When the Prime Minister loses his chief of staff and his communications chief in the same week, you are no longer watching politics as usual. You are watching a government in collapse. Morgan McSweeney resigned on Sunday. Tim Allan resigned on Monday. Olly Robbins, the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, is already out of the door. Every single one of them, in different ways, was caught up in the Mandelson-Epstein affair. And the man who appointed Mandelson — Sir Keir Starmer — somehow remains in office.

A Scandal Labour Cannot Outrun

Let's recap, because the speed of this collapse has been so rapid that the scale of what has happened is at risk of being lost. Peter Mandelson was appointed Britain's ambassador to the United States in December 2024. Even at the time, the relationship between Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein was a matter of public record — and a matter of public concern. The UK Security Vetting Service told the Foreign Office in January 2025 that the risk factors meant his clearance for the post should be denied. That advice was overridden. He was sent to Washington anyway.

The story that has now emerged from the Epstein files — including allegations that Mandelson leaked Downing Street emails to Epstein while serving as Business Secretary — has wholly vindicated the vetting service's caution. It has also exposed Sir Keir Starmer's judgement as catastrophically poor. He told Parliament he was unaware of the depth of the relationship. The evidence, week by week, suggests otherwise. He has now admitted that the appointment was a mistake. That is a long way short of accepting responsibility for it.

Half the Country Has Made Up Its Mind

A poll out at the end of April found that roughly half of the British public want Sir Keir Starmer to resign over his handling of this affair. That is an extraordinary number. It is the kind of polling that brings down Prime Ministers. The fact that it hasn't yet brought down this one tells you something about the desperation inside the parliamentary Labour party — and the absence of any obvious alternative who isn't tainted by the same circle.

Starmer survived a vote on whether he had misled Parliament. He didn't survive it on the merits — he survived it because Labour MPs are afraid that ousting him before the local elections would look like panic. What it actually looks like is a party more concerned with managing its public image than with restoring honesty to government.

The Wider Rot

This isn't only about Mandelson. It comes on the back of the tax scandal that brought down Angela Rayner. It comes alongside leadership challenges from Andy Burnham. It comes amid open mutiny from Anas Sarwar in Scotland, who has spent the last fortnight refusing to defend the Prime Minister in public. The pattern is unmistakable: a government that came in promising "no return to sleaze" is now being consumed by it.

What unites these stories is the basic question of who Labour are willing to protect — and who they're willing to throw under the bus. Junior staff have been sacrificed. Senior friends of the Prime Minister have been defended for as long as humanly possible. Vetting advice has been overruled. Process has been treated as an inconvenience. And the British public, who were told this would be a government of integrity, have watched the integrity drain out of it month by month.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would do what Labour cannot bring itself to do: take the security vetting service seriously. If the experts say someone is a national security risk, you don't put them in the most sensitive overseas post in the gift of the British state. We'd reform the appointments process so that Prime Ministerial patronage cannot override professional advice without a public, recorded reason. We'd legislate for proper transparency over communications between political appointees and outside individuals. And we'd restore the basic principle — long forgotten in Westminster — that responsibility for an appointment lies with the person who made it.

This Prime Minister appointed Peter Mandelson. He overrode the warnings. He misled Parliament about what he knew. In any functioning democracy, that would already have ended his premiership. The fact that he is still in Downing Street is a verdict on Labour's culture, not on his innocence. The voters will deliver their verdict on 7 May.