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Keir Starmer has attempted to reboot his faltering premiership, apologising for appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador and urging his MPs to unite behind him.
The prime minister gave a lengthy speech on Wednesday about community cohesion, but faced a barrage of questions about his leadership after one of his most turbulent days since entering Downing Street.
With his authority over the Labour party and the Commons looking shakier than ever, the prime minister insisted he understood MPs’ concerns and issued a frank apology to victims of Jeffrey Epstein.
Starmer said he regretted appointing Mandelson in Washington given his relationship with the financier and convicted child sex offender, about which he said the Labour peer had repeatedly lied.
“The victims of Epstein have lived with trauma that most of us could barely comprehend, and they have to relive it again and again. They have seen accountability delayed and too often denied to them.
“I want to say this. I am sorry – sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed, sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed him, and sorry that even now you’re forced to watch this story unfold in public once again.”
Seeking to reassert his reputation for probity in office, Starmer added: “I entered politics because I wanted to change our country for the better, to make it fairer, safer, more secure.
“I still believe that most people who serve in public life, whether as civil servants or elected politicians, do so for the same reason, because they believe in service, because they believe in duty, because they believe in the public good. But that is not why some people do it and that is not why Mandelson did it.”
Starmer was speaking from Hastings after a dramatic day in the Commons on Wednesday, during which Labour MPs prompted yet another government U-turn after threatening to rebel over Starmer’s plans to publish documents related to Mandelson’s appointment.
The prime minister had wanted the country’s most senior civil servant to oversee the release of those documents but decided to allow it to be overseen by a parliamentary committee instead after a widespread backlash from his own party.
Starmer said on Thursday he had wanted to release those documents a day earlier, but had been prevented from doing so by the police, who warned it could prejudice an investigation into Mandelson’s communications with Epstein.
Starmer’s decision to appoint Mandelson in the first place, coupled with what many MPs see as his mishandling of the aftermath, has prompted several of them to call for the sacking of his most senior adviser Morgan McSweeney, or his own resignation.
“It’s like Chris Pincher on steroids,” one MP said on Wednesday, referring to the scandal that eventually brought down Boris Johnson. A former minister added: “We were meant to be the ones who didn’t do this stuff. It’s time for a fresh start, the sooner the better.”
Speaking to the Guardian on Thursday, Labour’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell, said: “The most important thing is that when we all make mistakes – we’re all making judgments all the time, sometimes you get those wrong – the most important thing is that you absolutely learn from that and you make sure that those things don’t happen. Don’t make the same mistake again.”
Starmer said on Thursday that he understood MPs’ concerns, though insisted they were directed at Mandelson and not himself. “I understand their anger and frustration,” he said. “I am angry and frustrated like them, because nobody wants to see these deceits in public life. They are angry about his association with Epstein, as am I.”
Referring to recent documents that appear to show Mandelson sharing sensitive government information with Epstein while he was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government, Starmer added: “They’re angry about what he did at the tail end of the last Labour government.”
The prime minister had intended to focus on his “Pride in Place” scheme, a £5bn programme of investment in deprived neighbourhoods to which he is allocating an additional £800m.
He warned during his speech that without such investment, local communities risked fracturing and being exploited by the far right. And he took specific aim at Matthew Goodwin, the Reform candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton byelection.
“Politicians like the Reform candidate for Gorton and Denton, who look at people like Rishi Sunak, Shabana Mahmood, and presumably Marcus Rashford, Shirley Bassey and Anas Sarwar, and say they can’t really be English or Welsh or Scottish because they are not white – [that is] an affront to British values,” he said.
But he admitted his message of unity and cohesion was likely to be overshadowed by the lack of unity in his own party.
“My message [to MPs] is that every minute we spend talking about anything other than the cost of living, pride in place, how we stabilise our economy, how we make the massive argument we need to make – the argument that we must unite this country, understand what it is to be British, to be tolerant, reasonable, compassionate and diverse and fight for it, against the toxic division of Reform – every minute you spend not talking and focusing on that is an absolute minute wasted,” he said.
Additional reporting by Josh Halliday
