Keir Starmer is dull and managerial, they said. He’s a process-obsessed technocrat, they said. He is, his opponents argued long before Starmer won a landslide election victory nearly two years ago, a bad choice for prime minister – indeed, unsuited to politics itself – because he is not so much a leader as a lawyer, animated less by ideology than by official documents and boring details.

The Guardian’s revelation on Thursday that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting, and that the verdict was overruled by the Foreign Office so the Labour peer could take up his post as ambassador to Washington anyway, is confirmation of an unexpected fact. Starmer finds himself in his current, perilous position – in which his own colleagues discuss when, not whether, he will be forced from office – not because he is too much like his opponents’ caricature of him, but because he does not resemble that caricature closely enough.

The Starmer of his enemies’ depiction would have been all over the Mandelson case long before the latter’s proposed appointment saw daylight. That Starmer would have taken one look at the now-famous JP Morgan report of 2019, detailing how Mandelson’s links to Jeffrey Epstein continued even after Epstein had been jailed and convicted, and canned the nomination there and then. Whether prompted by a former prosecutor’s revulsion at misogynistic abuse or the risk-aversion for which lawyers are notorious, stereotype Starmer would have blocked the Mandelson bid immediately.

If somehow it had advanced, the Starmer of caricature – a manager, not a leader – would have insisted on due process being followed meticulously, monitoring it with an HR director’s zeal. Indeed, he would have gone above and beyond. Even though the rules allowed him to announce the appointment in December 2024, he would, through what lawyers call an abundance of caution, have waited until the security vetting process had concluded – in failure, we........

© The Guardian