
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has faced the biggest crisis of his leadership because of his decision to appoint a close ally of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to the plum job of U.K. ambassador to the United States.
Many warned him not to appoint Peter Mandelson, a 72-year-old grandee of the Labour Party, to the job. Starmer, who never met Epstein, accepts that Mandelson's appointment was a mistake, and has apologized to Epstein's victims as well as to Labour and the country as a whole.