DAN HODGES: Sir Keir will survive tonight’s vote, but victory will prove a pyrrhic one. Next week, the voters get to deliver their own verdict on the Prime Minister…

Stylistically, they couldn’t be more different. Sir Phillip Barton is a calm and careful career civil servant. And Morgan McSweeney, a soft-spoken but surprisingly hesitant and evasive political tool.

But the result of their statements was the same. They buried Keir Starmer.

Last week, as claims and counterclaims swirled around him, the Prime Minister sought to build a last line of defense around two contentious arguments. The first was his promise to the House of Commons last September that all due process had been followed for the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. The second is Donald Trump’s angry claim at last Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions that there had been ‘no’ pressure on public servants who sought to confirm Mandelson in office before his inauguration in February 2025.

Barton, with studied precision, and McSweeney – through a torturous process of self-justification and repentance – destroyed both claims. Sir Phillip began by completely refuting Starmer’s claim that normal regulations and processes were fully complied with.

The truth is that he was actually given the decision and ‘told to move on’. Enhanced scrutiny, vital to protecting the country’s most sensitive secrets, was almost sidelined by the Cabinet Office. No 10 was completely ‘disinterested’ in Mandelson’s review. The normal procedure would be for the candidate to obtain security clearances and then be assigned to the position. According to Mandelson, the order was reversed.

When Barton was eventually asked whether the Prime Minister had been honest in saying that due process had been followed, he initially remained silent. A silence that speaks volumes.

Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s former private secretary, appears before the committee

McSweeney was equally damning. When the Prime Minister was presented with a due diligence report detailing numerous risks associated with Mandelson’s appointment, he was tasked with questioning his problematic precedent. Even though he had a photo of Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein blowing out the candles on a giant birthday cake, McSweeney credited Mandelson with his insistence that the two men barely knew each other and were only casual acquaintances.

He admitted it was a mistake. So was the fact that he had been tasked by Ser Keir to interrogate the man he admitted was his ‘confidant’ and with whom he had dined on several occasions. He admitted it would have been ‘much better’ for ‘public demonstrations’ if the Cabinet Office’s etiquette and ethics team had done all this.

A similar carriage and horses were driven out following the Prime Minister’s insistence that no political pressure was applied throughout the process. Or, in McSweeney’s case, a minicab.

He admitted that pressure was applied. But that was the good-natured pressure you put on a taxi driver when you tell him you’ll be late for his train.

Sir Philip made a sharper distinction. The official clarified that no pressure was exerted on civil servants by directing them to change their decisions. However, this was implemented ‘strictly’ in terms of the speed at which they were expected to complete the assignment.

Four separate witnesses were brought before Emily Thornberry and her committee last week. Two former foreign office permanent secretaries, private secretary to the Prime Minister and – by correspondence – head of the UK Review department. And the picture they painted was generally the same.

Due process was not followed. Pressure was applied. Keir Starmer’s claims to the contrary were completely false.

Moreover, this is a lie that everyone in the country can now recognize. Crucially, Starmer’s MPs are included.

Tonight, under the cold gaze of party whips, they will dutifully move through lobbies to reject calls for Parliament’s Privileges Committee to investigate Sir Keir’s repeated misrepresentation of Parliament over Mandelson’s appointment. And at that moment they will completely reenact this disgusting saga.

To date, the Mandelson affair has been Keir Starmer’s scandal. From today onwards this will be Labour’s scandal.

Every Cabinet minister, junior minister and bench member who voted with the Prime Minister is complicit in Mandelson’s appointment. Complicit in his attempt to defend her. And in doing so, he becomes complicit in attempting to defend the indefensible.

The case against Starmer had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. His own words, delivered in the shipping box, damned him. But MPs still choose to set aside the facts and their own basic sense of right and wrong and rally around his tarnished flag.

And now they will pay the political price for it. It is true that the British public do not follow every detail of which Cabinet Office panjandrum the Foreign Office mandarin says is ticked in the colored box of Mandelson’s review form.

But they have long memories. And they remember Keir Starmer’s shrill call for Boris Johnson to be brought before Parliament for his own misdeeds. They remember the self-righteous demands that he be removed from office for intentional and unintentional lies he told. And most importantly, they have not forgotten the promise made by Starmer and his colleagues that things would be very, very different if they were elected.

Ser Keir will survive tonight’s vote. But this will come at a cost. There can no longer be lectures from Downing Street or Labor Party benches on the need for decisive action against powerful men who prey on defenseless women and girls.

And no more platitudes about the need to reinsert honesty and transparency at the heart of politics. Or – after the messy dysfunctionality in which Peter Mandelson waved goodbye to Washington without a single face-to-face meeting with the Prime Minister or any of his senior political advisers – assurances that the grown-ups are back in action.

Starmer’s victory will also be a huge victory. Next week voters will make their own decisions about the Prime Minister. And it will be a curse.