With three years left and a huge majority, Labour can govern with more humility and deliver real change. But with Starmer at the helm? I can’t see it
T
he smell of death is in the Westminster air. Labour’s King Rat Peter Mandelson has again cast his sulphurous odour of villainy around the palace, and contamination may drag a decent, well-intentioned Labour leader down with him.
That’s the tragedy. Nothing about Keir Starmer’s life purpose, attitudes, tastes, morals or values resembles Mandelson’s and his venal world of corrupted power, where mega-billions buy anyone anything. Not friends; they had nothing in common. For all Mandelson’s pedigree, reaching into the party’s past, he never seemed to have a single Labour value or egalitarian instinct. Labour was a vehicle.
But even if the men were never close, Mandelson worked to cast his mantle over Starmer’s team, just as he had exerted his malign and worldly influence on Labour for decades. Morgan McSweeney was his young protege, learning the Mandelsonian way of political cynicism; others in the cabinet, too, were surely seduced by that aura of “grownup” reckoning with the “real world”.
