An influential Labour Party peer has joined the chorus of calls demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer over the appointment of Lord Peter Mandelson as U.S. ambassador despite his ties to deceased paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
This week, the long-running scandal enveloping Downing Street over the appointment of veteran Labour spin doctor Lord Mandelson to the top diplomatic posting in Washington rocketed back into the headlines after it emerged that he was selected despite having failed his security services vetting process.
Top civil servant Sir Oliver ‘Olly’ Robbins was sacked on Thursday in an apparent attempt to divert attention away from Prime Minister Starmer, who maintained that he was unaware that Mandelson had failed the vetting process before having decided to make the appointment, itself a tacit admission that the PM was not in control of his own government.
The claim has been treated with widespread scepticism in Westminster and has sparked a further round of calls for Starmer to resign.
On Sunday, Lord Glasman, the founder of the Blue Labour movement, which calls for the left-wing party to move back to its working-class roots, said that the refusal of Prime Minister Starmer to take accountability for the Mandelson appointment has fundamentally undermined any remaining trust in his leadership.
“If you can’t own your mistakes, you can’t move. All he needed to say was ‘we made an error’. But he’s completely stuck in saying he hasn’t done anything wrong, so this can’t go away. It’s as straightforward as that, really,” he told The Telegraph.
“He cannot conceivably continue as a credible Prime Minister any longer. And that’s all because he cannot say ‘I made a mistake, I’m sorry’,” Lord Glasman added.
Speaking separately to The Times of London, Lord Glasman noted that he had advised Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, against the appointment of Mandelson over his longstanding ties to Jeffrey Epstein, even after his first conviction for child prostitution.
It later emerged that Mandelson had passed on confidential government financial information to the New York money man in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, sparking an ongoing police investigation.
“This is the most bizarre story I’ve ever been involved with. I warned them that Mandelson was going to be a disaster. Now the prime minister’s inability to own the mistake further undermines any credibility he has with the British people,” Glasman said.
However, it has been speculated that potential challengers to Starmer from within the Labour Party, such as his former deputy Angela Rayner, are waiting in the wings until after the upcoming local elections on May 7th, so as to hang the likely losses on Starmer’s head.
The main beneficiary of the scandal-ridden government has so far been Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party, which has maintained a lead in the polls since early last year.
In comments reported by the Daily Mail over the weekend, Farage said that he is expecting a “political earthquake” next month, from which his party will seek to launch their bid to destroy the two-party establishment in Westminster and take the reins of power at the next general election.
“What we’re reaching into here is something that certainly Boris Johnson couldn’t, even in 2019. If I’m right, this is of a whole different magnitude. It is an electoral earthquake for two reasons,” Farage said. “One, Labour is dying in the heartlands. And two, the Conservative Party is ceasing to be a national party.”