‘Pestering for a role’: how Mandelson talked his way back into the Labour fold
A general election was on the horizon and Peter Mandelson was everywhere.“He didn’t have a desk but he would dip in and out on big issues; he was always there for advice,” recalled a former Labour official of the party’s run-up to the campaign in 2024.“He would be in and out of the Loto [leader of the opposition] office in Westminster, picking people off individually, ‘We need to chat and do this’, sort of thing.”The Labour peer’s presence was welcomed by some, who found it reassuring to have a member of the election-winning New Labour team around, but others were notably seeking to keep a distance.“Sue didn’t want him near anything,” said the source of Sue Gray, who was then Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and for six years before that was head of the Cabinet Office’s ethics and propriety team.
“She kept trying to push him away.I think by that point, he was definitely, like, pestering for a role and wanting a role.She could probably see that all of this would happen.”This week the prime minister, whose hands appeared to be shaking at the Commons dispatch box, apologised for “having believed Mandelson’s lies” over his relationship with the sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.Emails within a cache of 3m documents released by the US Department of Justice, suggesting that Mandelson had passed on market sensitive documents to Epstein at the height of the financial crisis, prompted Starmer to claim that Mandelson had “betrayed our country”.
During the vetting process before his appointment last year as Britain’s ambassador in Washington, he was said to have portrayed Epstein, who killed himself in his cell in 2019, as “someone he barely knew”,The problem for Starmer, as the anger of his MPs attests, is that Mandelson was someone he and his acolytes, specifically his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, knew very well,Twice forced to resign from a Labour cabinet after getting too close to the wealthy and powerful, and known to have had a relationship with Epstein – even to have stayed in his home – after his conviction for soliciting a child for prostitution, there was baggage galore,The question debated in parliament this week was how Starmer could possibly have thought it was appropriate for Mandelson to be appointed as US ambassador,The one raised by Labour insiders is why he was brought back into the party fold at all by the prime minister, who supporters claim was never fully trusting of his character.
Mandelson was clearly not involved in the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, whom he so keenly sought to unseat, but neither did he have a role in Ed Miliband’s team.“All of us believe in dignity in retirement,” Miliband said in 2010, on being asked about a possible return of Mandelson.Why did Starmer not think the same?Many point to the relationship between Mandelson and McSweeney – they were introduced by the peer Roger Liddle, who lives near McSweeney in Lambeth.However, their politics clash, as one former minister laid out.“The adviser who wants to prioritise combating immigration inspired by the strongest protagonist of EU membership and free movement? The man who was the arch-pro-European for a Labour generation mentoring the man who wanted Labour to embrace the Brexit zeitgeist?“Morgan trying to bring Labour back to doorstep bread-and-butter issues and rejecting the progressive internationalism of New Labour, hitching his wagon to the architect of it? Peter the most eloquent exponent of the need to embrace and celebrate globalisation, Morgan the man whose politics begins by rejecting that entire approach?”So what brought this about? The answer – according to Labour insiders, officials, bag carriers and leading ministerial lights – is that Mandelson was adept at inveigling his way back, but also that it would not have been possible without a desperation at the heart of the Starmer project: they wanted to win and didn’t know how.
Simon Fletcher worked as a senior adviser for Miliband, Corbyn and then Starmer, and resigned in 2021.He was still working with Starmer on Sunday 15 February that year, when he read in the Sunday Times that Starmer was taking advice from “the man dubbed the Prince of Darkness”.Fletcher messaged the senior leadership team on a WhatsApp group, asking if the report was true.He did not receive a reply.He raised it again at a team meeting the next day and was told that the story had clearly come from Mandelson.
It was to Fletcher’s mind a dismissive non-response,He raised it again a few days later and received a response from Chris Ward, then a senior adviser to Starmer and today a Cabinet Office minister,“On Mandelson – this is just him being him,” Ward wrote,“He obvs hasn’t been brought to advise – but offers it and is helpful when asked,”One telling anecdote in Get In by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund has Mandelson writing a lengthy note to Starmer in 2023 on the need for a detailed vision.
A tracksuit-wearing Starmer turned up at Mandelson’s home in Regent’s Park to hear more.Fletcher said: “I think they brought Mandelson in because it would provide a frisson from the association with Blair-era New Labour.They knew it would be received badly in many parts of the Labour movement but they would think that was a net positive – it would build on the conflict over suspending Jeremy Corbyn to show they were prepared to embrace the previously unthinkable.“Mandelson brings with him a clear political analysis, however wrong, whereas the leadership lacked one.So it is a conscious choice to head down a very specific political road.
”For some Labour MPs, the first they knew that Mandelson was firmly back in the fold was when he turned up at a business reception in 2024 held at The Oval,That also appeared to some to be part of the explanation for his return,At a time when Labour was desperate for funds, Mandelson appeared to have a hotline to industry, said a source,Labour Together, the thinktank and fundraising outfit formerly run by Josh Simons, now a junior Labour minister, raised and donated many hundreds of thousands of pounds to individual Labour candidates in 2024,Simons was said to be in regular contact with Mandelson.
There was genuine anger in Westminster at the Mandelson revelations this week, but a host of other motivating factors were in play, said a source,There were those ambitious for their own careers, who believe the prime minister lacks vision, but who now felt tainted by their association with Mandelson, one Labour insider said,The health secretary, Wes Streeting, was part of a group who would have Sunday suppers with Mandelson and McSweeney among others, and whose partner was an adviser to Mandelson in the early 2000s,Streeting had to publicly defriend Mandelson in a broadcast round,There are also figures on the left, such as John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, to whom Mandelson is the epitome of all that is wrong with Starmer’s leadership and its rightward shift.
