How bad are the Mandelson files for Starmer?

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1:01Gabriel Pogrund: See offer page for details.

1:30Gabriel Pogrund: So look, we want to just take you inside where the government is on this and how they're trying to deal with it. And frankly, it is very, very difficult for them because what this does, once again, is it shows the catastrophic mistake that Keir Starmer made in appointing Lord Mandelson. It is there writ large in black and white, the many red flags about appointing him. There was the reputational risk about his friendship with Epstein. There was the fact that he stayed at his apartment in New York. Everything we knew is out there. And then there's more. On top of that, we now know that the National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, was very explicit in warning against appointing Mandelson.

2:10Gabriel Pogrund: We are told that what he was saying at the time was we shouldn't appoint Mandelson because it always ends in a disaster with Peter and it will do so again. And, lo, he was right. We also know that the head of the Foreign Office then, a guy called Sir Philip Barton, warned against the appointment of Mandelson. So Starmer not only had a two-page document highlighting really severe reservations from civil servants about appointing Mandelson, he was also being told not to do it by two of his most senior officials, and he appears to have just ignored them and rammed the appointment through. He's acknowledged today that's a mistake, but it is a pretty fundamental area of judgment, and he is paying a heavy price for it.

2:48Patrick Maguire: Yeah, he is. And I think the tricky thing for Zakir Starmer or the thing that might be making this worse for him is that naturally, I think, because of the political context we now live and work in, he cannot be completely honest or straightforward about the reasons why he appointed him. Let's not pretend that at the time, everybody was saying this is a disastrous appointment because of Jeffrey Epstein, because they weren't. A lot of the commentary was, in fact, the opposite. All of the things that we now say are unique weaknesses of Peter Maddison were indeed being cited as his strengths. You know, his ability to ingratiate himself with people like Donald Trump, his experience in the Labour government he resigned from and indeed the Gordon Brown government he was messaging Jeffrey Epstein from on his emails.

3:46Patrick Maguire: Kirsten Darmann can't say, look, I made a dispassionate, or Morgan McSweeney made and others made, a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis or risk-benefit analysis of the appointment. And I thought at the time that actually the benefits from appointing a politician like Peter Mandelson's this job outweigh the risks of the Epstein thing, which, as the due diligence documents we've now seen make clear, everybody knew about at the time. They were a matter of public record, but they weren't foremost in people's minds until the two rounds of releases, one from the US Congress and all of the stuff we've seen from the Department of Justice that led first to his resignation and then to his disgrace and police investigation into his conduct in the Brown government.

4:39Patrick Maguire: Nobody was thinking about that at the time, but Keir Starmer can't possibly say that. So instead, he's left in a position where we've all seen this in black and white. He acknowledges it was a mistake, but he can't bring us back to the world in which he made that decision, in which nobody was really talking about it. So it's really, really politically difficult. And there is no sensible or helpful thing that Keir Starmer can say on this.

5:06Steven Swinford: I think that's right. I think it might be worth dwelling on another dimension of this, which enters the domain of the unsayable. so um i was on the best radio station uh the only morning radio station worth listening to times radio earlier with emily darlington a member of the 2024 intake and she was saying that part of what this represented was a boys club at the heart of downing street and she said that if there were women who'd be more prominently involved uh the appointment would never have come to pass. Now, I won't cast doubt on that, but what I will say is I think it is an incomplete explanation because one common denominator is that those involved in the decision were, yes, men in the form of Starmer, Matthew Doyle, Starmer's Director of Communications, and of course Marvin McSweeney.

6:00Steven Swinford: But there's another through line, and that is the fact that these individuals were all people who had sat around the dinner table of Lord Liddell once upon a time in the dog days of Corbyn's leadership and the early days of Starmer's leadership, and they were all seized with the same conviction, the same desire to remake the Labour Party by routing the left and putting Corbyn, to use words apocryphally attributed to Peter Madison, back into the sealed tomb. And I think that that is part of why this is so difficult for Starmer to acknowledge. It's not just that Mandelson was perceived to have political powers, that these powers were a blessing that became a curse.

