The smell of death is in the Westminster air. Labour’s King Rat Peter Mandelson has again cast his sulphurous odour of villainy around the palace, and contamination may drag a decent, well-intentioned Labour leader down with him.

That’s the tragedy. Nothing about Keir Starmer’s life purpose, attitudes, tastes, morals or values resembles Mandelson’s and his venal world of corrupted power, where mega-billions buy anyone anything. Not friends; they had nothing in common. For all Mandelson’s pedigree, reaching into the party’s past, he never seemed to have a single Labour value or egalitarian instinct. Labour was a vehicle.

But even if the men were never close, Mandelson worked to cast his mantle over Starmer’s team, just as he had exerted his malign and worldly influence on Labour for decades. Morgan McSweeney was his young protege, learning the Mandelsonian way of political cynicism; others in the cabinet, too, were surely seduced by that aura of “grownup” reckoning with the “real world”.

McSweeney was widely reported to be the one pushing Mandelson’s appointment to Washington, a clever idea to plant a man without scruples to schmooze a president with even fewer. Clever, that is, if you can skip past the minor irrelevance of his intimate friendship with a man who trafficked young girls for influence with the mighty. All the great and bad whose names tumble out of the newly released files – Noam Chomsky! – shrugged it off. Somehow, the grooming gangs of Rotherham cause more visceral disgust and outcry than exploitation of these equally vulnerable victims procured for the lusts of the wealthy.

The end for Starmer is nigh: that was signalled by the sheer naked outrage from Labour’s own side, not point-scoring but shocked to the core, not plotting but erupting right, left........

© The Guardian