Mandelson files reveal Labour party is riddled with doubts and infighting

Peter Mandelson wrote to David Lammy on 18 November 2024, making a simple promise to the foreign secretary.

“If you were minded to appoint me [as ambassador to Washington],” he said, “I would make sure you never regret it.”

Since then, senior government figures, including Lammy and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, have had reason to look back at that appointment with almost nothing but regret.

With Starmer’s authority already in pieces, Monday’s publication of more than 1,000 pages of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment only served to underline why many of his own MPs have lost confidence in his government.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, originally demanded the documents be published to find out what ministers and officials knew about Mandelson’s links to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as any other security concerns that were raised during his appointment.

In the end though, it is not the rather limited information about the security process which has been so damagingly revealed in the files, but rather what everyone in the Labour government thinks of each other.

Many of the most withering assessments have come from Mandelson himself.

“Keir is not leading from the front and Morgan [McSweeney, his chief of staff] is not organising the centre as it needs to be,” he wrote to Pat McFadden, a Cabinet Office minister, last May.

“It stems from the top and Keir lacks verve as does the Cabinet as a whole,” he added.

“People’s heads are broadly in the right place but you need more people who can execute.”

No 10 was “beleaguered and bereft”, he said on a later occasion.

And he credited others with similarly critical views of the prime minister, even his then chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who had lobbied hard for Mandelson to be given his post.

“[McSweeney’s] view from when Keir first stood is that the cycle has been the same, advance/buckle/advance/buckle,” he said.

Wes Streeting meanwhile, was “hysterical” and “experiencing an early mid-life crisis” about Gaza, he said.

He called criticism of the former prime minister Tony Blair by the energy secretary Ed Miliband “personal and stupid”. Rachel Reeves, he said, was “on a growth mission but without an argument about where the growth will come from or how”.

Mandelson is not the only person in the documents being rude about colleagues, however.

In one message that has already been seized on by the Conservatives, McFadden said about Labour MPs: “Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.”

And in a veiled attack on his cabinet colleague Miliband, McFadden backed Blair’s criticisms of the government’s net zero strategy. “Tb content bang on,” he told Mandelson.