6:41Steven Swinford: It's all says that the appointment was outsourced to Mitswini, but that Mitswini had this profound and intimate relationship with Mandelson, who was something of a political mentor to him, a sounding board, the author of many of his foundational strategy documents in opposition. and that is something that Starmer can't say and in the circumstances it seems the best option available to him and it's not a great option is to talk about process as though that is what is at stake that is what the heart of it when in actual fact is it's a tale the political judgments being made and of personal relationships contaminating the judgment of those involved

7:22Gabriel Pogrund: that is absolutely bang on that that is the heart of this so exactly as you say the two people who vetted Mandelson. One, Morgan McSweeney, a close friend at Mandelson, and two, someone you've written a lot about, Gabriel, Matthew Doyle, his former director of communications, who actually said during evidence to lawyers after all of this had gone terribly wrong, yeah, he was a personal friend of mine and we were socializing around the time of his appointment, and yet it was his word. He looked at Mandelson's response to questions about his relationship with Epstein. How long have you known to continue your friendship after the sex offence conviction?

7:57Gabriel Pogrund: And he said he was satisfied with those answers. So exactly as you say, Keir Starmer essentially outsourced the vetting of Mandelson's appointment to two of Mandelson's closest friends in politics, which is, when you stand back, a pretty strange way of doing business.

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10:02Gabriel Pogrund: I think the other thing that we need to get into is what Starmer said in the Commons at the time that this scandal was breaking. So you talk about the due process and Starmer told MPs that due process had been followed. And when you look at the files, it does not appear to have been followed in any way at all. The appointment was rammed through.

10:22Patrick Maguire: Weirdly rushed is what the power says.

10:24Gabriel Pogrund: So that was number one. And then they gave him a briefing on highly classified material on January the 9th, 2025. He didn't actually get his security clearance, his vetting, which would see, could he be compromised? And that should be the threshold at which you are able to see that stuff until the end of that month. So they not only rushed through the appointment, they did this before any vetting had taken place. And the government, the only leg it's got to stand on today is it's saying that due process was followed at that time. Therefore, Keir Starmer didn't mislead MPs. But just as with Boris Johnson over Partygate, the thing that did for Boris Johnson, particularly over Partygate, was that he was seen to have misled or found indeed to repeatedly misled MPs.

11:09Gabriel Pogrund: And that question is going to dog Starmer. Did he mislead MPs? The Tories say he did. He claims on the narrowest of semantics that he didn't. And that is a really difficult question for him now.

11:21Patrick Maguire: Yeah, it is. And I think the Boris Johnson comparison is opposite, I think, because let's zoom out briefly and look at the broader politics of this. When Boris Johnson was brought down by Chris Pinscher in July of 2022, that came after months of damaging electoral defeats there was a by-election in Wakefield and another in Tiverton in Devon that the Tories lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats you had cabinet resignations yeah Oliver Dowden Tory chairman had resigned you'd had Tory MPs coming out calling for his head you'd had the background music of Partygate which was dreadful you had the Tories falling in the opinion polls You had the public opinion of the Prime Minister plummeting.

12:11Patrick Maguire: And I think Keir Starmer's in a very similar place because basically his parliamentary party has made up his mind that he needs to go at some point. They're divided on timing. You've also got a war abroad that the Prime Minister is considered to be handling reasonably well. But it's a question of when. I do think this process is fraught with danger, not least because there's an air of unreality about everything Keir Starmer says about this. Because to return to my previous point, he's not acknowledging the obvious, which is, you know, regardless of whether due process was followed or not, he says it was.

12:45Patrick Maguire: I mean, there are big question marks over that, as you say. He's not looking people in the eye and saying, look, I did this. He said today, on Thursdays we speak, it was my mistake. But he's not being honest about the mistake you know the mistake was uh a massive failure of political judgment it was not listening to jonathan powell uh who you know i'm told also you know may spoke for some of the plus of appointing peter manson but you know that sort of from a long-term colleague and friend of peter manson you know this always ends in tears ought to also you know settle on bells ringing you for the pm indeed you know a lot of labor politicians would have run a mile from this appointment because, you know, they know Peter Manderson has strengths, but his weaknesses are a matter of public record and recent political history.

13:34Patrick Maguire: But Keir Starmer is not like other Labour politicians. He's not really a Labour politician at all. And again, his political judgment, fundamental political judgment on what Simon Case describes in one of the letters from the files as one of, if not the most important roles in His Majesty's diplomatic service. You know, He outsourced even that to people who knew a man he neither knew nor liked particularly and vice versa. And I think that gets to the heart of all the reasons Labour MPs are looking at this and thinking, you know, maybe not now, but there will be other straws and the camel's back will eventually be broken.

14:15Steven Swinford: And finally, Patrick, you mentioned that one of your sources pointed out that Jonathan Howell have also raised the virtues of appointing Manson. Somebody rather mischievously pointed out to me earlier that the email in which the phrase, the appointment was weirdly rushed, appears it was in actual fact a record of a call which took place the day after Mandelson's resignation. So obviously, this is an appointment which has become an orphan and Skama has left that for me the reluctant parent of it. Well, yeah, indeed.

