Glasshouses, stone-throwing and bad calls

There’s small choice in rotten apples.

You know that old saying about people who live in glasshouses should refrain from stone-throwing? Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the Prime Minister, Sir Kier Starmer, for whom, it would seem, that phrase is astonishingly apt.

Sir Kier, as Leader of the Opposition was one of the main voices calling for the resignation of Boris Johnson as Conservative Prime Minister after a series of scandals/bad decisions during his premiership. Now, it seems, the Adidas trainer is on the other foot, as the fallout from his decision to push ahead with appointing Lord Mandelson as US Ambassador continues to dominate the airwaves.

Starmer has admitted that the move was ‘a gamble’. Yeah, we’ll put that on the No Sh** Sherlock pile. On the one hand, it probably made a certain amount of sense to want His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States to be the sort of oily, egregious creature who could cope with President Trump, possibly even stand up to him. Let’s face it, look what happened when Sir Kim Darroch was found to have told his truth about working with the first Trump administration.  On the other hand, to decide that the best option was Peter Mandelson seems – odd. Short-sighted. Misguided. Crazy even.

No-one seems to know, in public anyway, exactly what the serious concerns about Mandelson that the vetting process threw up were, and there are some implications that they were not all about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. The one thing that came out of today’s hearing with Sir Olly Robbins, the sacked civil servant at the heart of this, is that despite what his critics  the opposite benches assumed those concerns were not directly transmitted to Sir Keir and his team in 10 Downing Street. But others knew.

Successful calls for Johnsons’ resignation were the culmination of a lot of things, including, but not limited to, the prorogation of Parliament, the need for which was transmitted to the late Queen with a slightly loose grasp on the truth, the possible shenanigans with the blonde American lady whose name escapes me right now, the peerage given to Evgeny Lebedev, whose father was a KGB agent, and of course Cakegate, and knowing that Downing Street staff were partying in large groups while mere mortals had to stay 3m apart from each other, even at funerals. Those mere mortals, of course, included the late Queen, sitting in a pew on her own at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. A woman who really understood the optics of everything she did. The camel’s back, however, was broken by the straw that was Johnson’s appointment of Christopher Pincher as Conservative Party Deputy Chief Whip. Johnson claimed he knew nothing of any allegations of sexual impropriety against Pincher, yet, later had to admit that he did, calling him “Pincher by name and Pincher by nature”.

Putting aside how much Starmer did or didn’t know about Lord Mandelson – who did, it has to be said, resign pretty quickly once those dressing gown photos of him and Epstein came to light – this whole episode just goes to highlight our current Prime Minister’s blandness. He was once the most important lawyer in the land, and that shows. That said, he did show that there is a spine in there somewhere, when he stood up to Trump over the war with Iran. “This is not our war. We will not be drawn into the conflict.”

Whether Starmer survives this Mandelson vetting issue probably depends how much faith the rest of the Labour Pary have in any possible successors. Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband may have their eyes on the prize, but it depends how fed up the Party and the public are with the churn of leaders of all hues.

It all seems very important and not at all important, all at the same time. Maybe we need Parliament to be focussing less on who knew what about an appointment that everyone now knows was a mistake, and instead be looking at doing something about the economy. At trying to stick to that manifesto pledge about building all those houses. Maybe even at whether the changes to the Business Property Relief taxes should be reigned back for family businesses.

In other news, I’m writing this on National Tea Day (April 21). So, here’s the best biscuit to go with it. IYKYK