Over in the UK, Keir Starmer finds himself in very hot water, with his job as prime minister on the line over all manner of issues that have nothing to do with actual policy.

It was always clear from the beginning that Starmer was never going to be a progressive in the mold of Jeremy Corbyn. He was your typical neoliberal politician, tinkering at the margins of policies that might benefit ordinary people while keeping intact that stranglehold that the capitalist classes have on major issues. His election campaign did not make any bold proposals but he and his party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority when voters rejected the 14 years of Conservative Party rule that included the clown car of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and because Rishi Sunak could do little to salvage anything from that debacle.

But at least one would be justified in having the impression that the calm Starmer would be competent in his job, appointing people who would enable him to run things smoothly. And yet he has proven himself to be really poor at it, especially in his judgment of people to appoint to high posts. This has resulted in a high number of people resigning. The biggest names have been Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff.

But the biggest millstone around Starmer’s neck has been Peter Mandelson, the person he appointed as ambassador to the US. Despite Mandelson’s well-known history of dubious behavior that should have clearly marked him as someone who was sleazy and untrustworthy, Starmer seemed to be determined to appoint him. After Mandelson’s extremely close relationship to Jeffrey Epstein was exposed in the Epstein files, Mandelson was forced to resign. But that did not end the saga. It now turns out that the vetting process conducted by the civil service recommended that Mandelson not be given security clearance but that was mysteriously overruled in some way by the Foreign Office and this information was apparently not conveyed to Starmer. It is not clear whether they decided to overrule it because they felt that Starmer strongly wanted Mandelson and they wanted to enable it. Whatever the case, as a result, Olly Robbins, the top civil service official in charge of the process, was forced to resign.

I will not even pretend to understand the Byzantine processes of the UK civil service and its relationship with elected officials but now there is a whole lot of finger pointing going on, very much in a passive-aggressive style, where the various parties try to deflect blame from themselves and onto others, without actually saying so. You can read about some of the shenanigans here.

But the original sin was Starmer’s rushed appointment of Mandelson and whether it was he himself who was so determined to do so or it was his now-sacked chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. The ever-sardonic commentator John Crace sums up the sorry state of affairs.

All that was required of [Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch] was to turn up and say six times: “What on earth made you think that Mandy was the right person for Washington? Which bit of being sacked twice for breaking the ministerial code, being close friends with Jeffrey Epstein and being suspected of passing privileged insider information to a bank did you somehow miss?”

That is Starmer’s real crime. His failure. That he was a mere bystander prime minister. A spectator in Downing Street as Morgan McSweeney set about finding plum jobs for all his mates. That is the question that’s troubling his Labour MPs. That is the question on the minds of everyone in the country. We didn’t need to do any vetting on Mandelson to reach the conclusion he was a wrong’un. His nickname of the Prince of Darkness could have been a clue. We’d done our due diligence over the past 30 years.

That is, to me at least, the real mystery. Was Starmer (or McSweeney) aware of some extraordinary qualities that Mandelson possessed that made him uniquely desirable to be the UK’s ambassador to the US that made them turn a blind eye to his manifest failings that had already resulted in him being sacked twice by previous administrations? If so, what was it?

Even if Starmer weathers this storm, there are local elections coming up in two weeks, on Thursday, May 7th. If Labour does badly, his woes will only get worse.