Et tu, Anas?

The people of Aberdeen haven’t seen the sun for a month, and Keir Starmer knows how they feel. After losing his chief of staff on Sunday, he lost the latest in a series of directors of communications on Monday morning. Still, at least no one in Labour was publicly calling for him to resign. That would come just after lunch.

Starmer is now in a position familiar to those who remember Theresa May: no one can see how this goes on, but no one can quite work out how to end it. In her case, it was a set of terrible elections where Nigel Farage was triumphant. For Starmer … hang on, I’m just hearing something about what’s coming in three months.

The day began with Kemi Badenoch doing a victory lap on the radio, explaining that the Peter Mandelson scandal was a personal triumph. “I am doing my job,” she told us. “None of this would have happened if I had not done so.” 

There is something admirable about Badenoch’s ironclad self-confidence. Reality bounces off her like airgun pellets off a battleship. It is entirely possible that she really does believe that the reason for the current chaos is her six questions about Mandelson in Parliament last week. 

Perhaps, in her mind, she is the one who forced the US Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, who went through the millions of pages, who found and published the incriminating documents. 

Not that she wants to hog all the credit. Far from it. Take the question of why, if Mandelson was such an obvious rotter, she hadn’t mentioned the fact for months after his appointment, until his name popped up in the Epstein files. “I can’t do it all on my own,” she said, graciously sharing the blame for this omission with her team. “I’m not a one-man band.” 

What about the Tories’ own endless problems in government? “I’m not saying that we were perfect, far from it, but they are worse.” Come back to us when Keir Starmer has banned people from visiting their families while hosting a series of raucous parties and lying about it or when Rachel Reeves has to pay $5 million to HMRC, including a £1 million fine, to settle her tax affairs, and then lies about it. 

The government had sent Jacqui Smith, a former Home Secretary now in the Lords, out to defend the prime minister. Were no current Cabinet ministers available? Or did Smith, an early loser in the expenses scandal, take the view that the worst had already happened to her? You could understand why others were in hiding. The interview was a 15-minute denunciation of the prime minister for appointing Mandelson as US ambassador, when his closeness to Epstein was so well known. 

At which point a more combative interviewee might have pointed out that, if the BBC knew Mandelson was such a terrible human being, it didn’t stop them from having him as a regular interviewee. A criticism that might be levelled at quite a few other news outlets.  

The awful truth is that anyone who cared to know about Mandelson’s association with Epstein could have found out about it with a couple of clicks, but that almost no one did care to know. Mandelson was able to give his famous quote dismissing the story as an obsession of the Financial Times because no one else was asking about it. Not the BBC, not the opposition parties, and not the commentators who called his appointment a masterstroke and now say it was obvious foolishness. 

Which brings us to Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour Party, and a man who can see the train that’s coming down the track to hit him in this May’s Holyrood elections. Somehow the SNP, a party that has gone through its own rapid cycle of leaders, with a couple of them enjoying rides in police cars, is set to win again. Sarwar is quite certain where the blame for this lies. “The leadership in Downing Street has to change,” he told a press conference. “We cannot allow the failures at the heart of Downing Street to mean the failures continue here in Scotland.”

It’s not that Sarwar thinks the government is doing a bad job. “There are so many achievements of a UK Labour government,” he said. “So many good things that are happening across the country.” As denunciations go, this was a confusing one. 

Sarwar had until very recently been defending Starmer. Why the change of mind? He explained: “It was great to catch up with my old friend and the UK’s (relatively!) new Ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson.” Oh, no, wait, that was what Sarwar said in April. This was all a bit awkward. The line on Monday was that Mandelson “is not someone or something I want to be associated with.”

So, why had he been so enthusiastic last year? “I met him in his capacity as ambassador to the US because that was the right thing to do in Scotland’s interests,” Sarwar said. OK, sure. 

It was a strange event. The goal was to put distance between Sarwar and Starmer, but the impression at the end of it was that Labour’s difficulties in Scotland might not be entirely down to the leadership in England.