Keir Starmer has broken his silence about sacking Peter Mandelson as US ambassador over the envoy’s close friendship with the financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Amid mounting questions about his political judgment, Starmer was asked why Lord Mandelson was appointed in the first place, given that the Labour peer’s friendship with Epstein had long been public knowledge.
Starmer said: “Had I known then what I know now, I’d have never appointed him.”
The prime minister backed Mandelson in the Commons on Wednesday, but sacked him a day later. He was aware when he stood up at prime minister’s questions last Wednesday that further revelations were due to be published about Mandelson, because the ambassador had already acknowledged that “very embarrassing” messages would surface.
Starmer knew the Foreign Office had asked Mandelson questions about those emails, before PMQs, but has since insisted he did not know about the content of those emails, or Mandelson’s response to the official inquiries – until Wednesday night.
The prime minister only withdrew his support for Mandelson on Thursday morning, over the emails published by Bloomberg, from Mandelson to Epstein. They were from 2008 and Mandelson suggested Epstein’s sentence for soliciting a child for prostitution should be challenged and that Epstein should “fight for early release”, shortly before he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Asked whether he had been briefed properly on the issue before facing MPs, Starmer said: “What I knew before PMQs was that there had been media inquiries. I didn’t know the content of the Bloomberg emails, and I knew that questions had been put to Peter that he had not yet answered, and he hadn’t answered them by the time I got to PMQs. There is, of course, a time lag in America, but I knew that there were questions that have been put to him, but I didn’t know what answers he was going to give to those questions.
“That came later on Wednesday, and that’s why, at that point, I gave the answer I did at PMQs. And that’s the extent of what I knew at the time.”
Mandelson is also reported to have told Epstein: “I think the world of you,” the day before Epstein began his sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor in June 2008.
Starmer said that by Wednesday evening after looking at “Mandelson’s responses to questions that have been put to him by government officials” he “did not find them at all satisfying”.
Despite Starmer’s attempt to address concerns over Mandelson there is dissatisfaction within the parliamentary Labour party over the PM’s leadership after the handling of Angela Rayner’s resignation, the reshuffle that followed, and Mandelson’s sacking.
Last week the Guardian reported that a government adviser said they raised informal doubts within Whitehall about Mandelson’s 2005 association with the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska but said they were reassured that he was a good appointment because he was “such a master of the dark arts”.
The prime minister insists Mandelson went through a proper due diligence process before his appointment.
Starmer said: “The nature and extent of the relationship being far different to what I’d understood to be the position at the point of appointment, the questioning and challenging of the conviction, which … goes to the heart and cuts across what this government is doing on violence against women and girls and the unsatisfactory nature of responses from Peter Mandelson last week to the inquires made of him by government officials – I took the decision to remove him.”
Despite the widespread anger over the prime minister’s handling of the episode, ministers have continued to praise Mandelson’s “singular talents” citing them as why he was seen as “worth the risk” .
