If there was once thing we were always supposed to believe about Keir Starmer, it’s that he is a technocrat. Boring, sure. Lawyerly, undoubtedly. A man of the system – yes, Mr Speaker. But at least that he was competent and vaguely ‘decent’. All of this, in Starmer’s telling and much of the commentariat’s, placed him in stark contrast to Boris Johnson, the chaotic, devil-may-care populist whose ego meant the rules didn’t apply to him, and the Tories of partygate more generally. Starmer was Mr Rules, Mr Process, who in opposition in 2022, as the very first clause of his “contract with the British people”, pledged a “binding commitment” to “decency and standards in public life”.

Today, with the Mandelson albatross weighing heavier than ever on Starmer’s neck, and his Cabinet debating throwing him overboard in not-so-hushed tones, the twists and turns of this sorry saga have shown that Starmer is anything but. In the latest, Sir Keir is planning to force Labour MPs to vote down any attempt to refer him to a parliamentary sleaze inquiry over the appointment of the Prince of Darkness. This is the same committee which Starmer won great advantage in referring Boris Johnson to in April 2022, shortly before his felling (and which eventually decided that the PM had lied). From the point of view of Keir’s survival this is probably the right move – albeit it sets up an extraordinary test of Labour backbenchers’ careers versus their consciences. But clearly, it is nothing close to allowing “process” to go forward unhindered by political concerns. Like when he banned Manchester mayor and potential leadership rival Andy Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election, this is a move of naked political self-interest from a shameless bruiser.

For Sir Keir’s “government of service”, another extraordinary revelation to emerge in this scandal is his attempts to secure an ambassadorship for his outgoing comms chief Matthew Doyle, who departed Downing Street last year. Doyle had no diplomatic experience to speak of when Starmer’s team asked the Foreign Office whether his lackey could be made “head of mission” somewhere agreeable. Even grubbier, officials were under strict instructions not to mention these approaches to the Foreign Secretary David Lammy, as Sir Olly Robbins revealed to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee last week. A cushy overseas posting for this Keir crony not having transpired, instead, naturally, Doyle was made a placeman in the House of Lords. And yet he had graced the red benches for less than two weeks before the whip was withdrawn after details emerged of his association with Labour councillor Sean Morton, who was charged with possessing and distributing indecent images of children in December 2016. Outrageously, Downing Street knew of this association when Starmer appointed him Lord Doyle, just is it knew of Mandelson’s association with Epstein. Plum jobs and peerages for your dodgy mates, while accepting bucketloads of freebies from Lord Alli – thus has Starmer brought “decency, honesty and integrity back into our politics”.

As for Starmer’s being a dull, staid centrist, one can but note that this week begins the trial of Roman Lavrynovych, 21,Petro Pochynok, 35, and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, each Ukraine-born, on charges of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life. These relate to a series of fires in May last year including fires at Keir Starmer’s current and former private residences in Islington. Who these men are and what connection they may have with the Prime Minister one can but speculate, but it’s certainly an extraordinary and colourful story for this grey bespectacled figure. So far, this episode has received remarkably little press attention, as has the Guido Fawkes story from 2024 about the “shape of Starmer’s family”. Nothing against the narrative.

Another typical feature of the technocrat is that they are supposed to trust the vaunted institutions implicitly. Officials and their methods are always dependable and effective, you see, and no politician ought to think of subverting the way things are done for tawdry political expediency. Yet as Michael Rainsborough and I discussed on the Sceptic last week, central to why Mandelson was appointed is the immense political pressure Starmer and his team exerted on the Foreign Office, with his lackey Morgan McSweeney even allegedly swearing at officials to speed up the appointment process. There is deference to officials and institutions and then there is berating them to greenlight your mate – you certainly can’t have both. The Spectator’s Tim Shipman reports that there have been tensions with Whitehall ever since Starmer’s comments in December 2024 accusing officials of wallowing “in the tepid bath of managed decline”. Starmer’s aggressively politicised clampdown on the Southport unrest, meanwhile, showed how little he thought of due process and judicial independence when push came to shove.

Yet for all that, Starmer’s technocratic emperor’s new suits have served him well. Even now, his unwarranted reputation as a details man causes peculiar malfunctions in his opponents. Despite ample ammunition, at Prime Minister’s Questions Kemi Badenoch often fails to make a dent in his plodding, guileless, self-satisfied performances. Last week, as Patrick Christys identified on GB News, sooner than skewer Sir Keir’s abject leadership failings or the gaping splits in his party, Badenoch let him off by challenging him on technical minutiae. A far better approach to grappling with the greaseball was shown by Diane Abbott, who, during the Prime Minister’s statement to the Commons earlier that week, expertly punctured his verbal blizzard of “process” and “procedure” by pointing to Starmer’s personal leadership failings. “It’s one thing to say, as he insists on saying, ‘Nobody told me anything’”, averred the Mother of the House. “The question is, why didn’t the Prime Minister ask?” This was direct, it was to the point, and it laid bare the basis of the Mandelson scandal as resulting from Starmer’s ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach to evading responsibility for decisions. Starmer’s bizarre, now notorious, stutter in response – “meep meep” – amply shows how ill-equipped he is to deal with such attacks. Pious, priggish Starmer clearly imagines himself to be an unimpeachable rule-follower – the last thing anyone should do is to treat him like one.