Someone told me once that they had been talking to two people who had worked with Keir Starmer before he became Labour Party leader. They both said that his two most striking traits are - perhaps a little surprisingly - laziness and, much less revealingly that he would happily chuck his granny under the bus before accepting any responsibility himself if things go wrong.
And so it goes: tonight, the top civil servant at the Foreign Office has taken the figurative leap out the window after Keir didn't know Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed Ambassador to the USA. He joins a growing list of people sacrificed to save Keith, at least until 9th May.
It could be they didn't tell the PM that Mandelson failed his security vetting but it was set aside and his appointment went ahead. Maybe that's true - though when all this came up last year, you'd have imagined the 'forensic' PM would have asked to see everything before telling the Commons full process had been followed.
But if only Sir Keir had spoken to me. I could have told him not to appoint Epstein's patsy. So I suspect could you have told him. And your friends and neighbours.
The whole affair speaks to a corrupt, decaying Political Class, their credibility flooding down the gutter faster than Mandelson's bladder-filtered Chateau La Fitte trickled along the pavement onto that copper's boot.
Keith abides. For now.
But his sociopathic shenanigans recall to me the words of the late Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe, no stranger to corruption himself, when in 1963 he scathingly reviewed Tory PM Harold Macmillan's dismissal of a string of Cabinet Ministers in a vain attempt to save his crumbling regime.
In biblical tones, unexpectedly quite appropriate for our suddenly God-fearing days, Thorpe sonorously adapted the Gospels to observe that:
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life."
A prophet for our times.
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| Jeremy Thorpe, Liberal Party leader 1967 - 1977 |
