Mandelson car crash shows Starmer’s Labour has no ideology, only in-fighting |
The Mandelson scandal has exploded in Downing Street (Court/Getty Images)
Peter Mandelson was given the job because he’s from the right faction of the Labour party. Keir Starmer’s government doesn’t believe in anything except fighting itself, says John McTernan
Politics is – at its best – a battle of ideas. Successful politicians need to be able to fight and think at the same time. Peter Mandelson, who has had a final and very visible fall from public life, famously said he was a “fighter not a quitter”. That worked for New Labour because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had a clear ideology. The slow-motion tragedy of Keir Starmer’s government is that there is no ideology, no “Starmerism”, but plenty of fighting – almost all of it against people within the Labour party.
Factionalism is the besetting sin of the current Labour government. And is the answer to the fundamental question: why was Peter Mandelson made UK Ambassador to the United States? He was, in Margaret Thatcher’s term “one of us”. This was the........