There is a unique, and bitter, flavour to the corruption of the men of the 1990s. Peter Mandelson – who was yesterday sacked as UK ambassador to Washington – Tony Blair, and the former German and US leaders Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton came from the left, and offered a hard but plausible message to their supporters. The right had monopolised power under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, they said. The only way to win in the late 20th century was for Labour in the UK, the Democrats in the US, and the Social Democrats in Germany to abandon their old notions of standing up to the bosses on behalf of the workers and embrace big business. They called it the “third way”: neither capitalism nor socialism. Frankly, it was just capitalism.
The debacle adds to the sense among Labour MPs that McSweeney and Starmer don’t know what they are doing
As a tactic, it worked. Labour, the Democrats and the Social Democrats all won. But it soon became clear that the third way was also the way to personal enrichment. Blair and the rest weren’t just embracing oligarchs the left had previously despised as a regrettably necessary electoral tactic. They liked them and wanted to be like them. They did not court the billionaire class to secure a political advantage, they courted billionaires because they wanted to.
Whether it was Rupert Murdoch and now Donald Trump in the case of Blair, Gazprom and Vladimir Putin in the case of Schroder, paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and the Russian oligarchy in the case of Mandelson, and Wall Street and the tech billionaires in the case of the Clintons, leaders of the third way produced mass disillusion with centre-left politics.
They helped create the conditions for right-wing populism by reinforcing the notion that “all politicians were the same” and “in it for themselves.” In their gullibility, starstruck centre-left leaders abandoned the left’s traditional suspicion of financial capitalism, and were wholly unprepared for the crash of 2008.
Having lived through the failure of the third way, Keir Starmer should have known better. He was a bloody fool to tie himself to the Blair era.
There is an unflattering explanation for his conduct: Blair won elections and so, if Starmer didn’t have much of an idea how to win or indeed govern, then the alternative was to follow the Blair method from the 1990s of moving to the right and hoping for the best.
To go further and tie himself to Blair and Mandelson personally, however, shows a far greater credulity. Two needless scandals now embroil Starmer’s government.
By making Mandelson the UK’s ambassador to Washington, Starmer has dragged Labour into the sex trafficking and corruption Jeffrey Epstein presided over.
Starmer had no choice other than to fire Mandelson. But what a condemnation of his judgement it is that he appointed Mandelson in the first place.
It was a matter of record that Mandelson did well out of his relationship with the Russian oligarchy, not least in accepting their lavish hospitality.
Meanwhile, an intriguing story in the Times this week suggests that at least some in the Starmer government knew about the close ties between Mandelson and Epstein. After Starmer gave Mandelson the Washington embassy earlier this year, Whitehall officials blocked the release of a memo to the public archives they feared might embarrass the PM. It showed that Mandelson had asked the then prime minister Tony Blair to meet Epstein to discuss business interests in 2002.
Mandelson’s third sacking from government this week also casts doubt on the judgement of Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s supposedly Machiavellian advisor. True Machiavellians see the world without illusion. But it seems that McSweeney could not see Mandelson clearly.
Starmer’s chief of staff was “a Mandelson protégé”, according to the Financial Times, and there was constant contact between the two. Mandelson “is said to have contributed ideas to last week’s government reshuffle and a planned political reboot.”
Anyone with half a political brain knew that Mandelson was trouble. Yet apparently McSweeney does not possess half a political brain.
The decision to overrule the Foreign Office and appoint a loose cannon, rather than a reliable diplomat to the UK’s most important foreign posting, just adds to the sense among Labour MPs that McSweeney and Starmer don’t know what they are doing.
Out of ideas of their own, they replay the Blair tactics of the 1990s in wholly different social and economic conditions. As Karl Marx might have said, if the first time was tragedy the second time is farce.
The other scandal has only been noticed on the left.
After what must have been toadying on an epic scale, Tony Blair somehow managed to inveigle himself into a meeting at the end of August with Trump in the White House to discuss the future of Gaza.
Trump had already encouraged ultra-nationalist Israelis by envisioning the mass deportation of Gazans. Also in the room was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law, who has exploited his connections to become a billionaire.
I don’t expect Conservative readers to intuitively understand the visceral progressive reaction to this news. But most people on the left will say to themselves: “Hold on, this man was a Labour prime minister of the UK, and yet somehow he is cozying up to a US president and his acquisitive family, who have tried to overturn free elections and undermine free institutions in the US, and are now standing by while their clients on the Israeli right inflict terrible suffering.”
The combination of Trump, billionaires, ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and Israel is pure poison on the left. Trust me, more trouble is coming on this issue.
One reason why Starmer and McSweeney admire Blair is that he was prime minister for ten years. If Starmer wants to make it to two, he needs to ditch Blair as quickly as he ditched Mandelson.
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