I don’t care what Keir Starmer knew, or when, about the vetting of Peter Mandelson before he became Our Man in Washington. Let the political nerds pick the bones out of that.

No, let’s take a step back and ignore the fine detail for a moment, rather as Starmer himself does. There, now what do you see from our vantage point on the margins?

Another clusterfuck, that’s what. Yet more evidence that Starmer – our Prime Minister, remember – has little or no idea what Ministers and civil servants are doing in his name.

And that’s the way he likes it. The less he knows, the more he can dissemble; the easier it is for him to deflect the blame for his own poor decision-making.

It makes him totally unfit for high office. And now it has all come back to haunt him in two days of febrile politics that have shown him up as weak, lazy and frankly not very intelligent. A man promoted far beyond his abilities.

What these last two days have shown is that 10 Downing Street under Starmer’s leadership (no, that can’t be the word) is a fetid swamp where liars and bullies roam.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee heard evidence yesterday from Sir Olly Robbins, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office until Starmer sacked him.

When he took up his post on January 20, 2025, the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington was already a done deal.

In a letter to Dame Emily Thornberry, chair of the committee, Robbins, 51, pointed out that the Cabinet Office had done its due diligence on Mandelson; the King had approved his appointment; the Government had announced Mandelson’s new role; the United States had approved it; and Mandelson already had access to the Foreign Office, its IT system and classified briefings.

Mandelson was, in effect, already Ambassador. And yet he had not passed Developed Vetting. Downing Street was “dismissive” of this, Robbins said. There was “ a very, very strong expectation” that Mandelson needed to be in post as soon as possible.

One committee member, Richard Foord, a Liberal Democrat MP, claimed Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney had called Robbins’s predecessor to hustle the vetting procedure along, using “terms stronger than those that I can use before the watershed”.

Thornberry was having none of it. She filled in the blanks for Foord and quoted McSweeney as saying: “Just fucking approve it.”

But they didn’t. Those carrying out the vetting told Robbins that Mandelson was a “borderline case” and they were leaning towards recommending against approving his appointment.

However, it was for Foreign Office officials to make the final call and their decision was that the risks Mandelson posed – interestingly, his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was not one of them – could be managed.

In a thinly-veiled dig at Starmer, Robbins said that he did not tell No. 10 that Mandelson had failed vetting because technically he hadn’t; and because secrecy surrounding the process and the Civil Service code of behaviour prevented him.

Robbins has taken legal advice on his sacking and on the basis of his performance before the Foreign Affairs Committee, he’s going to need a bigger wheelbarrow.

On Tuesday, Starmer appeared before MPs to bat away claims that he misled the House over Mandelson.

He wriggled like a maggot on a fisherman’s hook.

The Prime Minister began by admitting it had been his mistake to appoint Mandelson to the role of His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States.

Then he turned to the process that led to him inadvertently claiming that Mandelson had gone through the vetting process and passed.

Had anyone told him that Mandelson had failed the vetting procedure, he never would have allowed him to take up the post.

Many MPs would find it “incredible”, he said, that this consequential fact had been kept from him. The Opposition benches, which had been silent until then, exploded in scornful mirth.

Starmer froze, his face a picture of fear and panic. But he recovered and continued with his shameless reshaping of the narrative.

Ten minutes in, I began to hear a strange rhythmical drumming sound. I listened carefully and finally, I think, identified what the noise was.

It was the sound of angels, thousands of them, performing a Riverdance number on the head of a pin.

The PM was making a valiant attempt to bore the Commons into a stupor. He was flanked by David Lammy and Rachel Reeves, both nodding gravely, occasionally shaking their heads in bafflement or sighing theatrically in exasperation at the stupidity of civil servants.

Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch asked him six questions of which BBC inquisitors Robin Day and Jeremy Paxman might have been proud – long-winded and forensic and doomed to the brush-off.

It took, of all people, Diane Abbott, in playful mood, to cut through the BS. With a hint of mockery, she chided Starmer for wittering on about process and procedure.

She pointed out that Mandelson was a known wrong ’un, twice sacked from the Government (for dubious dealings with very rich men).

Then she got to the heart of the matter in two damning sentences. “It is one thing to say, as he insists on saying, nobody told me, nobody told me anything, nobody told me.

“The question is, why didn’t the Prime Minister ask?”

That cheered the House up and Abbott, who had the Labour whip removed and is no fan of the Toolmaker’s Son, resumed her seat, grinning broadly. Revenge is sweet.

*****

I have long thought that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s face looked excessively “lived-in”. Now we know why. He is a recovering alcoholic.

The composer told the Sunday Times that he had been sober for 16 months but that before he gave up drinking his family had been in a “desperate state”. His wife Madeleine “was feeling she couldn’t go on”.

Lloyd Webber, 78, who composed Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar, tried rehab but it didn’t work for him. He now goes to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous every day.

This week he will auction off the remainder of a wine collection he started at the age of 15 that would go on to be the most valuable collection owned by one individual in the UK. He sold part of it in 2011 for £3.5 million.

Rather poignantly, he said: “When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as… well, alcoholics drink spirits.”

It is all sadly familiar to me, and probably anyone who lived through the Fleet Street years.

I had a friend, a lovely, gentle man, who was a hopeless alcoholic. He had two stints of rehab in The Priory, paid for by the Express, and then another attempt at getting sober at a clinic in South Africa. That didn’t work either.

He was guilt-ridden at his weakness, as he saw it. He told me how he had lived in pubs throughout his long career and could not imagine a life that did not allow him to go on patronising them.

He revealed his guilt at one particular bender that caused him to fall down the stairs. His son came home to find his father unconscious and reeking of vodka.

After his ruinously expensive sojourn in South Africa, he moved to the Kent countryside. How was it? I asked.

“Lovely,” he said. “I’ve got a nice little cottage. It’s next door to the village pub.”

“You’re not drinking again?” I asked, aghast.

“Well…”

Soon afterwards, I learnt that he was dead following a fall in his bathroom.

Incidentally, I once heard a story about Lloyd Webber so preposterous that I couldn’t possibly pass it on. But after his revelations in the Sunday Times, it seems to make a bit more sense.

*****

I was exploring the historical treasures on BBC iPlayer the other day when I struck a rich vein.

Elkie Brooks was 80 in February last year and to mark the milestone, she performed some of her classic songs for the BBC Radio 2 Piano Room.

I remember watching her at the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Apollo) back in 1983. I recall her shimmering beauty, her big hair and her renditions of Pearl’s a Singer and Lilac Wine, which was better even than Nina Simone’s. It was a great night.

The iPlayer led me from her Piano Room performance to other stupendous concerts she gave and to perhaps the finest version I have ever heard of Gasoline Alley, that great song by Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood.

She was the best female blues singer of her generation and watching her on BBC in her pomp made the hairs on my neck stand up. What a voice!

And to think she might have been a neighbour of mine during my time in Salford.

RICHARD DISMORE

22 April 2026