Starmer Stays Defiant as Mandelson Saga Continues to Swirl

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(Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Keir Starmer insists he’ll remain in the job and lead the Labour Party into the next elections, even as the controversy over his appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US refuses to die down.

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In an interview with the Sunday Times, Starmer dismissed speculation he’ll be forced to resign or that he’ll face a leadership challenge as “talk.” While once again acknowledging that the appointment of Mandelson was a mistake, he expressed frustration at how the scandal is overshadowing the “urgent” issues facing his government.     

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“I understand why there are questions,” Starmer said in the interview. “I’ve answered I don’t know how many of them. But at the same time, I’ve got a huge amount of work to do on the war on two fronts.”

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One of them is tackling UK inflation, which has pushed up by the US-Israel war with Iran, mainly through higher energy prices linked to disruptions in Middle Eastern supplies. 

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The government is monitoring potential shortages across fuel types, but the bigger concern is energy, food, and travel costs that are expected to increase over the coming months, with the impact lasting well beyond any resolution — potentially for months after tensions ease, Darren Jones, Starmer’s chief secretary, told the BBC on Sunday.

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“It really depends on how long the negotiations take to unblock the Strait of Hormuz and bring the de-escalation to the conflict in the Middle East. I think our best guess 8-plus months from the point of the resolution when you’ll see economic impacts coming through the system,” Darren Jones said.

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The appointment of Mandelson, a friend of the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, has engulfed Starmer’s already rocky tenure and shows no sign of going away. Evidence from the former top civil servant at the Foreign Office last week eroded the PM’s credibility over the saga, and more testimonies are scheduled for the coming week. 

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Olly Robbins, who was sacked by Starmer over the affair, told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that he faced an “atmosphere of pressure” from Downing Street to get Mandelson’s appointment over the line, apparently contradicting Starmer’s own statement in the House of Commons a day earlier that “no pressure whatsoever” was applied to the former civil servant. 

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“There are different types of pressure,” Starmer told the Sunday Times. “There’s pressure, ‘Can we get this done quickly,’ which is not an unusual pressure. That is the everyday pressure of government.” 

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Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, will appear before lawmakers on Tuesday.

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The saga has undermined public trust in Starmer ahead of local elections next month that Labour is predicted to lose, and also damaged the premier’s relationship with the UK civil service. 

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“The whole situation is regrettable as you would imagine,” Jones said during the BBC interview. “But as to say on this particular questions on whether the PM had lied or done any wrongdoing here – that’s has been shown not to be the case.”

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(Updates with comments from Starmer’s chief secretary starting in fifth paragraph.)

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