14:48Patrick Maguire: And just to jump in briefly, Gabriel, I remember at the time, after Morgan McSweeney's resignation, you'll have been getting these texts too. I'm sure we all got these texts from Morgan McSweeney's many acolytes and disciples in government. And lots of them said the same thing, which was if advocating for Peter Manderson to be US ambassador or saying he would be good as ambassador was is now a hanging offence, Jonathan Powell has to go to. And, you know, it just goes to show actually what people are perceived to have said about this appointment at various points in Peter Manderson's short life as ambassador has changed.

15:30Patrick Maguire: You know, clearly there are people in government who have the impression that Jonathan Powell was all for it. Certainly Jonathan Powell, once Peter Mandelson was in there, worked closely with Peter Mandelson. So, as you say, it's become an orphan and nobody. Actually, I think the biggest sort of misleading thing the government is doing, everything it's saying about this is just acting as if, you know, it always thought this was a terrible idea. it's like no you clearly you clearly didn't you know right up until the day before peter manderson resigned you had cabinet ministers going on television and saying you know peter manderson's a great ambassador you know we knew this is very in confidence yeah exactly hours before they sacked yeah yeah so you know i think there's no reality as i say and i think when you reflect on

16:17Steven Swinford: what this amounts to um long term we're in a world now where he's short of mcsweeney But this extends McSweeney's salience and his shelf life within Westminster discourse, but also the Parliamentary Party in a way which is profoundly damaging for the Prime Minister. I mentioned being on air earlier with an MP. I just thought it was super interesting to hear that phrase being deployed again, the boys club, because that was a trope or an allegation which first materialised in the weeks and months after the 2024 general election. and indeed the months before it all related to the psychodrama that pitted McSweeney against Starmer's initial chief of staff Sue Gray and you think well we're now two years plus beyond that point but the debate remains uh the culture in Downing Street the extent of McSweeney his hidden hand and role in the matters of state and also the extent to which Starmer is or is not himself culpable for decisions which mcsweeney was the ultimate author of and you know starman might be forgiven for thinking well i've since sacked him but in the absence of a clear political project to replace it uh beyond an accommodation with the mushy middle of the plp and the cabinet yeah starman is just going to be bedeviled by this man this man to whom he nevertheless we should say owes everything electorally if not forever then certainly for the time being and And that makes it very difficult to move the conversation on, especially as a local elections approach.

17:50Gabriel Pogrund: We should talk about briefly what comes next with the messages. So there is this was just the first cache. It was actually 30 messages in total, just over 140 pages of PDF documents. The big, big drop is Darren Jones, the chief secretary of the Prime Minister, committed that this would come next month. And that is going to potentially be thousands, tens of thousands of files relating to Lord Madison. There is this tiny cell of people, I call it a cell, it sounds like a prison, probably is for them, of people in the cabinet office who are going through all the WhatsApps, all the emails, everything that was sent to Mandelson during his time as US ambassador.

18:29Gabriel Pogrund: So it's not stuff that directly pertained to his appointment or his sacking. We're talking about the day-to-day life of an ambassador in Washington. And the thing about that is twofold. One, it will again raise all the questions every time we see more documents about why Starmel appointed him in the first place. And two, it's very, very unpredictable where that will go. Like how what what what Madison may have said about people in cabinet, what they may have said about others in cabinet, that there is potentially incendiary stuff that could explode in all sorts of different directions. And there's so much of it that inevitably something will be damaging again for the government in there.

19:10Steven Swinford: I think that's right. What a weird world now where there are just countless unintended consequences and disclosures and there is nothing bied into the parliamentary chicanery at foresight of Kami Baden-Ostey, but Salma can do about it. his only hope is that events continue to intervene and that something will turn up which uh you know patrick uh was outlining only a few moments ago is very redolent of a another which uh was uh in office but not in power the last few months for a shot to the partnership i think that's um

19:47Gabriel Pogrund: about it so right we'll do the wrap-up for a moment so look thank you for joining us for this bonus edition of The State of It. And look, we look forward to seeing all of you again next week.

20:00Gabriel Pogrund: Hey, this is Adam Grant, host of Ted's podcast, Rethinking with Adam Grant. Have you heard of Bill? It's the intelligent finance platform that uses AI to help you avoid costly errors and optimize cash flow. In fact, Bill reports that over 90 of the top 100 US accounting firms trust them to manage, move, and maximize money, proven by over a trillion dollars in secure transactions. Eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.com slash proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a$250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven.

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