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.
Tom Baldwin, author of Starmer’s hagiography, spoke to Times Radio:
Tom Baldwin: “I think he’d like to do something. He’s very dutiful and driven by service. That’s why he came into politics. I think that’s characterised his time as prime minister. He hasn’t always sought popularity or been good at being popular. But I think he has some of the necessary qualities that we actually do want in a prime minister. That resilience, that relentlessness, that ability to carry the weight and the job really does weigh very heavily on people and he carries that weight very, very well.”
Jo Coburn: “NATO Secretary-General?”
Tom Baldwin: “I think that’s something that he would be interested in. I think it probably requires Andy Burnham’s government to support him in that and these are some of the questions which Andy Burnham has to resolve quite quickly.”
