The scandal, that the media are tiptoeing around, is that the PM was prepared to ignore a potential national security risk (Mandelson's ties to foreign powers and his vulnerability to blackmail) due to factionalism & cronyism. These are matters of substance, not fantasies.
There is a gulf between witch-hunting and scrutiny, not some narrow line, and its pretty obvious that the Mandelson scandal is about the latter: the lack of scrutiny over the original decision to appoint him & the lack of scrutiny over the decision to announce it before vetting.
See, the thing is, witches didn't actually exist (the few that thought they were witches were fantasists or just mentally befuddled old women). That's why we use the metaphor in respect of McCarthyism or the Labour Party's recent purge of "antisemites".
Credit where credit is due. Worth noting that the local press ignored this and the Standard only picked it up very late.
insidecroydon.com/2026/04/21/f...
But it does refute the idea that Mandelson was an aberration in which FCO petty-fogging & No 10 impatience combined to produce an error of judgment. Ignoring red flags is the norm, which means a cavalier attitude to national security, and it's that that may bring Starmer down.
What the pattern does do is shift the focus to the culture of the Labour right and its impact on the heart of govt, but there are too many in the media already compromised by it to expect a full investigation into Labour Together. And McSweeney can conveniently take the blame.
Have we learnt anything new from Robbins' testimony? Arguably not. We already knew that No 10 wanted Mandelson in-post regardless. The Doyle revelation points to a pattern of behaviour in giving jobs to cronies, but again, who is surprised by that?
For the Labour right, they're pretty much the same thing.
It's worth emphasising that this govt isn't technocratic (cf its illiteracy over AI) and shows little managerial competence (cf Mandelson), despite the way it was puffed up by the liberal media. It treats every decision as political because factionalism is all the Labour right knows.
But the way Starmer has treated him - a peremptory sacking and a very public denunication - suggests that the PM has also pretty much burnt his bridges with the Civil Service, which is ironic given his history as a state apparatchik, if not unexpected after his record as DPP.
A more plausible answer is that relations between Number 10 and the mandarins have already broken down to the extent that Robbins was reasserting a degree of autonomy by invoking the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act. That was playing with fire and now he's burnt.
One question that wasn't asked in the Commons yesterday was what Starmer thought Olly Robbins' motive might have been in keeping Mandelson's vetting decision from him. One answer is the "working towards the Führer" line, which is amusing but a bit of a stretch.
Starmer was lauded as a technocrat & efficient manager who would get things done, but the reality has been the opposite. Appointing Mandelson was a purely political move that would immediately have failed the smell test if Number 10 was genuinely focused on good governance.
There's also likely to be a growing mistrust between ministers and officials as the latter recognise that they will be first in line to be sacrificed as the govt's failures pile up. To be fair, this is something most will have realised some time ago.
The broader implication of Starmer's defence (the mandarins failed me) is that this govt not only hasn't got a programme but has no intention of finding one, as that would require having an engaged Civil Service onside. Policy will now be bogged down by arse-covering.
A famous attempt to substantiate the "progressive blindspot" was David Baddiel's Jews Don't Count, a badly-argued book that had an obviously partisan purpose. There's been no better evidence offered since, but the myth has become entrenched in the media.
fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2021/07/blin...
In contrast, David Davidi-Brown thinks that random antisemitic comments on social media places a moral obligation on anti-racist "allies" to "apply the same principles to Jews as they do to other ethnic and religious minorities". But he offers no evidence that they don't.
Elsewhere in the paper in a review of a TV doc about the late queen, Frances Ryan noted "Elizabeth II believed in the equality of races, we are told, which seems a perfectly normal thing to say about someone." In other words, we should assume that most people are anti-racist.
Who are these "anti-racists" of whom you speak? The Guardian has of late taken to using language more commonly found in the Telegraph or Times, which suggests that "progressives and anti-racists" are hypocrites or useful idiots.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Can't believe the defence has now settled on the "Working towards the Fü hrer" line.
The appointment of a rightwing Labour drone to any public body is a sure-fire sign that it has been captured by corporate and reactionary interests and will shortly slide into irrelevance. Backwards indeed.
Parallel to this, the press more widely has narrowed its traditional role of calling the state to account, partly because of financial pressures but also because it became imbricated with politics as journos became ministers and ex-ministers became newspaper editors.
It was the Tory press that pushed the Thatcherite line that there is "no such thing as society", encouraging not only an antisocial individualism but reinforcing racial and other bigotries (along with mawkish royalism & sleb culture) as a substitute for a shared identity.
Kenan Malik bemoans the decline of civil society and thus accountability, before criticising Allison Pearson and Matt Goodwin for "pernicious racialisation", but he doesn't draw the real link between the two, preferring to criticise norms of avoidance.
observer.co.uk/news/columni...
The project is not Starmer's own: he is merely the vehicle. And let's not be in any doubt that there were more behind the wheel than Mandelson. "Sat at the front of the DLR" now seems a fitting epitaph.
This is something that came across strongly in Oliver Eagleton's The Starmer Project (2022), particularly in his dealings with the US DOJ (basically doing whatever they asked) and his destructive handling of Brexit (pushing a policy designed by others that he then dropped).
Andrew Rawnsley here highlights two habits of Keir Starmer, either of which would be enough to disbar him from the job as Prime Minister. Others have talked about his "incuriosity", but it would be better to say that he sees his role as carrying out the instructions of others.
"The belief that AI may nudge the population towards more moderate views is a counsel of despair. The democratic ideal of a Habermasian discourse has given way to the subconscious sculpting of opinion through a technology dominated by the rich." More ...
fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/04/will...
This is particularly amusing, not least because it goes nowhere and the focus is immediately returned to the right. I suspect the "subset" who have become more leftwing with age do not necessarily identify as "liberal", precisely because they have politically educated themselves.
Naked racism and Islamophobia aren't unusual in people raised in the 1950s and 60s. The idea that they've been radicalised by Facebook or YouTube is misleading. What media, old or new, do is legitimise prejudices that were already there. You just didn't bother to look before.