There is, of course, a version of events we will never hear from Keir Starmer.

It goes something like this: “We made a decision in what we thought was Britain’s interests. It blew up in our faces. Sorry about that.”

Simple. Honest. Completely impossible.

Because the truth, if it ever saw daylight, would be far less flattering and far more cynical.

Fighting Fire With… Questionable Fire

Faced with the looming return of Donald Trump, a man whose relationship with truth and legality has always been more of a casual acquaintance than a binding commitment, Starmer’s team likely reached a grim conclusion.

If you are forced to negotiate with someone widely seen as a walking ethics bypass, perhaps you don’t send in a choirboy.

Perhaps you send in Peter Mandelson.

After all, Mandelson has spent decades cultivating a reputation as the kind of operator who could sell sand in a desert and invoice you for delivery. If Trump is chaos in a suit, Mandelson is calculation in human form. In theory, it makes a certain grubby sense. Set a crook to catch a crook. What could possibly go wrong.

Enter the Skeletons

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Because politics is not just about who you send into the room. It is about what follows them in. And in Mandelson’s case, that includes a long, noisy trail of controversy and association that refuses to stay buried.

The Epstein shadow did not just complicate matters. It detonated them.

Without that baggage, this might have been spun as ruthless pragmatism. Instead, it looked like the government had decided to fight reputational risk by setting it on fire and hoping nobody noticed the smoke.

The Art of Not Saying Sorry

At this point, a normal organisation might admit the obvious. Bad call. Move on.

But this is politics.

Admitting the logic behind the decision would mean openly conceding that the plan was to outmaneuver Trump by deploying someone equally comfortable in morally flexible territory. That is not a sentence any Prime Minister wants attached to their name.

So instead, we get the usual performance. Careful wording. Strategic amnesia. A hint that perhaps someone else misunderstood something somewhere. Civil servants begin to look nervously over their shoulders.

A Predictable Mess

In truth, the whole episode was as predictable as it was avoidable.

Trusting Mandelson with your reputation is a bit like installing a fox as head of hen security. Yes, he understands the system. That is precisely the problem. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with British politics could have told you how this would end.

But when the possibility of Trump returning to power looms, normal judgment has a habit of going out the window. Panic sets in. Bad ideas start to look clever.

And Now the Fallout

Now the government is left dealing with the consequences.

Starmer’s authority takes a hit. Talk of leadership challenges begins to bubble. The prospect of a messy internal contest looms, followed by the usual chorus demanding a snap election. The likely outcome is not clarity or renewal, but a hung parliament and months of political paralysis.

Exactly what the country does not need.

The Bitter Irony

The real irony is that without Trump’s gravitational pull dragging everything into dysfunction, Mandelson would probably have remained what he should have been all along. A faintly unpleasant memory from an earlier political era.

Instead, he is back at the centre of a mess that perfectly captures the problem with modern politics. Faced with a bad situation, the instinct was not to rise above it, but to meet it at its own level.

And then act surprised when it all sank.