No responsibility, no alternative: How Britain got stuck

The Mandelson affair only exposes Westminster's failures, and there is no alternative in sight.

When I was in primary school, I got in trouble. As we ran around in the playground, five or six of us boys got into what a PR manager might call a fracas. One boy had a slight graze, another a light bruise, and everyone had an excuse. Marched in by the teacher, we were rightly all punished for being adjacent to general misbehaviour. If only such justice were available to those in Number 10.

Everyone must have known something was off with Peter Mandelson’s vetting to be ambassador in Washington D.C. As both sides hastily assemble their legal fig leaves, the only truth is that a political appointment became a political catastrophe. People have already stopped listening as Westminster devolves into an orgy of who sent what when. Never has failure had so many absent fathers.

There was probably, at one point, a galaxy-brain explanation about why Mandelson should become ambassador. It is tempting to imagine personal favours and intrigues, but this will have been justified by connections and experience. These same connections have caused the crisis. Although the more salacious details, whether Epstein or Chinese intelligence, will now take the headlines, the real lessons of this story are twofold. One, the Civil Service’s breach with its supposed allies in Number 10 has made its reordering inescapable. Two, Keir Starmer only survives because no challenger likes their odds of replacing him.

When Starmer first entered Number 10, there was a belief that the Civil Service would make everything work. Sue Gray captured the mood on the arrival of the new PM’s team when she thanked assembled civil servants for “welcoming us into your house.” The last two years have seen the erosion of this faith in the old system on the left; the process was already well on the way on the right. First Sue Gray went, then the Cabinet Secretary was fired; now there is a responsibility-shirking standoff between sacked Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Olly Robbins and the PM.

There is a habit among historians of arguing great changes never happen. Everything has a precedent, and every revolution has already begun, from the centralisation of France before the 1780s to Callaghan’s attempts at economic reform in the 1970s. When systems realise they need to fix themselves is when they are overwhelmed. As de Tocqueville said, “the most dangerous moment for a bad governments is when it begins to reform itself.” Like Louis XVI, who tried to take on the nobility, Starmer challenges the upper echelons of the Civil Service. I doubt the political fates of each of these men and their respective ancien régimes will be very different.

For now, the Prime Minister is somehow surviving. The approach of the May elections makes changing course impossible. The latest Mandelson scandal is probably not a resigning matter in and of itself. The reasons for his appointment were the reasons for his departure. Nightmare popularity ratings and MPs looking at an atrocious job market are the real reasons for him to worry about his position.

Starmer’s saving grace is that every potential candidate thinks they won’t win. Burnham is trapped out of Parliament and refuses to openly declare war. Every time there is a great confrontation, be it at conference or after he was barred from contesting the Gorton and Denton by-election, he slips away into the comfort of professional northernerdom. On the other hand, Streeting knows he would lose any vote with the membership, and Rayner is still tinged by scandal. The right’s gravest fear, Miliband, and the boring dark horse, Cooper, both seem to know they couldn’t start a fire without getting burned themselves.

This stasis might be broken by catastrophic May election results, but the Labour leadership challenge rules make even that difficult. Twenty per cent of MPs would have to back a single challenger, who would then face Starmer in a one vs one election with the membership deciding. Even if you won that challenge, anything other than a decisive victory would probably only spell greater trouble when you tried to do anything. Between the bond markets and Labour MPs desperate to placate their potential employers in the charity and NGO sectors, there is no room to manoeuvre. Labour’s highest likelihood of victory is to hope Starmer stabilises at around 20% in the polls and then, closer to the next election, resigns. A new leader could then perhaps smuggle a progressive coalition over the finish line on the power of enthusiasm alone.

The Mandelson affair has revealed two great gaps in Westminster: there is no responsibility, and there is no alternative. Despite everything, I don’t think either of these things will change anytime soon.