Labour Won the Mandelson Vote. Unfortunately, the Electorate Still Exists

The Conservative-led motion to force a Privileges Committee inquiry into whether Keir Starmer misled the House over the Mandelson debacle failed by 335 votes to 223 on Tuesday evening.

In Westminster terms, this was a victory for Starmer.

In every other recognisable human language, it was a government using its majority to prevent a formal inquiry into whether its prime minister had been entirely straight about a scandal involving Peter Mandelson, Jeffrey Epstein, security vetting, questions about business links involving China and Russia, Downing Street pressure, missing records and the phrase “full due process” — which now seems to have all the structural integrity of a two-year-old Mini Cheddar.

But even before the vote, the scandal showed little sign of politely climbing into its coffin.

Earlier that day, Morgan McSweeney and Sir Philip Barton had given evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee that added fresh layers of confusion to a story already thickened by the previous testimony of Whitehall mandarins Sir Olly Robbins and Cat Little, and by Keir Starmer’s own fighting-talk Commons performance — all of which I covered in my previous piece.

What emerged from Tuesday’s two testimonies was not a single clean contradiction, the sort Westminster likes because it can be packaged neatly into a hot-take headline and a resignation demand by lunchtime.

It was something more irritating, more British, and therefore more lethally beige.

A process that everyone insisted had been followed was also being described as a chain of events involving haste, pressure, an appointment announced before clearance was complete, absent records and enough retrospective clarification to make “full due process” sound less like a constitutional guarantee than a slogan on the side of a collapsing portakabin.

Crucially, though, neither McSweeney nor Barton provided the smoking gun that Westminster had spent the previous week trying to hallucinate into existence: the one neat, lethal fact on which Starmer’s opponents could hang the words “the prime minister must resign” and not sound as though they had brought a trebuchet to a damp paperwork dispute.

This is not the same as saying the evidence helped Starmer. It did not. It was a bit more typically boring of the Starmer administration than that.

There was, in Cluedo terms, no single dead body in the library, cleanly despatched with a lead pipe by the unassuming Reverend Green.

There was just a strong smell from under the floorboards, several different witnesses looking at different corners of the carpet, and the government insisting this was simply what carpets smell like under a mature democracy.

But—

There was enough of a stink to generate a lot of swarming media horseflies, a point raised in my first article on the whole affair last year.

So why, after all that, did neither testimony become fatal?