Labour's hypocrisy and indifference to female victims

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I need a rant.

I can't quite understand why Starmer’s appalling decision to appoint Mandelson is only now coming back to bite him.

The FT reported on Mandelson’s continued relationship with Epstein back in 2023 - to a resounding silence from the British establishment and media ecosystem, which says nothing good about the indifference of the powerful. An FT journalist asked Starmer about the relationship back then: “I said, you’ve got a very senior Labour peer who was staying at Epstein’s house while the paedophile was in jail. Aren’t you a bit worried about this? And Starmer just batted it away and he said, oh I know as much about this as you do.”

The developed vetting report on Mandelson prior to his appointment as ambassador raised red flags on both security and financial grounds. Starmer made a political decision to ignore the security service advice. His decision, not McSweeney's (McSweeney shouldn't have seen the DV report). I can see only two ways to interpret this.

One, Starmer thought someone who had been flagged as a security risk and had maintained his ties to a convicted paedophile was a fit person to represent the UK - he facilitated a situation in which the UK ambassador to the US was effectively providing reputation laundering to a convicted US paedophile.

Two, he’s stupid enough to have believed the excuses offered by a man who had already been sacked from government twice. That strikes me as unlikely, so it makes my blood boil when I hear Starmer doing his best moral outrage voice and excusing himself on the grounds that Mandelson lied to him.

What is making me truly angry, all over again, is that information about the depth and extent of Mandelson's ongoing links with Epstein and that Starmer knew that Mandelson continued the relationship post-conviction when he appointed him ambassador was widely reported in September. I couldn't understand why he wasn't forced out then. Kudos to Badenoch and her team for - belatedly - realising the killer question that needed to be put to the PM (the man who regards himself as some sort of moral true north and promised us the highest standards in public life), but why the fuck has it taken so long?

If Lab MPs genuinely didn't realise before this week that their supposedly whiter than white leader knowingly appointed the close friend of a convicted paedophile as US ambassador they aren't doing their job properly, if they did then they’re as morally culpable as Starmer.

I cannot stomach the hypocrisy and the hand-wringing from people whose inaction and lack of curiosity simply betrays the low priority they give to the victims of Epstein.

(The FT podcast on the September wave of this scandal is here, transcript also available. Worth a read/listen if you think I'm overreacting.)

I’ve lost count of the number times I’ve seen Kier doing his highly affronted face/body language (+ irritated spluttering noises) when being asked about his crap attitude towards, and crap record on, protecting women and girls. He also does it when asked sharp questions by female journalists.

It’s bloody obvious that he dislikes what he considers to be uppity women.

He's not good at being challenged at the best of times. He splutters, goes pink, jabs his finger and tells whoever it is that they've let the country down, they've let themselves down and worst of all they've let Paddington Bear down. But he gets much angrier when it's a woman doing it.

Antonia Romeo is a bit of a marmite character in Whitehall. There are old school mandarins who dislike her because she's a shameless publicity hound (god forbid a woman should be openly ambitious!). There are more junior civil servants who quite like that because she's a very visible leader who's eager to trumpet all the cool stuff her department is doing. Shabana Mahmood, who is not a low maintenance secretary of state, has a very strong relationship with her.

I just think, if Starmer couldn't cope with Chris Wormald telling him he couldn't do stuff, and Wormald is basically a Starmer clone, he's going to spontaneously combust when a woman tells him he can't do stuff.

No he’s not. He bristles, fizzes and reacts badly. Look at last PMQs.

Losing staff that really believed in him eg McSweeney is going to be a dent.

I don't even think McSweeney believed in him. He was just an empty vessel who McSweeney could use.

I dislike Alastair Campbell but he correctly said - nobody ever believed that Blair was my puppet.

The book Get In by Maguire and Pogrund (which sources close to McSweeney cooperated closely with) is an interesting read but a very strange one. There's an awful lot about McSweeney's genius (I take this with a pillar of salt) and some revealing pen pics of figures like Rayner and Mahmood. But at the end you're no wiser about what Starmer believes in or what makes him tick, and there are lots of quotes from people on his team saying he's really crap at politics and not even particularly interested in it.

The nearest thing you get to an insight into his character is that he gets angry when someone (especially an uppity woman) challenges him. The very brutal sacking of Becky Long-Bailey really comes down to him ordering Becky to delete a tweet and her not understanding that she had to do what he said immediately instead of thinking it was up for discussion. Which is very weird for such a usually indecisive man, and it's not even as if Becky is a very assertive woman.

The one thing everyone remembers from the book is that brilliant quote (if it doesn't come from McSweeney it's from someone extremely close to him) saying "Keir thinks he's driving the train, but we've just sat him at the front of the DLR." I bet he's been fuming about that since the book came out.

Isn't it amazing that these men believe other men when they claim to be innocent of abuse, even when they've already been proved guilty, yet they refuse to believe women who are survivors of abuse.

Good on her, Starmer was the ringmaster in the bullying of Rosie when she insisted on defending womens'right to privacy, dignity and safety. He is a lefty misogyny, as are most men on the Left. Womens' rights have always been "jam tomorrow" in their view. Good to hear from her.

If by "bloke's bloke " you mean a vile bully who hates women and has no care for children or young women trafficked by paedophiles, yes.

This . Also how on Earth has Margaret Hodge had a long successful career following her utterly shocking behaviour when it was brought to her attention that children were being abused in Islington care homes .

This was widely covered in the mainstream press in the 1990s .The Independent articles are still up on line .
The brave Islington social worker , Dr Liz Davies , (who has just been given an OBE ) covers the subject well on her website .

M.H.was later made ‘Minister for Children ‘ in the Blair government.
I have no words .

You should have a column @SionnachRuadh!

@Ereshkigalangcleg one of these days I will get annoyed enough at the world to start a substack, but not just yet.