Partygate v Mandelson: Keir Starmer faces attack from his own playbook | Politics

The lexicon of British parliamentary scandal is mysterious.

As Keir Starmer fights to remain prime minister, he has been forced to respond to a “modest appeal”, his decision taken during an “urgent opposition day debate” and now facing the ignominy of a “privilege motion”.

However, those who follow UK politics closely will recognize that these terms are familiar: they are all parliamentary tools used by the opposition Labor Party as it seeks to hold the Conservatives to account on various points – most notably during the Partygate incident that helped bring down Boris Johnson.

At first glance, the two disputes appear to be very different.

Johnson was sacked following allegations that he attended Downing Street parties during the pandemic lockdown he presided over. Starmer allegedly allowed his officials to bypass normal vetting procedures to appoint Labor veteran Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington, a Guardian investigation revealed last week.

But one of the key charges Starmer now faces against Johnson in 2022 is the act of misleading parliament, which is considered a resignation offense in the ministerial code of conduct.

Much of what Labor did in parliament at the time was built around proving that specific point, a playbook that the opposition Conservatives said they were working on. “We have certainly learned from what happened during Partygate,” said a former Conservative Party leader. “Our long-term strategy is to gradually trap the prime minister until he cannot deny that he misled parliament.”

Starmer’s troubles stem from his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson, a Labor member and veteran of successive governments, as ambassador to Washington in late 2024.

Politicians are rarely appointed to diplomatic posts in the UK and the decision was controversial; especially since Mandelson was forced to resign from the government twice due to different scandals. He was known to be a friend of Jeffrey Epstein, even after the New York financier was convicted of child sex crimes.

Starmer was sacked within a year of Mandelson’s appointment after documents showed his friendship with Epstein was closer than thought. But it’s not the intimate messages Mandelson shared with Epstein that’s currently under scrutiny; Instead, it emerged that Starmer appointed Mandelson despite investigators recommending he be denied security clearance.

This announcement was made possible thanks to a process initiated by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Earlier this year, he took up a “humble speech” motion demanding that the government release all documents related to Mandelson’s appointment.

Technically a petition to the ruler, a modest address can be used to extract documents from within the machinery of government. Starmer has used the tactic four times in opposition to access Brexit-related documents or see security advice given before Johnson appointed newspaper magnate Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords.

Ministers have often used national security exemptions to avoid having to disclose sensitive documents in response to a modest address. But this time, the process of collecting the files produced something that even the prime minister said he did not expect: a written recommendation not to grant Mandelson a security clearance.

Revelation by the Guardian last week that the advice existed and was overlooked by the Foreign Office has thrown the government into turmoil and sparked a new excitement in parliamentary activity as the Conservatives seek to take advantage.

Earlier this week, Badenoch introduced an urgent motion in the House of Commons, calling on MPs to hold the government to account for its decision to appoint Mandelson. And now he is pushing Potentially for a wider debate: a vote on whether parliament’s privileges committee should investigate whether Starmer misled the House of Commons when he repeatedly told MPs that “full due process” had been followed.

In the UK, misleading parliament is considered “contempt of parliament” and is one of the most serious crimes a parliamentarian can commit. Anyone who accuses another member of parliament of misleading parliament is in danger of being expelled from parliament by the speaker. An MP found guilty of doing this may be suspended from office. And when Labor forced a privileges committee inquiry into whether Johnson had lied about lockdown parties, it led to his resignation as an MP.

“It’s always been a big issue that Parliament is misleading,” the Conservative veteran said. “We are very aware that there is a change in the meaning of contempt in 2022, which means not only misleading the house but also refusing to answer reasonable questions within it.”

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, said: “Dominating the parliamentary process is incredibly important for an opposition leader. If Badenoch has it, he can use it, if not to oust Starmer from Downing Street, then at least to damage the morale of Labor MPs and ministers enough to make his position untenable.”

While much of the focus has been on what Starmer knew about Mandelson’s vetting and whether he misled MPs about it, the prime minister faces much deeper-rooted issues. No sooner had they secured a historic victory in 2024 than things began to unravel for the Labor government, partly due to the budget problems they faced.

In an effort to save money, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced an unwelcome cut to winter fuel subsidies for retirees shortly after taking office. He then announced a budget that raised taxes to levels not seen since the 1940s. As the economy continued to stagnate, ministers tried to save money on the welfare budget but were forced to back down in the face of opposition from their own MPs.

As decisions were made, Starmer’s net approval rating fell from a historically low figure of around 0 to around -40 per cent. He faces elections next month that could see his party fall from power in councils across the country and come third in its former strongholds of Scotland and Wales.

All of this has created a situation in which otherwise avoidable scandals threaten to bring down the government. “Popular prime ministers and governments can fend off anything the opposition does,” Bale said. “But if they are in trouble, anything the opposition does could lead to instability.”

Starmer’s problems are particularly serious given that he came to power promising an end to the chaos and scandal of the Conservatives’ 14 years in power. A former prosecutor and Johnson’s reputation as a troublemaker was: in words a ministerial colleague being “Mr. Rules”.

Many feel that Starmer’s travails cannot be compared to the long-running breaches seen under Johnson.

Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government think tank, said: “Like Partygate, the Mandelson case exposes a prime minister’s wrongdoing through the machinery of parliamentary inquiry and fuels the anger of backbenchers at their leaders.

“But the real damage from Partygate came from public anger at what was seen as Johnson’s continued hypocrisy in setting rules for the public that he did not live by. The danger for Starmer is how his party evaluates his own judgment in the decisions he makes, and especially in appointments, when doing the job.”

When Starmer looks back on his time going after Johnson, he may reflect that it wasn’t the Partygate scandal that finally led to the former prime minister’s downfall. Instead, there was a later controversy over sexual abuse allegations by former Conservative MP Chris Pincher, when Johnson was a minister.

This was the point at which MPs lost confidence in the prime minister and began refusing to defend him publicly. And when more than 50 ministers and deputies resigned from the government, Johnson accepted his fate and resigned.

Veterans of that era saw a similarity in the behavior of Starmer’s energy minister Ed Miliband, who appeared reluctant to defend the prime minister on television this week. “A mistake was made” Miliband told Sky News. “Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed. And it was a mistake. And the prime minister apologized for it. Rightly so.”

Bale said: “Where this scandal and Partygate are similar is that it really comes down to the confidence of the cabinet. Once you start losing the support of your cabinet, that means the end, and that may be what’s happening now.”