Cabinet Ministers have begun to scrub their X profiles of any mention of Peter Mandelson. It won’t be that easy to edit out their association Prince of Darkness…
Darren Jones – who was put up in the Commons yesterday afternoon to claim that primary legislation is not the route to strip Mandelson of his peerage – has overnight deleted a very old X post from 2009 in which he celebrates Mandelson’s performance on the Labour Party Conference stage:
The post was still live as of yesterday. Expect to find no mention of Mandelson on any minister’s X by close of business today. Harder to accomplish with Department of Justice releases, eh…
A Tory source tells Guido: “The PM’s Chief Secretary is trying to erase his professed love for the ‘best pal’ of a convicted paedo. With Pat McFadden and David Lammy junior ministers under Mandelson when he was taking Epstein’s dirty money and dishing out state secrets, this scandal goes right to the heart of Starmer’s government.” McSweeney and Starmer protected him for as long as they could…
UPDATE: Wes Streeting is now doing the same.
Shadow national security minister Alicia Kearns told Times Radio she would have put a precondition on a China trip if she were PM:
“I would have put a precondition that I was not going to go if I was prime minister, unless Jimmy Lai was coming home with me. I would also put a precondition in the six months leading up to the visit that I wanted a reduction in hostile acts against our country. But that’s not what we saw. And actually, in contrast, what we saw was clearly the Chinese Communist Party did put a precondition, which was that the new embassy in London had to be signed off. So why is it okay for China to set preconditions and to make very clear red lines about what they require for a visit, but we go without having put any ourselves?”
