IT is as if bungling Sir Keir Starmer is trying to do everything he possibly can to blow up Donald Trump’s state visit to Britain next week.
Blundering from disaster to disaster, misstep by misstep, the PM is running out of other people to blame for his woes.
Scandal-prone Peter Mandelson’s sacking is a two-pronged headache for blundering Keir Starmer
AlamyGlobal attention is on Starmer’s unholy domestic wobbles[/caption]
While publicly the Don has played nicey-nicey with Sir Keir so far, privately the TV-minded US President has questioned the PM’s ratings, to put it politely.
This will be the week when the special relationship is stress-tested to the max, not least as Starmer seems to be doing all he can to make life difficult for the White House.
I fully expect fireworks over bugbears including dead paedo Jeffrey Epstein, free speech and Trump’s current enemy number one: India.
Watch Harry’s new YouTube channel, Harry Cole Saves The West here
And with the presidential juggernaut roaring into town here in a matter of days, global attention is on Starmer’s unholy domestic wobbles.
To bastardise Oscar Wilde, to defend then lose one Labour big beast may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.
End in tears
Fresh from trying to justify clueless Angela Rayner’s tax affairs without knowing the full details, the PM caved to internal party pressure to sack his most famous big hitter less than 24 hours after insisting she had his full support.
Many warned him late last year that resurrecting the twice-axed and remarkably scandal-prone Peter Mandelson to the fold would end in tears, and yet here we are.
This is a two-pronged headache for Sir Keir.
First, friends say the sacked US Ambassador feels deeply “betrayed” and menacingly suggest he has enough ammunition to bring the whole house of cards down with him, should he wish.
One Labour figure branded his defenestration an “extraordinary betrayal” and claimed “Mandelson’s vengeance will be unleashed like a deposed Mafia don with scores to settle”, adding he “knows very well how crap they are in Downing Street”.
In a chilling warning, the pal put the PM on notice, saying: “Never doubt the sting of a dying wasp.”
Whether that comes to pass, the ousting of the Dark Lord over his well-known links with the late financier Epstein puts Trump firmly in the spotlight.
Which leads to the second, more urgent, problem.
The President’s ties to the disgraced sex offender are a matter of fierce political firefighting here in Washington after a U-turn on publishing the full Epstein files, which the White House have now declared a hoax cooked up by Democrats.
But large swathes of the President’s support base still believe Epstein was at the centre of a sinister cabal of powerful public figures for whom he procured teenage girls, among a slew of other lurid conspiracies.
Not least because President Trump told them as much during his re-election campaign and once vowed to publish all known files on the matter.
Doomed attempt
Mandelson made a doomed attempt to come out grovelling for his past associations with Epstein, but so far the President is doubling down on his new defence that he cut ties with the banker long before he was arrested and eventually jailed.
Yet by throwing Mandy to the wolves, Starmer has put the whole issue firmly on the agenda and I fully expect next week’s joint press conference to be a car crash on the matter.
The visit will also see the two leaders ink a new tech partnership between the UK and US, which is what the Government will want to talk about.
But in a bid to avoid fireworks, I understand there are a raft of politically toxic carve-outs for US firms to avoid taxation and regulation by Britain’s overzealous and greedy bureaucracy.
Mandelson made a doomed attempt to come out grovelling for his past associations with Epstein
The future of the voter-friendly but America-repellent Digital Services tax on Silicon Valley’s giants remains on the table, despite public protestations to the contrary.
Meanwhile the growing furore over online censorship and free speech in Britain will also likely dominate next week’s tete-a-tetes as well as any chance journalists get to throw questions at the pair.
And the tensions don’t stop there.
Leaving aside what will no doubt be a gory Labour party conference the following week, Sir Keir’s next jolly is also raising eyebrows Stateside.
Below the belt
Starmer is planning to break all the usual norms and upstage the Conservatives’ conference to go hug controversial Indian PM Narendra Modi.
The last person to pull that stunt was Gordon Brown, who flew into Iraq on the day of then-Opposition boss David Cameron’s big speech in a political move considered a bit below the belt.
Trump is currently locked in a vicious battle with Modi, having slapped massive tariffs on the emerging superpower.
He told Fox News last night: “I put a 50 per cent tariff on India because they’re buying oil from Russia. That’s not an easy thing to do. It causes a rift with India.”
It shows a familiar tineared-ness from Starmer to leap straight from a grip-and-grin photo op with our closest ally, to cosy up to the one country keeping the Russian economy — and thus the Putin war machine — afloat.
But really, nothing surprises me any more due to Sir Keir’s inability to read a room.
I wouldn’t miss next week’s jamboree for the world, so I’m on my way to the airport . . . with popcorn.
PETER MANDELSON was nearly two hours late to my interview with him this week as he battled against the tide on my new online show.
He was not his usual purring self, despite attempts to charm and flatter before the cameras rolled.
Instead, tense and tetchy, he hoped others – ie, No10 – would be as “resilient” as he is as he battled the Epstein storm.
But I hear it was actually the Foreign Office that were the ones leading the sacking charge.
And he was in trouble the moment new Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper walked in the door after last week’s calamity reshuffle.
Old battles die hard as the 30-year-old feud between the Brownites and the Blairites was resurrected on the diplomatic stage.
Yvette, married to Brown’s most loyal apparatchik Ed Balls, still has Gordon’s infamous spin doctor Damian McBride at her side.
A man who spent many years locked in inky combat with one Peter Mandelson, who was weaving his dark magic for Tony Blair.
Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
