Echo Comment on latest twist in Mandelson saga

We have to believe him when he says no one told him that his choice to become US ambassador, Peter Mandelson, had failed the “developed vetting” process in January 2025.

We have to believe him because his admission makes him look like a prime minister who is not in charge of his own government, of a prime minister so inconsequential that civil servants don’t tell him want is going on under his own nose, of a prime minister who has such a weak team around him that no one has the ability to alert him when serious danger is brewing.

And why did no one in the Foreign Office, as the scandal was unfolding, take him quietly to one side and tell him the truth to stop him misleading Parliament and the people when he spoke about his faith in the vetting process.

It is, as Mr Starmer himself says, “staggering”.

How much longer can he stagger on for?

Perhaps many people who aren’t news junkies won’t be following these latest twists. They’ve probably already made up their minds that Mandelson, a friend of a convicted paedophile, was an unsavoury choice as ambassador and so won’t immerse themselves in the intricacies of “developed vetting”.

Perhaps many Labour MPs will be waiting until after the expected heavy defeat in May’s local elections before making a move against their beleaguered leader.

But how much more is there to come out? Will we ever find out why Mandelson failed the vetting process – does he have more skeletons in his closet beside his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein?

Any more revelations would completely undermine the prime minister’s position which is now so desperately tarnished that it is difficult to see how he can recover.