At the height of the Profumo ministerial sex scandal in 1963, the death knell was sounded on one of Britain¡¯s most successful postwar prime ministers, Harold Macmillan, by a fellow Tory quoting a line from Robert Browning¡¯s poem ¡°The Lost Leader¡°: ¡°Never glad confident morning again.¡± Nigel Birch¡¯s intervention signaled the ¡°glimmer of twilight¡± for his boss. Within three months he had departed No 10. And Macmillan was a political giant compared to the current incumbent, Keir Starmer.
It will never be glad confident morning again for Labour¡¯s prime minister, and it rarely has been since he took office in July 2024. Macmillan looked like a man out of his time after six years in office and a decades long political career. Starmer has been in No. 10 for only 18 months and has already exhausted the credit of a landslide election victory. By admitting to the House of Commons this week that he was warned of Peter Mandelson¡¯s continuing friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before appointing him U.S. ambassador, Starmer has placed himself on political Death Row.
Taking on Birch¡¯s role, former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner led a rebellion of Labour legislators to force Starmer to allow a cross-party Parliamentary committee to decide which official documents about Mandelson¡¯s vetting and appointment should be made public. The PM and his few remaining loyalists have tried to deflect blame by ramping up the outrage over his appointee¡¯s treachery and lies about the depth of his Epstein relationship. But they can¡¯t escape the facts. Starmer failed to do due diligence and wagered it was worth bringing back a scandal-prone operator known to love the company of amoral rich people. Two other Labour prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, had made that same miscalculation before.
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