Mandelson files reveal Labour party is riddled with doubts and infighting

Peter Mandelson wrote to David Lammy on 18 November 2024, making a simple promise to the foreign secretary: “If you were minded to appoint me [as ambassador to Washington],” he said, “I would make sure you never regret it.” Since then, senior government figures, including Lammy and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, have had reason to look back at that appointment with almost nothing but regret. With Starmer’s authority already in pieces, Monday’s publication of more than 1,000 pages of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment only served to underline why many of his own MPs have lost confidence in his government. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, originally demanded the documents be published to find out what ministers and officials knew about Mandelson’s links to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as any other security concerns that were raised during his appointment. In the end though, it is not the rather limited information about the security process that has been so damagingly revealed in the files, but rather what everyone in the Labour government thinks of each other. Many of the most withering assessments have come from Mandelson himself. “Keir is not leading from the front and Morgan [McSweeney, his chief of staff] is not organising the centre as it needs to be,” he wrote to Pat McFadden, a Cabinet Office minister, last May. “It stems from the top and Keir lacks verve as does the cabinet as a whole,” he said. …