The horses are glossy, well-shod and trained to withstand the roar of the Marine One helicopter landing nearby – all 80 of them the equine contingent of the massive show of glitz and pomp which, as part of the cavalry salute, will await President Trump and the First Lady.
The state visit, which begins tomorrow, is minutely planned to ensure a safe setting in Home Park, Windsor, far de-risking a sensitive guest being exposed to civilian displeasure in London or meeting Maga-critical MPs.
But the fallout from Lord Mandelson’s abrupt removal as US ambassador, as a welter of damning details of his closeness to the late sex abuser and trafficker Jeffery Epstein escalated, is a turbulent ghost at this feast.
The risk to Keir Starmer, who needs to keep a brave face on the visit as a host, is that he is welcoming to Chequers an unpredictable house guest who can easily depart from the script of constructive courtesies and “go off on one,” as one witness to his last off-script press conference monologue in Scotland puts it.
And in truth, there is a lot to feed the President’s tendency to make bad situations worse. Mandelson is not hiding his anger at being summarily dismissed via a message from an irate Starmer, who concluded that the man he had sent to Washington to wring concrete results out of the labyrinthine talks on setting lower UK tariffs and a special arrangement to support the British tech and AI sectors had become a liability.
That is a further blow to the Prime Minister’s battered authority after a series of unfortunate events, ranging from the departure of his deputy PM Angela Rayner over a stamp duty scandal and an emergency reshuffle.
The problem for Starmer is that while the state visit will most likely look like a confident presentation of the UK on the global stage, a revenge tragedy is revving up fast in the wake of the transatlantic sacking.
What started as (yet another) embarrassing personnel issue has accelerated over the weekend into a political poly-crisis which is now piling pressure onto Starmer over his judgement, conduct and communications style.
It is also providing kindling for internal challenges, including what one Number 10 insider describes as “incoming ammo” from Andy Burnham, the eternally ambitious Greater Manchester mayor who has founded a grouping aimed at moving Labour’s key policies leftwards. Their emphasis is on wealth taxes and removing the two-child benefit cap – both totemic dividing lines between Starmer and increasingly despondent MPs.
With the deputy leadership candidate Lucy Powell – another figure who feels sore not to have been promoted by Starmer and now ousted as leader of the Commons – calling for a personnel and direction reset in Number 10, Mandelson has become a symbol for everything internal critics see as wrong with Starmer’s stewardship.
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They think it is inward looking, cliquish and prone to over reliance on the old Tony Blair elite, of which “Peter being Peter” was most definitely a scion.
Starmer is attracting a reputation for first backing then dropping colleagues, which creates a low loyalty environment in much of the Cabinet. As one who kept their job in the reshuffle reflected, there’s a small band of relieved “I’m still here” people. This also means that there are a lot of others, from the former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh to Angela Rayner and Lucy Powell, who have little reason to remain faithful.
If these coalesce into a solid soft-left grouping, likely with Burnham as its leader, it’s not hard to imagine a challenge to the Starmer leadership – or a concerted pressure group aiming to overpower No 10’s recent “reset”.
The other pot boiling in the who-missed-what controversy over Mandelson’s vetting process is whether, as Number 10 now claims and Mandelson denies, he withheld information on his relationship with Epstein which meant that the PM lacked a complete picture.
The two stories will not align on this – Mandelson did not have access to the damaging emails between himself and Epstein when appointed (though he cannot, surely, have forgotten writing them).
But having reported on the Mandelson appointment, and the determination of Number 10 to push it through despite squeamishness in the security services about business links with China, which was more on their radar than Epstein entanglements, it was also evident that the post-appointment vetting in the Foreign Office undergone before new postings are confirmed was, as one senior insider says, “conducted in an atmosphere of ‘fait accompli’”.
And this all brings us to what severance arrangements will need to be hashed out by the Foreign Office’s HR team – and Mandelson. In terms of cauterising the political damage, a lot depends on that running smoothly (and, frankly, nothing has so far).
At the same time, payouts when senior figures leave office under a cloud are inevitably contentious. No one yet knows how the ousted ambassador will handle this, but the process of removing him was certainly fast and furious.
When a Foreign Office instant inquiry by the Permanent Secretary Olly Robbins began last week, Number 10 was gripped by such a panic about the backlash inside Labour that it proceeded to dismiss the ambassador before Robbins’ instant report on the facts could be delivered.
Mandelson, according to allies, strongly disputes the portrayal of his guilt-by-association which No 10 accepted as beyond doubt. That, given the queasy nature of the supportive notes to Epstein, might be self-indulgent. But it also indicates that one of the major architects of the modern Labour project believes himself wronged. And anyone who knows him also knows that this is not a recipe for going quietly.
The state visit is intended as a “moving on” moment. But the “Mandel-gone” saga is just the start of a longer and riskier story for Starmer – a lot more parlous than one suave appointee gone wrong.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and host of the Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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