In this episode of Starkey and Mogg, Jacob and I call things by their proper names.
The Mandelson affair isn’t personal. It’s not about “Petey’s” child-in-a-sweet-shop venality. Or about the rules-obsessed Starmer’s tin-ear for real moral and political choices.
Instead, it’s bigger. And it’s systematic. Because it tears the veil from the organised system of lies-based corruption that is the whole New Labour Project.
Mandelson, with his sidekick Alistair Campbell (who has never refuted the multiple charges of direct lying brought against him by Peter Oborne in his book, The Rise of Political Lying), invented New Labour.
They had to because the death of Socialism, in the wake of Thatcher and the collapse of the Soviet Union, left an ideological void at the heart of the Labour Party.
Of course, the relationship between Socialism and Labour had always been awkward. Hence the cynical pragmatism of Herbert Morrison’s remark that “Socialism is what the Labour government does”.
But it was left to Mandelson, Morrison’s grandson, to discover what a Labour Government had to do without Socialism.
The answer, it turned out, was to lie.
To find anything similar, we have to go back to the system of “Old Corruption” invented by Sir Robert Walpole at the beginning of the 18th century.
But there’s a difference. Walpole’s system worked and laid the foundations of political stability and prosperity at home and empire abroad.
But New Labour Isn’t Working: it’s destroying its authors, the Labour Party and, if it’s not checked, the country itself.
Jacob ends by suggesting we use Impeachment to cleanse the stable. I demur because of the risk of political tit for tat.
But, as the revelations tumble out, I think he might be right.