If only the PM had been the process-obsessed technocrat he was once painted as, this disaster wouldn’t have happened – and he wouldn’t be on the brink
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eir Starmer is dull and managerial, they said. He’s a process-obsessed technocrat, they said. He is, his opponents argued long before Starmer won a landslide election victory nearly two years ago, a bad choice for prime minister – indeed, unsuited to politics itself – because he is not so much a leader as a lawyer, animated less by ideology than by official documents and boring details.
If only.
The Guardian’s revelation on Thursday that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting, and that the verdict was overruled by the Foreign Office so the Labour peer could take up his post as ambassador to Washington anyway, is confirmation of an unexpected fact. Starmer finds himself in his current, perilous position – in which his own colleagues discuss when, not whether, he will be forced from office – not because he is too much like his opponents’ caricature of him, but because he does not resemble that caricature closely enough.
