Hubris and under-confidence

Labour's woes have long been based in not knowing what to do with power

It was 1996, a year from the general election that would sweep Tony Blair into power. The leader of the Labour Party (rebranded New Labour) seemed to walk on water; the Conservatives didn’t dare to criticise him. Even hostile right-wing newspapers bit their lips. That millennium era will be remembered by history as a public relations triumph. Even the country acquired a new moniker: Cool Britannia. Several people were responsible for this double rebranding, but one man oversaw it all: Peter Mandelson, otherwise known as the “Prince of Darkness” or “Svengali.”

I was the chief political correspondent for the Financial Times at the time, and one moment has stayed in my memory. I was taking Mandelson out for lunch for the first time. He proceeded to tell me that I needed to show more discipline in my writing. I reminded him I’d just spent time in East Germany and the Soviet Union. I sought to divert his attention by inviting him to gossip, which he duly did. He ran through the plusses and minuses of prospective Labour MPs. About one whom I considered among the most talented, he proffered: “He thinks too much.”

Watching Mandelson’s demise of the past few weeks, I’ve turned over in my head our various interactions. On one occasion, he described a veteran commentator—who was reluctant to toe his preferred line—as a “has-been” and suggested he would “have words” with his editor. After I moved to the BBC, I had a comment slot on the morning radio show, Today, that sometimes annoyed the Downing Street operation. I learned I, too, had been denounced to my bosses.

New Labour was a spectacular election-winning machine, but it became increasingly evident that Blair and those around him seemed more interested in keeping office than introducing the changes they promised to the country. The atmosphere throughout was macho (it was always male-dominated) and obsessed with discipline. Blair’s several cabinets, particularly the early ones, did contain some impressive free spirits—I think of Robin Cook, his first foreign secretary, and Mo Mowlam, Northern Ireland secretary, to whom I became close. They were not disloyal, but evidently not loyal enough. And so they, too, were undermined.

After a decade, Blair was finally forced out in 2007 by his friend-turned-rival Gordon Brown. But Brown had been so driven by gaining the top job that, once there, he seemed to have little left in the tank. He lasted only three years, and what followed was 14 years of Conservative rule, a disastrous Brexit referendum and a chaotic merry-go-round of prime ministers. Labour was back in the political wilderness, riven with factionalism and taken over by the left. Under Jeremy Corbyn—the opposite of everything the Blairites represented—it achieved the spectacular feat of losing successive elections, to the unloved Theresa May and then calamitously to the clown Boris Johnson.

By 2020, the Blairites saw their opportunity to reassert control, but they had already been hatching their plans for some time before, through an organisation they had set up called Labour Together. The mastermind behind that was a relatively young Irishman by the name of Morgan McSweeney—who happened to be a protégé of none other than Mandelson.

In Keir Starmer, they believed they had found their man. (Unlike the Conservatives with four, Labour has yet to have a female leader.) The fact that Starmer, a human rights lawyer and public prosecutor, had no political hinterland was seen as an advantage. Dull, methodical efficiency would do. His political flexibility was a further asset. Starmer had served under Corbyn in two different positions, only later to distance himself from him.

Once installed as leader of the party, Starmer steadily purged it of Corbynites and brought back in Blairite old-timers and their younger acolytes. In the general election of July 2024, he secured a huge majority, thanks in large part to quirks in voting patterns—the party’s actual share, 33.7 percent, was the lowest of any governing party on record. This was much more about removing the Conservatives than endorsement of the alternative. Starmer had little of Blair’s charisma—or political acumen. Unlike Blair, he quickly lost control of his party.

On the world stage, he appeared far more assured, working well with the Europeans to try to help the increasingly beleaguered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and to navigate the many perils of Donald Trump. But domestically, the government quickly became mired in a series of policy U-turns and personnel calamities. His propensity to buckle at the first sign of a rebellion from within his own party on anything remotely controversial—from cutting a universal heating allowance for the elderly, to raising inheritance duties for wealthier farmers, to the introduction of digital ID cards—became his signature tune. That produced a vacuum, which in turn produced infighting. Starmer lost his chief of staff; then his deputy prime minister was forced to quit, while a succession of officials in Downing Street came and went.

He became almost completely reliant on McSweeney, whom he had appointed his chief of staff. As the government’s opinion poll rating plunged to record lows, Starmer and McSweeney became ever more embattled and ever more interdependent, alienating other ministers, MPs, and civil servants by their decisions. One decision most of all.

McSweeney overruled several wiser heads and urged Starmer to appoint Mandelson to the post of ambassador to the United States. The incumbent, Karen Pierce, had been deemed a success, cultivating strong contacts across the aisle. Her time was up, but some in the Foreign Office were urging the prime minister to keep her on. As for other alternatives, there were several capable senior diplomats on offer, plus some other big names from politics, from former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband to the former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne. Instead, Starmer opted for Mandelson, someone he didn’t know particularly well but whom he regarded as a grown-up, versed in trade negotiations (from his time as an EU commissioner) and with the oleaginous skills to keep Britain in Trump’s good books.

There were concerns aplenty, but they were cast aside in a vetting procedure that was anything but thorough. It was considered not relevant that Mandelson had been forced by scandal to resign twice during the Blair era. His friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which had long been in the public domain, was also seen as a trivial concern, as was copious information attesting to his friendship with Russian and other oligarchs. It was not as if Mandelson was particularly secretive about his predilections toward money and power; pace his breezy statement back in 1998 that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich—as long as they pay their taxes.”

Labour leaders seemed to rely on Mandelson as a prop. Even Brown, who had always been suspicious of him, became so desperate to kick-start his regime that he brought him back into the cabinet as business secretary in 2008. Perhaps it was no surprise that Mandelson considered himself unassailable. Starmer believed his appointment as envoy in Washington to be a masterstroke. Within months, however, it all came crashing down when the first tranche of Epstein files was published. The prime minister was persuaded to remove him last September; he did so very reluctantly.

Starmer was already at a low ebb when the latest tranche of files revealed not just more about the exploitation of women and girls by Epstein and his cabal, but that Mandelson, while a minister under Brown, was apparently sending the sexual predator confidential economic information from the heart of the U.K. government. The police are now assessing whether criminal charges should be brought against him. Mandelson has gone from being feared to being disparaged. Many MPs and aides who owe their careers to him are now trampling on him.

Downing Street is haemorrhaging. McSweeney has quit, quickly followed by the head of communications (the fourth Starmer has had in barely 18 months), who was also close to Mandelson. Other officials and ministers are likely to be implicated when Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, which has been asked to investigate, releases emails and text exchanges around the saga.

As candidates for the succession are jockeying for position, Starmer’s future is hanging by a thread. Elections due in May for local councils, and for devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, were always going to be difficult. Pollsters now predict a calamity for Labour. Within hours of McSweeney going, the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, called on Starmer to step down. Yet, after a frantic ring-around by aides, the Cabinet in London was press-ganged in pledging support for their leader. An acute crisis has become merely a chronic one.

Labour has always been a curious amalgam of hubris and under-confidence, seemingly deriving strength only from a narrow cabal of individuals. The problem goes beyond the fate of one prime minister and one party. Long term, it is possible that someone will emerge who might inject into the Labour Party a policy courage it lacks—that could be both radical and mainstream—while shedding the tribal narcissism that it has often personified. That will be its only route to survival, but it has many hurdles to cross to get there.

Meanwhile, with the Tories also in the doldrums, the path has never seemed rosier for the far right, for Reform UK and Nigel Farage, to exploit a growing sentiment of disdain for all mainstream politics. These are dangerous times for British democracy.

This is an updated version of a piece published in Foreign Policy