Kier Starmer is wriggling like a worm on a hook as he desperately tries to distance himself from his own appalling decision last year to appoint as the UK’s ambassador to the US the notorious villain Peter Mandelson, the self-declared ‘best pal’ of child trafficking paedophile Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019). As ever, Starmer’s only concern is himself. He doesn’t care about the grievous damage he is doing to the Labour Party or about plunging the already rock-bottom reputation of British governance even lower; all he cares about is protecting himself and clinging to power.

Looking like he’s about to burst into tears whenever he’s cornered, there’s something extraordinarily childish about this deeply inadequate man. He doesn’t seem to grasp the most basic principle of leadership. Hey Starmer: YOU are Prime Minister, YOU are responsible, the buck stops at YOUR desk. But no, he blames others, seeks scapegoats, pleads ignorance, portrays himself as a credulous innocent and postures as an abused victim in a brazenly bogus and patently insincere rewrite of known facts that combines the haughty detachment of Pontius Pilate and the ‘not me guv’ lame excuses of the Nuremburg Defence. We are asked to believe that he was conned by Mandelson’s lies – but, unless he’s claiming to be completely stupid, that is a bigger lie than any Mandelson might have lisped, since the sordid details of Mandelson’s very close relationship with Epstein were already exposed in numerous media outlets and well established in the public realm long before Starmer decided the ‘Prince of Darkness’ was the perfect guy to fill one of the most important and prestigious posts in UK politics. Does any sentient adult buy Starmer’s pathetic weasel words?

And even if Mandelson had never had anything to do with Epstein, it would still have been a dreadful lack of judgment to put him in charge of so much as a whelk stall. Where had Starmer been over the years when Mandelson fawned to the corrupted power of mega-billionaires for his personal advantage, when he was sacked from the Blair cabinet for failing to declare a conflict of interest in acquiring a huge unsecured personal loan, when he was later forced out of another Blair cabinet for influencing a passport application, or during the decades when he was enriching himself as a lobbyist for corporate strategists, an apologist for environment-trashing big business, a collector of lucrative directorships, and an incessant advocate of turbo-capitalist profiteering?

Let’s not forget that Mandelson is the man who in 1998 defined and embedded Labour’s betrayal of the working-class with the words “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – as much a statement of Labour’s future direction as Thatcher’s equally famous “There is no such thing as society” was for the Tories in 1987. Here then is the real reason why Starmer ignored Mandelson’s sleazy criminal circles – not because he didn’t know, that’s just a routine Starmer lie, but because there was something far more important about Mandelson that he and his vile Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney (a Mandelson protege) very much approved of: he is an out-and-out rightwinger, and that’s a quality that will always trump trivia like child molestation in the mind of a far-right ideologue like Starmer.

Since becoming Labour leader nearly six years ago Starmer, with the rat-like McSweeney telling him what to do in the background, has pulled off a complete putsch in the Labour Party, purging the Party of anybody remotely leftwing and overseeing the expulsion of countless members, activists, candidates and sitting MPs, to complete policies begun long ago by Neil Kinnock and then further developed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The result is the UK has been saddled with yet another nasty, reactionary rightwing political party – as if the Tories and UKIP/Brexit/Reform weren’t enough. One of Starmer’s tactics to complete the coup and justify his persecution of socialists was to call anyone who criticised Israel’s multiple breaches of international law and United Nations resolutions an anti-Semite and chuck them out of the Party. It was one more Starmer lie, a particularly ludicrous one too considering that at least 30% of Israelis also oppose the policies of the far-right thugs who run Israel. To underline his wicked distortion Starmer proceeded to give himself permission to supply Israel with millions of pounds of weaponry to inflict mass murder on Palestine, and then implemented draconian laws that effectively outlawed any protests against the policy or support for Palestine.

I see Polly Toynbee in The Guardian is describing Starmer as “a decent PM brought down by Mandelson” – but, as so often when she writes about Labour politicians, she is wrong. He is a thoroughly indecent, cowardly, British nationalist brute, a pathological liar, Labour’s worst ever leader and worst ever PM, and one of the worst PMs in UK history – which is saying something. Those who care about the Labour Party should now be organising to not just topple this particular swine as soon as possible but all the rightwingers who are destroying the Party, and then restore Labour’s founding socialist principles and very reason to exist. As for the charmless, hideous, money-mad Mandelson: if it’s true that he gave extremely sensitive market information to a foreign financier when business secretary at the height of the banking crash in 2008 and in the subsequent recession he urged, via Epstein, the CEO of JP Morgan’s to “mildly threaten” the chancellor of the exchequer to try to stop him imposing tax on bankers’ bonuses, then that amounts to the very serious crime of treason (penalty: life imprisonment). The Met Police should hurry up with their investigation and charge him.

UPDATE (February 9th)
Starmer’s henchman McSweeney walks the plank and resigns. In his resignation letter he trots out the obligatory “firstly and most importantly we must remember the women and girls whose lives were ruined by Jeffrey Epstein and whose voices went unheard for far too long” – forgetting to add “by people like me and the Prime Minister”. He then says that appointing Mandelson was “wrong” and “a mistake” as if it was some sort of unfortunate accident rather than a calculated policy decision. What next for McSweeney? Well, how about throwing in his lot with Reform UK? His far-right politics would fit perfectly in the dumping ground for toxic Tory rejects and failures, and Farage isn’t fussy. As for Starmer, he is deluded if he thinks chucking his chief of staff under a bus gets him off the hook. McSweeney merely gave advice; he MADE THE DECISION.