As one told me: ‘If Keir isn’t even going to bother to try to defend himself over Mandelson I’m b******d if I’m going to.’
Which takes us to the heart of what Starmer’s silence unwittingly revealed yesterday.
I don’t know what is currently sitting in the pile of memos, e-mails and WhatsApp messages still to be published over the Mandelson affair. But the Prime Minister does. And it clearly terrifies him.
By refusing six times to answer a simple question, Keir Starmer could not have more clearly signalled he has something to hide if he’d jumped on the Speaker’s Table, whipped out a neon sign that flashed ‘He’s Hiding Something!!!’ and screamed ‘ask me about anything, anything at all!!! Just not Peter Mandelson!!!’.
The conclusive moment in the Watergate scandal came when Richard Nixon’s accusers asked: ‘What did the President know and when did he know it?’ The same question about Keir Starmer is now clearly haunting him. He could have just brushed aside Badenoch’s question yesterday. He could have acknowledged he delegated the appointment of Mandelson to others, taken the hit and moved on.
But he didn’t. Because he believes the hit will be too great.
Whatever it is he’s trying to conceal, Starmer obviously knows that if it does eventually see the light of day he will not be able to survive it politically. As he refused to answer, for the seventh time, the question being fired from the Tory benches he knew how it looked. How this man who so enjoys lecturing others about the needs for transparency and probity – and who prides himself on his ‘forensic’ attention to detail – would appear to his colleagues, opponents and the nation.
Yet he chose to humiliate himself anyway. Because he calculated humiliation was preferable to the alternative.
How will the Mandelson scandal bottom out? With Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation. He knows it. And after yesterday’s PMQs, the country knows it too.