Mandelson’s fall is now another stick with which to beat a vulnerable and useless Prime Minister, writes Eliot Wilson

There will be no sixth act. Lord Mandelson (so he remains, though he is leaving the House of Lords and being removed from the Privy Council) has demonstrated a capacity for resurrection which would be the envy of Lazarus. But the lingering death of his diplomatic career – he managed 212 days as ambassador to the United States – and of his public life in general because of his links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein is a death too far.

The downfall of the man who revelled in his reputation as New Labour’s “Prince of Darkness” is a sordid and sorry one from which no-one has yet emerged with much credit. But what does it mean? Beyond the departure of Mandelson, all sulphur and cologne, what are the wider implications?

Last week in this paper, John McTernan, a Labour insider who was Sir Tony Blair’s political secretary in Downing Street, concluded that “factionalism is the besetting sin of the current Labour government”. Arguing that Mandelson had been appointed to the Washington embassy solely because he was part of Sir Keir Starmer’s clique, McTernan declared: “The slow-motion tragedy of Keir Starmer’s government is that there is no ideology, no ‘Starmerism’, but plenty of fighting – almost all of it against people within the Labour party.”

I’m not so sure that is the whole story.

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