LONDON — The handwritten note Peter Mandelson sent David Lammy in November 2024 reads like something between a job application and a promise. The government, he assured the then-Foreign Secretary, would “never regret” appointing him as Britain’s ambassador to the United States. That pledge, released Monday as part of more than 1,500 pages of government files, has since become the defining emblem of the political catastrophe now consuming Keir Starmer’s premiership.
The documents go further than any previous disclosure in exposing the contradictions at the heart of the Mandelson appointment. Most damaging is what they reveal about Mandelson’s private posture toward the prime minister he was nominally serving. In a May 2025 WhatsApp exchange, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden told Mandelson that Keir was “not leading from the front.” Mandelson’s verdict was starker still: “Keir lacks verve,” he wrote, adding that the government needed to act, in his words, “in a more Trumpian risk taking and dare devil way.” These were not backbench grumblings — they were a serving ambassador’s private assessment of the prime minister who had appointed him.
The nature of the full exchange has not been made entirely public. The Metropolitan Police secured the suppression of key vetting documents, including the nine-page security clearance summary, on the grounds that they form part of a criminal investigation. Mandelson, 72, was briefly arrested in February by detectives probing allegations he passed market-sensitive government information to Jeffrey Epstein during his tenure as Business Secretary. He has been released without bail conditions while the inquiry continues.
Health Secretary James Murray called Monday’s release an exercise in “unprecedented” transparency. Opposition lawmakers were not appeased. Conservative MP Alex Burghart warned that any further redactions beyond those requested by police “will be viewed by the House as a contempt of Parliament, and as a cover-up by the British public.” The implicit suggestion that Starmer’s government might still be managing the information flow landed in Westminster like a second detonation.
The timing could hardly be worse. Labour suffered crushing losses in local elections in May. Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, resigned from cabinet and declared his intention to challenge Starmer for the Labour leadership. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor who commands real affection in Labour’s working-class heartlands, is running in a June 18 by-election in Makerfield — a step many in the party read as the clearest signal yet of a leadership bid. As Eastern Herald reported last week, even a Tony Blair intervention designed to box in Starmer’s rivals has done little to slow what is increasingly visible as an open succession contest.
The Mandelson files are the thread from which every subsequent crisis in Starmer’s leadership has unraveled. When the U.S. Department of Justice released its vast trove of Epstein documents in January, the disclosures placed Mandelson’s relationship with the convicted sex offender in sharper and more troubling relief. Emails suggested Mandelson had maintained contact with Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a minor, and that he had stayed at Epstein’s home while the financier was incarcerated. Allegations followed that Mandelson may have shared market-sensitive information with Epstein during the 2008 financial crisis — claims that remain under active criminal investigation. As the Eastern Herald documented in April, the Epstein files were already pulling senior figures on both sides of the Atlantic into a widening political storm.
Starmer fired Mandelson in September 2025 after an earlier document release showed the sustained nature of that contact. He has since said he was misled — that Mandelson “lied repeatedly” to his team about the extent of the relationship. The March files, the first parliamentary tranche, revealed that officials had warned of a potential “reputational risk” before the appointment was confirmed. Starmer proceeded anyway. Mandelson had also failed his security check, a disclosure that emerged later and triggered bitter public recriminations between the prime minister’s office and senior civil servants over who bore responsibility.
Monday’s release does not resolve those questions — it compounds them. The WhatsApp messages show that Mandelson was not merely a passive actor in a relationship gone wrong. He was actively, privately, assessing the prime minister as deficient while holding the most important diplomatic posting in Britain’s gift. The decision to appoint him is now inseparable from the broader accusation that has followed Starmer since Labour’s landslide: that he prioritized proximity to powerful, well-connected figures over the due diligence his office required.
What the files cannot yet answer is whether Starmer’s own account of events is complete. The suppressed security vetting summary remains out of public view. The Metropolitan Police’s intervention is legitimate, and the investigation may ultimately exonerate all parties. But its effect, for now, is to preserve precisely the ambiguity Starmer most needs to dispel. As the Labour civil war has escalated, each incomplete disclosure has extended the story rather than ended it.
The June 18 by-election in Makerfield, should Burnham win it, will likely mark the next inflection point. A Burnham seat changes the arithmetic of any leadership challenge. Until then, Starmer governs in the space between each release, buffeted by revelations he cannot fully rebut, waiting on a police investigation that may take months, watching a successor queue take shape in plain sight.
That Mandelson privately judged his prime minister to lack verve — and said so in writing, to a cabinet minister, during his tenure as ambassador — is the detail that 1,500 pages of documents have finally confirmed. It is also the detail that the government, had it known, might have wished it had asked about before signing the appointment papers.
—Inputs from Sputnik.
