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Sir Keir Starmer on Monday called for Lord Peter Mandelson to be stripped of his title and his seat in the House of Lords, but the UK prime minister risked suffering serious collateral damage from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal engulfing the former Labour cabinet minister.
Starmer attempted to limit the fallout by promising to find a way to quickly remove Mandelson from parliament’s upper house, while announcing an official inquiry into the peer’s conduct “during his time as a government minister”.
But Starmer’s opponents said he should have taken decisive action earlier, while there were renewed questions over the prime minister’s decision last February to appoint Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US.
Mandelson went to ground as opprobrium descended on one of the founding fathers of New Labour, after new revelations emerged about his relationship with Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
Long-time allies of the peer were dismayed by revelations that Mandelson passed on confidential information from the highest levels of the UK government to Epstein, who had previously paid him $75,000, while he was a cabinet minister.
One friend, who has known Mandelson for 30 years, said: “I just feel numb. This is a body blow for all the people who have defended him.”
Former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, who brought Mandelson into his government in 2008 as business secretary, called for an official inquiry into the “shocking new information” about the leak of “confidential and market-sensitive information”.
Stephen Flynn, leader of the Scottish National Party in Westminster, reported Mandelson to the Metropolitan Police “to investigate whether there is sufficient evidence of criminality in his actions as a UK government minister” and in his long-standing relationship with Epstein.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK said it had also reported Mandelson to the police.
Labour MP Peter Prinsley said Mandelson’s conduct, revealed in the latest document release, “looks like political insider trading on a grand scale” and called for a criminal investigation.
Mandelson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, said: “Keir Starmer and his chief of staff [Morgan McSweeney] appointed Mandelson [as] ambassador despite his relationship with Epstein, and then refused to act even as the mountain of evidence against him grew.”
“Given the prime minister’s appalling lack of judgment and the participation of his Downing Street operation, there must now be a full and thorough independent investigation,” she added.
Starmer sacked Mandelson as his envoy to Washington in September last year but, until now, he had not called for the peer to be removed from the House of Lords or to lose his title.
On Sunday, Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party to the relief of Starmer’s allies. The party said: “It is right that Peter Mandelson is no longer a member of the Labour Party. Disciplinary action was underway prior to his resignation.”
Despite the wave of outrage, Downing Street shied away from promising to change the law to allow the removal of an individual peer, saying that there was “no precedent” for such a move.
Rather than pass primary legislation, Number 10 said it would be quicker to work with the House of Lords “to modernise disciplinary proceedings in the House to remove lords who have brought the Lords into disrepute”.
Downing Street was unable to say how this new mechanism might work or how long it might take to be developed. In the meantime, Labour figures hope Mandelson, who is already on a “leave of absence” from the Lords, will relinquish his title of his own accord.
Meanwhile, Sir Chris Wormald, cabinet secretary, has been asked by both Starmer and Brown to conduct an inquiry into Mandelson’s conduct while he was a minister, including the cash payments he received and the information he passed to Epstein.
Downing Street said it would be up to the Met to consider the revelations “in the normal way” and that it would fully co-operate with any inquiry.
Dame Emily Thornberry, Labour chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said the important question was not whether Mandelson should relinquish his peerage, but “whether the police should be involved”.
One Labour frontbencher said the revelations about Mandelson filled them with “horror”, adding: “It’s surely another nail in the coffin for Morgan [McSweeney] — because indubitably it was him pushing the appointment and then resisting sacking him.”
Paula Barker, a Labour MP, said Mandelson should have “been expelled from the party and not allowed to resign. He should be stripped of his peerage and made to testify in the US, although having said that, I’m sure he would have problems remembering things, a bit like the $75k he received that he can’t remember.”