When I have some information which tends me to think one thing but not enough information to be sure and without the ability to gather more relevant information, there is a technique I use to try and work out how solid my instincts are. It is to ask a corollary question that comes at the same point from a different direction, the meeting or divergence of the two increasing or decreasing my confidence in my initial instinct.
So when Keir Starmer started his ‘I can’t believe no-one told me Mandelson’s was dodgy’ line I instinctively didn’t believe him. I suspect he himself may only have been communicated with in vague terms but I don’t really believe no-one in his team knew. So I try to come at it from another direction.
My corollary question is simple; do I believe there was there anything in the world which could happen which would have prevented the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador in the late autumn of 2024? My conclusion is a hard no. The decision was made. Nothing short of a criminal conviction or an arrest for spying would have stopped it.
So it is irrelevant whether Starmer knew because he already knew he didn’t care because he had already made the decision and nothing was going to unmake the decision. So no, perhaps he didn’t know specifics, but only because him or someone in his team will have said ‘I don’t want to hear it – get him approved’. That’s unacceptable. It used to be enough to lead to a resignation.
But there is something more important in this. It is a lesson we never really learn. We all think our actions and the actions of others are driven by calculation, but the truth is that more than us being a sum of our actions, our actions themselves emerged largely fully formed from our own soul. That is the thing we let ourselves off the hook about.
Now I don’t actually believe in the soul – it’s all just neurones firing in the brain. But it is a good metaphor for a sort of underlying characteristic of how we see the world, how we sense it, who we think we are. I know people who believe themselves to be good people who deep in their soul are angry and vindictive.
I know people who think they are great and generous contributors who actually are screaming narcissists who want to insert themselves into the lives of others, the time-served busybody. We never escape it; we have to confront it. My life has been a long term battle to understand what is really in my soul, because not everything I do comes out good and I want to know where the other stuff comes from.
This incarnation of British Labour has a very dark soul
Institutions and organisations have a soul too, and those define that organisation much, much more than corporate strategy or mission statements or posters of ‘our values’ stuck round the office. If an organisation believes itself to be ‘the grown ups’, it will fail to listen to others. If it believes it is the only competent entity in a sea of dross it will become unable to see its own failures.
The soul of an organisation can last forever or it can change radically, but it is always there and it always defines behaviour and it always emerges from how the organisation’s key players see themselves and others.
The SNP just now has a very, very small soul – too much power for too long does that to you. In its withered soul it now believes it is ‘the natural party of government’ and little else, and so it justifies itself as a jobs-and-power machine. It is moral only in as much as it helps it build power.
The Scottish Greens are the opposite. They believe their souls to be boundless, a group of people bound together by a superior morality. This is always dangerous because it is a license to bully and harass those you see as less moral, and it makes it hard to see your own faults. It probably genuinely believes its blatant rigging of the internal politics on behalf of Maggie Chapman isn’t corruption ‘like a Tory’ because ‘we’re better than that’.
Of course, it is absolutely corruption, just like the Tories in every way. The soul of Alba was angry, a party of people who felt betrayed. People could sense it. The soul of Reform is narcissism, the certainty that the only reason they are not more famous is because people can’t see the brilliance in their risk-taking. Reform is a party of people who venerate their own self-importance.
So where Alba feels all sharp edges and the Greens can be dangerously sanctimonious and oblivious to their darker instincts, Reform is just randomly chaotic, revelling in shock more than logic, revering the edgy lone wolf and unable to understand why everyone keeps falling out.
Well, this incarnation of British Labour has a very dark soul. In fact it is a Prince of Darkness soul, because Peter Mandelson successfully transplanted his soul into the party. When Labour lost power in 2010, Mandelson, Blair and it’s leading figures ran out the door and put all their efforts into getting rich. It was only the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader that kicked them back into action.
As Peter Mandelson put it at the time, he was working every single day to bring down Jeremy Corbyn. The story of this is dark and troubled; he starts holding dinner parties and recruiting people inside and outside the party to coordinate attacks and destroy Corbyn’s administration. One day we will find out which journalists were involved I hope.
One way or another they are all cosplaying Mandelson – he is their north star now
He starts hand picking little proxies – Wes Streeting, Morgan McSweeney, Steve Reed. There was a fairly recent ‘Blue Labour’ think tank at the time, known as Labour Together. This was repurposed as a hostile organisation there to bring down the party leadership. It was stuffed with horrible people.
Some were IDF and sniggered about how they chased a 90-year-old Palestinian woman who was trying to pick tomatoes with her family because they were hungry, reporting with derision how she fell to her knees, kissed his hand and begged. Others were hiring shady private detective firms to smear legitimate journalists with lies.
They were guided by Mandelson, and we know that that is a nasty, morality-free universe. Now we have unnamed officials (it was McSweeney) calling Muslims ‘fleas’, young members are assaulted in public at party conference if they heckle, Shabana Mahmoud herself appears to be role-playing ‘the most evil person I can imagine in my mind’.
David Lammy, Lisa Nandy, Yvette Cooper, Starmer himself – think about their rhetoric, their actions, their default positions. Ban Palestine action because they’re fucking muslims and lefties. Expel Jeremy Corbyn because only destruction is good enough for them. They’re a bunch of thoroughly unpleasant human beings you’d cross the road to get away from.
The point is some of them are nasty by nature (has Mahmoud ever not dripped contempt towards anyone?), some of them were coached into nastiness (if you’d told me the insipid, centrist Yvette Cooper would one day be filming herself on dawn raids of asylum seekers I wouldn’t have believed you), but one way or another they are all cosplaying Mandelson. He is their north star now.
The other connecting factor is that they are all intensely close to Israel. I believe that the fundamental immorality of the modern incarnation of that nation state (it’s not just the leadership, there is strong public consent for their atrocities) has shaped this era of Labour. It was formed as a counter to Corbyn’s Palestinian sympathies. It learned to love atrocity.
And then they needed a stooge so they got themselves a vacuous puppet whose script they wrote. That is why Keir Starmer can say and write the nasty crap he does. He is a vessel for the poison of a party that would be best put out its misery.
I have never got such dark, dark vibes from a political party in my life. Thatcher’s Tories had their moments. So did Blair, and so did Osborne. But nastiness as a defining mission? That is what Mandelson did to Labour.
With some luck Labour will now die an appalling death and either be reborn or replaced. It doesn’t deserve to draw breath any longer. Starmer is incompetent, dishonest and thoroughly unpleasant. We’re fretting about whether he lied over Mandelson at a time when we absolutely know he is flat-out lying to the Commons when he says British air bases are only being used by the Americans for defensive purposes.
There is no way back now. When your soul is that polluted, you can be a twitching corpse and you’ll still leak noxious black ooze from your veins. Sadly, we are stuck with this infected pus of a government for years to come. I just hope the media facilitators of this monstrosity (I’m looking at your Guardian) are chastened – because Labour clearly isn’t.