Everything Donald Trump touches dies. He put his name on the Kennedy Center in Washington, prompting artists and performers to flee in such numbers that the venue will now shut down for “approximately” two years. The Washington Post under owner Jeff Bezos sought to ingratiate itself with the second Trump presidency; this week it announced 300 layoffs and the withering of that once great institution. And now we can add one more, unexpected item to the list poisoned by the touch of Trump: Britain’s Labour government.

It’s easily forgotten, but it was because of Trump that Keir Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson to serve as the UK ambassador to Washington. The prime minister decided it would take a snake to navigate the serpentine backchannels of the new administration and that Mandelson had the skill set. The result is an irony rich enough to make you retch. The Epstein files, which contain more than 38,000 references to Trump, his Mar-a-Lago estate and other related terms, seem set to bring down a national leader who is not mentioned by Epstein even once.

Which points to a related irony, no less bitter. Because politics is Newtonian, with elections often won by those who represent an equal and opposite reaction to what has gone before, Starmer reached Downing Street in part because he was a boy scout – the squeaky clean antidote to the sleaze of Boris Johnson. His pitch to the voters was that he was not exciting, but he was trustworthy, a former prosecutor free of the whiff of scandal. For him to be linked, via Mandelson, to the netherworld of Jeffrey Epstein and the vile abusers of women and girls who filled it is not merely embarrassing or compromising: it destroys his chief claim to the top job. As the Economist asked this week, if this can happen, then “What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?”

Hence the number of Labour MPs........

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