Keir Starmer is dull and managerial, they said. He’s a process-obsessed technocrat, they said. He is, his opponents argued long before Starmer won a landslide election victory nearly two years ago, a bad choice for prime minister – indeed, unsuited to politics itself – because he is not so much a leader as a lawyer, animated less by ideology than by official documents and boring details.
If only.
The Guardian’s revelation on Thursday that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting, and that the verdict was overruled by the Foreign Office so the Labour peer could take up his post as ambassador to Washington anyway, is confirmation of an unexpected fact. Starmer finds himself in his current, perilous position – in which his own colleagues discuss when, not whether, he will be forced from office – not because he is too much like his opponents’ caricature of him, but because he does not resemble that caricature closely enough.
The Starmer of his enemies’ depiction would have been all over the Mandelson case long before the latter’s proposed appointment saw daylight. That Starmer would have taken one look at the now-famous JP Morgan report of 2019, detailing how Mandelson’s links to Jeffrey Epstein continued even after Epstein had been jailed and convicted, and canned the nomination there and then. Whether prompted by a former prosecutor’s revulsion at misogynistic abuse or the risk-aversion for which lawyers are notorious, stereotype Starmer would have blocked the Mandelson bid immediately.
If somehow it had advanced, the Starmer of caricature – a manager, not a leader – would have insisted on due process being followed meticulously, monitoring it with an HR director’s zeal. Indeed, he would have gone above and beyond. Even though the rules allowed him to announce the appointment in December 2024, he would, through what lawyers call an abundance of caution, have waited until the security vetting process had concluded – in failure, we know now – in late January 2025.
And while he waited, he would have required regular updates, demanding to see all the relevant paperwork he was allowed to see. At an absolute minimum, he would have insisted on being informed of the vetting’s outcome.
Remember, these were meant to be the downsides of Starmer – that he would be a stickler for process, immersed in the details, all minutiae, no vision. During the opposition years, his defenders countered that a stolid technocrat was exactly what the country needed. They sold the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service as the polar opposite of Boris Johnson, who was driven from Downing Street in part by Starmer’s own forensic questioning. If only Starmer had lived up to the billing of his detractors, reluctantly conceded by his allies, he wouldn’t be in the hole he finds himself this weekend.
Instead, he now has to rely on a defence that is lawyerly in the worst sense of that word. To have knowingly misled parliament is, in political terms, a capital crime. So the PM has to proceed on two tracks, one for “knowingly” the other for “misled”.
On the first, he insists that when he told MPs in September 2025 that “full due process” had been followed over Mandelson’s appointment, he believed that to be true. That, he explained with great vehemence on Friday, was because he and his fellow ministers had been kept in the dark over the decision taken by officials at the Foreign Office, or FCDO, to override Mandelson’s rejection by the vetters – a non-disclosure Starmer described as “staggering” and “unforgivable” and for which Olly Robbins, the top civil servant at the FCDO, paid with his job on Thursday night. That, No 10 hopes, deals with “knowingly”.
Second, and this is the kind of move that gives lawyers a bad name, Downing Street argues that, technically, full due process had been followed, in that the FCDO’s power to overrule a vetting recommendation is, in fact, a legitimate part of the official process – even if it’s one no minister knew about until now. On that reading, Starmer did not mislead parliament, even unknowingly, because what he told the Commons was technically true. That, he hopes, deals with “misled”.
That might just work as a legal defence, but politics is a rougher business. Starmer now has to brace for whatever torpedo Robbins might fire if he accepts the invitation to appear before MPs on Tuesday. If any testimony or document emerges that blows a hole in Starmer’s account, the PM will be finished.
But even if it doesn’t, he is vulnerable. The ignorance defence he is offering is doubly self-wounding. Either it casts him as astonishingly incurious, failing to ask even the most basic follow-up questions – or it suggests that he runs a government in which people avoid bringing the prime minister bad news or tricky dilemmas that only he can resolve. Is it possible that FCDO officials understood that Starmer was determined to send Mandelson to Washington, and knew better than to tell him of an obstacle in his way, preferring instead to quietly remove that obstacle without telling him?
If so, it doesn’t say much for Starmer as a manager. Again, this was an area where he was meant to excel, to compensate for his other, obvious deficiencies. Sure, he couldn’t make a soaring speech like Barack Obama; true, he couldn’t tickle audiences’ funny bones like Johnson. But at least he would know how to run an office properly. He would be a competent administrator, able to straighten out a government that had become a clown show. Unexciting, yes; but capable. Instead, he’s managed to be both dull and incompetent – and that’s no one’s idea of a winning combination.
Throughout his troubled 21 months as prime minister, Starmer has received voluminous amounts of advice, and if he somehow survives this latest chapter he will get more. Much of that advice urges him to change. But in a man his age, that is surely a lost cause. Instead, he should be more like himself.
Think of it. If he had been more, not less, of a human rights lawyer, he would have avoided taking at least one of his early stances on Gaza that cost him so dearly. He would have known that he could express his horror at Hamas’s murderous attacks on Israelis on 7 October 2023 without appearing to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu’s appalling decision to withhold power and water from Gaza’s population.
Had Starmer been more, not less, of a top-flight barrister he’d be better at making arguments, setting out a case, something he constantly, and bafflingly, seeks to avoid. And, had he been more, not less, of a courtroom prosecutor, used to persuading juries of regular people, he’d be better at telling compelling, human stories, an area in which he has been conspicuously and damagingly deficient.
The coming days will determine how much longer Labour MPs will hold back. They will surely not move before the expected shellacking that is coming for Labour in elections on 7 May, but their patience is draining away. Many of them will be looking to replace Starmer with someone who seems to be his opposite, a to-their-fingertips politician. But picking a lawyer was not necessarily a mistake. The trouble was, Starmer stayed true to the worst instincts of his profession – and forgot the best.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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