Mandelson’s payout is an affront to the taxpayers being crushed by the weight of the cost of living crisis
After the release of the Mandelson papers on Wednesday, if the Prime Minister was hoping for the dust to settle then he was mistaken. It is becoming ever apparent that the whole Mandelson scandal is now a real threat to Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.
There are still parts of the files that have not been released, such as the correspondence where the PM says he put questions to Lord Peter Mandelson about his relationship with the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. Questions to which, Sir Keir says, Mandelson lied.
The release of the Government documents show that the PM is directly exposed by the decision to appoint Mandelson as the ambassador to the US. Regardless of what any of his advisors were telling him, Sir Keir was warned of a “general reputational risk” and senior officials raised concerns about the appointment.
The taxpayer-funded payout to Mandelson has rightly angered the general public. For them it encapsulates all that is wrong with the political class.
Cabinet office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds argues that the £75,000 payout was “value for money” because Mandelson was asking for more than £500,000. That’s not how members of the public being crushed under the weight of the cost of living crisis see it.
And as the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch points out “If someone has been dishonest and lied, you don’t give them a severance payment.”
Over the course of his political life, Mandelson has shown a propensity to bounce back. But surely this is the end of any involvement in frontline politics for the man once dubbed the ‘Dark Lord’.