We are told, with weary inevitability, that politics is no place for moral fastidiousness. If any period in modern memory has laid truth to that increasingly tired idiom, the last few weeks has perhaps presented the most compelling, if uncomfortable, confirmation.
The debacle of Mandelson’s appointment as foreign ambassador to the United States was birthed months ago when his explicit connections to infamous pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, was unearthed, but has retained its eminence as a scandal that refuses to go away. Some of the comparatively minor scandals that have reared their ugly heads in recent decades were able to be patted away in timely Westminster fashion; when asked about why tax expenses have been used to purchase slotted spoons from Marks and Spencer, politicians are steadfast in reminding journalists that there are far greater matters of importance to attend to like the cost of living crisis or the war in Ukraine. This, however, simply refuses to do so.
This week, the country has learnt in a shocking revelation that his appointment was much less a blunder than a fundamental catastrophe – that he had failed his vetting process and yet catapulted into a seat at the table of British elitism regardless.
Sheepishly, the Prime Minister insists he had no knowledge that this had occurred; that this was a fact kept from him and accordingly sacked the senior Civil Servant, Sir Olly Robbins, who he holds most culpable as the progenitor of this grave scandal. Put simply, the British public have been handed excuse upon excuse ranging from: “we didn’t know” (but we did); “it was a mistake” (but an honest one); “the wrong conclusions were drawn” (in good faith). We are invited to believe, all at once, that nothing was known, that the wrong things were known, that the right things were misunderstood, and that—despite all this—the decision itself was entirely reasonable, however regrettable in hindsight.
However, do any of these excuses wash? Is there a single way in which the government can say, with a straight face, that allowing a close ally of a defamed international pedophile into classified British affairs is justified with procedural malfunction? The difficulty is not that excuses are made for Mandelson, but that they are so readily available – they belong to the political culture that produced him in the first place.
The excuses, reasons and justifications – of which there are many – are all inherently plausible. Even despite just 16% of the UK population believing that Starmer was misled, it could very well be that he was. But it is not the same thing as an excuse. For what is striking is not the absence of explanation, but its abundance.
In this pantomime affair, the villain of an insidious and cynical Whitehall seems to be an ever present stage-set, doing both no harm at all but simultaneously the evil puppeteer of Starmer’s demise whilst he begs the public to witness it and believe him. Starmer casts himself the lead in a Shakespearean morality play, fuelled by righteous anger, touched by tragedy, let down by treachery and perennially surrounded by forces just coherent enough to be blamed, but never quite tangible enough to be seen.
What emerges, then, is an unsettling ritual that has long stood in the way of the public and elected office. It is the driver of poor electoral turnout, it’s the reason party membership is at an all time low. The perceived notion among many is that the public are mere mortals underneath a perceived distinctly unsympathetic, unrepresentative hierarchy who seem to be inexorably above the law whenever these scandals re-emerge in a cyclical fashion. The public are alienated not because they don’t understand politics, but rather that they understand it all too well.
Thus Harold Wilson’s famous quote that “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing” feels utterly at odds with this shambolic affair that Starmer seems to be desperately trying to row back to shore. Evidently the Labour Party has long prided itself on seeking to marry moral purpose with political exercise. Mandelson belongs to the tradition that resolves this tension in a way that allows the latter to eclipse the former rather than reconciling the two. What is presented as pragmatism is, in reality, a set of assumptions about power so deeply embedded they no longer appear as choices at all.
If we are to, with empathy, follow the government into the notion that the full facts of the matter were not readily apparent at the time, then the charge is one of startling incompetence. If, on the other hand, the facts were indeed available but disregarded, then the pressing issue of sheer misjudgement is ever more visceral. And if responsibility is to be displaced onto process, then we are left with the curious doctrine that leadership consists precisely in not leading.
The words resolutely inscribed in many of Labour’s merchandise and campaign literature is: “country first, party second”. It is the lingo of pragmatism that the party has so fluently spoken and pushed the envelope of since July 2024; that the best decisions are those that deliver, however unappealing and controversial. If the public grit their teeth, surrender and brace for a small but consequently relieving period of strife, that eventually there will be a rainbow at the end of the storm.
Pragmatism, so to speak, is the politics that will eventually come good. The issue, however, is that what is often called pragmatism is simply ideology that has forgotten it is ideology. It’s no use my insistence that the problem was the “wet paint” sign not being more thoroughly brought to my attention as I get up from the bench with a paint-sodden back. True pragmatism, in the end, is only what survives explanation.
All of this matters. If a political culture that cannot distinguish between explanation and justification, it eventually ceases to treat responsibility as meaningful at all. If every failure can be reclassified as a procedural defect, then nothing is ever finally owned by anyone in particular. And if nothing is owned, then nothing is truly answerable. The result, then, is not a more sophisticated politics, but a hollowed-out one whereby power is easily exercised without remainder and then retrospectively dissolved into an array of conveniently placed excuses to be wheeled out and reached for when necessary.
For this reason solely, the routine manufacture of excuses ought not to be treated as harmless spin or even familiar political theatre. Instead, it is an endemic blemish within the British high office which corrodes the most basic linchpin principles that we herald as what makes this country so unique – the unspoken bond that binds us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny, a robust and proud history of checks and balances on power from Magna Carta to the Miners Strike – the idea that decisions can be held to account in any meaningful sense at all.
A democracy in which every mistake is immediately absorbed into a narrative of bureaucratic mishap and misunderstanding is one in which responsibility is permanently deferred. And what is deferred indefinitely, in the end, is the very essence of political judgment entirely.
Each account seems to point elsewhere: to a failure of communication, to a gap in procedure, to a misunderstanding at the relevant stage. Yet the effect is always the same. Responsibility is continually pushed one step back, until it becomes difficult to say where, if anywhere, it properly resides. What begins as explanation ends as evasion simply by accumulation. Quite simply, excuses are thin – especially that of the self-pitying, manufactured kind. It cannot continue.
Mandelson is not the difficulty. Rather, he is merely the occasion for it. What matters is a twofold matter of both disgraced leaders of international pedophile cabals having close access to British national security affairs but also the ease with which politics learns to talk its way out of these humiliating debacles alls whilst the British public’s intelligence is insulted for the world to see. There is evidently no shortage of reasons being offered. There is, however, no excuse.
Featured Image credits: “Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosts a business roundtable” by Number 10, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0