McDonnell has called for Starmer to go.Then there is the bulk of the party, which sees the Mandelson saga as proof of the “uselessness” of the leadership, as one MP put it.One noted that it had taken a Starmer loyalist, Derek Twigg, the MP for Widnes and Halewood, to have a word with the party whips to ensure that they did not press ahead with a piece of legislation that could have blocked the publication of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador.For all of those groups, said one party source, an underlying source of dismay was the realisation that Mandelson had been brought in because Starmer “doesn’t have any answers and clarity” – and Mandelson did, even if wrong.“Basically,” the source added, “they were beguiled by him”.
Almost a quarter of soup on sale in UK supermarkets has too much salt, study finds
Nearly a quarter of all soup bought in supermarkets contains too much salt, with one brand containing more salt than two McDonald’s cheeseburgers, according to research.Soup has long had a reputation for being a healthy choice for lunch. The analysis of nearly 500 varieties of tinned and chilled soups sold in supermarkets found that 23% contained too much salt.Of the 481 soups Action on Salt and Sugar (AoSS) tested, nearly half (48%) of branded soups and 6% of supermarket own-brand soups still exceeded the government’s voluntary salt target of 0.59g per 100g serving
Bald eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd: is Budweiser’s all-American Super Bowl ad serious?
Featuring an unlikely animal friendship, the commercial boasts enough patriotic iconography to verge on self-parodyThree years after its sister brand, Bud Light, faced a rightwing boycott over a transgender spokesperson, Budweiser’s new Super Bowl ad, American Icons, contains absolutely nothing that could be mistaken for social progress. Instead, it features an unlikely friendship between two animals whose blood runs red, white and blue: a bald eagle and a Clydesdale horse, the Budweiser icon. An adorable foal trots out of a barn, and the viewer is injected with a single minute of American iconography so pure that it would make Lee Greenwood nauseous.The horse meets a struggling baby bird who gets caught in the rain, prompting the horse to stand over the bird as a roof. The pair become pals and grow up together, the bird riding on the horse’s back as it grows larger
Barclays reportedly cuts ties with lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson
Barclays has reportedly cut ties with the lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson, after intense scrutiny of the founders’ dealings with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Vodafone has also said it is reviewing its contract for public affairs services with Global Counsel, which Mandelson co-founded in 2010 after Labour lost the general election.Mandelson has tried to distance himself from the lobbying firm after the revelations of the extent of his relationship with Epstein sparked a major political scandal. Mandelson resigned from the Labour party on Sunday.The former minister was sacked as ambassador to the US in September after the emergence of emails that suggested he had a close relationship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial over child sex-trafficking charges
Shell will consider fossil fuel investment in Venezuela, says chief executive
Shell is considering fossil fuel investments in Venezuela worth billions of dollars, according to its chief executive.Wael Sawan said Europe’s largest oil company is weighing plans for production projects off the Venezuelan coast that could begin yielding gas in the next couple of years. “These are opportunities that could potentially be activated within months,” he told CNBC, adding that the company was now awaiting approvals.Shell’s fresh interest in the South American country has emerged a week after Venezuela passed sweeping reforms to its hydrocarbon laws to encourage increases in oil and gas production and foreign investment, in line with calls from the US president, Donald Trump, to revive the industry.Trump called for America’s biggest oil companies to reignite Venezuela’s struggling oil industry after removing the former president Nicolás Maduro last month, but the suggestion received a tepid response from executives, including the chief executive of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, who said that political stability was vital before investments could take place
Rio Tinto and Glencore abandon revived $260bn merger plan
Rio Tinto and Glencore have abandoned plans for a $260bn merger, walking away from a deal that would have created the world’s largest mining company.Rio Tinto said it was no longer considering a “merger or other business combination” with Glencore after it “determined that it could not reach an agreement that would deliver value to its shareholders”.Glencore said the key terms of the potential offer, which would have seen Rio keep both the chair and chief executive roles, “significantly undervalued Glencore’s underlying relative value contribution to the combined group”.The company added the deal did not adequately value its copper business and growth pipeline, and concluded that the merger was not in the best interests of its shareholders.It marks the third time that talks to combine the two commodities giants have collapsed, after discussions were revived last month
US job openings dropped to a five-year low in December 2025, report shows
US job openings dropped to the lowest level in more than five years in December and data for the prior month was revised lower amid a softening in labor market conditions at the end of 2025.Job openings, a measure of labor demand, decreased by 386,000 to 6.542m by the last day of December, the lowest level since September 2020, the labor department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or Jolts report, on Thursday.Data for November was revised down to show 6.928m job openings instead of the previously reported 7
Rich plums and ripe tomatoes: Australia’s best-value fruit and veg for February
How to make moreish cookies from store-cupboard odds and ends – recipe | Waste not
Camilla Wynne’s recipes for blood orange marmalade and no-bake marmalade mousse tart
The dump dinner: spaghetti is now being served straight on to the table – but why?
Australian supermarket coconut water taste test: ‘Smells like an island holiday’
Miso mystery: red, white or yellow – how does each paste change your dish? | Kitchen aide