Sir Keir Starmer has insisted he never would have appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US if he had known the full extent of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein in his first public comments since the Labour peer’s sacking on Friday.
As he sought to get back on the front foot after his ‘phase two’ plan for government seemed to fall apart before it began with two weeks of chaos, the prime minister gave an interview to broadcasters in an attempt to move on from the crisis.
But even as he tried to bolster his own weakened position, Sir Keir was rocked by yet another resignation of a key aide with Paul Ovenden quitting as head of strategy in a fresh scandal.
Sir Keir was already facing an angry parliamentary Labour Party after two MPs openly suggested that he could be ousted while a senior minister told The Independent that he is “screwed”.
It came as two of the UK’s leading pollsters warned that Labour is facing even worse problems in public opinion with one suggesting the party “is yet to hit rock bottom”.
With the crisis over Lord Mandelson throwing serious questions on his judgement as prime minister, Sir Keir held a morning meeting with his junior ministers in Downing Street to “rally the troops”.
In the afternoon he came out to address the concerns which had been raised about the Lord Mandelson debacle and what he knew before appointing him as ambassador to the US and then standing by him at PMQs last Wednesday before ultimately sacking the Labour peer on Thursday.
He insisted that he would have “never appointed” Peter Mandelson “had I known then what I know now, in his first comments since sacking him over links to Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking to broadcasters days after removing Lord Mandelson from post, the prime minister said the “nature and extent of the relationship” between the convicted paedophile and Lord Mandelson is “far different to what I’d understood to be the position at the point of appointment”.
Lord Mandelson was dramatically sacked on Thursday amid new revelations about his relationship with the billionaire paedophile – raising serious questions about the prime minister’s judgement.
Asked why he had been appointed in the first place, Sir Keir said: “Peter Mandelson, before he was appointed, went through a due diligence process. That’s the propriety and ethics team. He went through a process, and therefore I knew of his association with Epstein.
“But had I known then what I know now, I’d have never appointed him, because what emerged last week were emails, Bloomberg emails which showed that the nature and extent of the relationship that Peter Mandelson had with Epstein was far different to what I had understood to be the position when I appointed him.
“On top of that, what the email showed was he was not only questioning but wanting to challenge the conviction of Epstein at the time that for me, went and cut across the whole approach that I’ve taken on violence against women and girls for many years, and this Government’s approach.”
But as he tried to address the Mandelson crisis, Mr Ovenden, a longstanding member of his staff was leaving Downing Street over accusations he had sent emails about veteran MP Diane Abbott using explicit sexual language.
It was not the member of his team that MPs had been demanding the to leave with anger growing over the role of chief of Morgan McSweeney in the Mandelson debacle as well as the first 14 months of a misfiring Labour government.
With Labour losing seats to Reform in three council by-elections last week, which are monitored by pollsters, there was a feeling that the wheels are in danger of coming off.
Respected pollster Lord Robert Hayward noted that the byelections last week would not have taken into account the scandals which led to the resignation of Angela Rayner as deputy prime minister over her tax affairs and Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the US.
The reason for this is that council by-elections are usually decided by postal votes which go out two weeks before.
He told The Independent: “Those two events will have a significant impact on the polls going forward. Last week’s results were bad but Labour has not hit rock bottom yet.”
Meanwhile, professor Sir John Curtice noted: “All three Reform gains were on around 30 per cent of the vote. That’s often enough to win in our fractured politics.”
