There is a unique, and bitter, flavour to the corruption of the men of the 1990s. Peter Mandelson – who was yesterday sacked as UK ambassador to Washington – Tony Blair, and the former German and US leaders Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton came from the left, and offered a hard but plausible message to their supporters. The right had monopolised power under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, they said. The only way to win in the late 20th century was for Labour in the UK, the Democrats in the US, and the Social Democrats in Germany to abandon their old notions of standing up to the bosses on behalf of the workers and embrace big business. They called it the “third way”: neither capitalism nor socialism. Frankly, it was just capitalism.

The debacle adds to the sense among Labour MPs that McSweeney and Starmer don’t know what they are doing

As a tactic, it worked. Labour, the Democrats and the Social Democrats all won. But it soon became clear that the third way was also the way to personal enrichment. Blair and the rest weren’t just embracing oligarchs the left had previously despised as a regrettably necessary electoral tactic. They liked them and wanted to be like them. They did not court the billionaire class to secure a political advantage, they courted billionaires because they wanted to.

Whether it was Rupert Murdoch and now Donald Trump in the case of Blair, Gazprom and Vladimir Putin in the case of Schroder, paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and the Russian oligarchy in........

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