JEREMY CORBYN’S intervention in Parliament demanding a public inquiry into Peter Mandelson’s appointment as British ambassador to the United States has crystallised into something far more consequential than parliamentary theatre.

As of today, February 9 2026, Keir Starmer’s government is in a state of terminal crisis. His communications chief Tim Allan has resigned, following the departure of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney just yesterday.

The Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has called for Starmer to resign. Two affiliated trade union general secretaries — the Fire Brigades Union and the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association — have publicly demanded Starmer step down. Eleven ministers have now resigned from this government since it took office in July 2024, making this one of the most unstable administrations in modern British history.

This is not merely a political crisis — it is the implosion of a project built on ruling class patronage, corporate lobbying and the systematic suppression of democratic socialism within the Labour Party. Corbyn’s call for accountability has become the catalyst for a reckoning that exposes the entire architecture of corruption he challenged as leader, and for which he was relentlessly attacked.

The immediate trigger is clear. Starmer appointed Mandelson to the most important diplomatic post in the British state despite being briefed on his intimate ties to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

When emails surfaced showing Mandelson had leaked confidential government documents to Epstein — including Cabinet minutes, tax policy plans and details of £20 billion in asset sales — while serving as business secretary during the 2008 financial crisis, the scandal metastasised.

Mandelson had called Epstein his “best pal,” told him “I think the world of you,” encouraged him to fight for early release from prison, and allegedly received upwards of £75,000 in payments alongside his husband. The relationship continued years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor.

Starmer’s response has been catastrophic. He claimed he “did not know the depth of the darkness,” despite having personally questioned Mandelson about the Epstein links before appointing him and receiving a dossier from the Cabinet Office flagging serious concerns.

When public outrage mounted, he accepted McSweeney’s resignation as chief of staff, with McSweeney taking “full responsibility” for advising the appointment. But this attempt at deflection has failed spectacularly. By Monday morning, Allan had also resigned to “allow a new No 10 team to be built,” and the Prime Minister is now fighting for political survival.

Yet the deflection has unravelled. Diane Abbott, the longest-serving female MP despite Starmer’s repeated suspensions, intervened on Good Morning Britain to demolish the McSweeney narrative. Starmer “knew more” about the Mandelson appointment than he has admitted, she stated — and McSweeney’s resignation may be designed to shield what evidence still lies hidden.

Abbott went further: “The Labour vote in 2024 was more or less the same as 2019 — what actually happened was a Tory vote split and half their vote went to Reform.” Labour’s “landslide” was no strategic masterpiece but arithmetic: right-wing fragmentation, not genuine popular mandate. The government’s entire foundation was sand.

Downing Street insists Starmer is “upbeat and confident” and “concentrating on the job in hand.” Yet the Scottish Labour leader’s call for resignation, the union demands, the 55 per cent of the public who believe Starmer should resign, and the third of Labour members who want him gone tell a different story. As Conservative deputy chairman Matt Vickers put it: “The rats are abandoning the sinking ship.”

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn declared Starmer a “lame-duck leader” who should “do the decent thing and resign.”

The significance of this moment cannot be grasped without understanding what was done to Corbyn between 2015 and 2019, and why. From the instant he won the leadership election with 59.5 per cent of the vote, Corbyn faced systematic delegitimisation designed to remove him and restore Establishment control over the party. The attacks operated across multiple fronts: a relentless media campaign depicting him as a security threat, an anti-semite and an incompetent; a parliamentary coup attempt in 2016 involving mass shadow cabinet resignations and a vote of no confidence; and internal sabotage by party officials who actively worked to lose the 2017 general election to oust him.

Peter Mandelson — the figure now exposed as corrupt — declared openly in 2017: “I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office.”

The official justification for this assault was that Corbyn was unfit for office, extreme, and a threat to Labour’s electability. His policies — public ownership of railways and utilities, opposition to austerity and illegal wars, nuclear disarmament, ending NHS privatisation, wealth redistribution — were treated not as legitimate democratic socialist positions but as dangerous radicalism. The message was clear: the party machinery, the media Establishment, and the parliamentary Labour right would tolerate no challenge to neoliberal consensus or Establishment power.

Yet what has unfolded under Starmer’s leadership exposes the inversion at the heart of that narrative. The person relentlessly depicted as unfit for office is now demanding basic democratic accountability for ruling class corruption, while the “serious” centrist who replaced him has appointed a man with documented ties to a sex trafficker and evidence of leaking state secrets to represent Britain in Washington.

Corbyn explicitly stated that under his leadership, Mandelson “had no role, no influence and no part to play, because I do not trust the man or believe him.” That was not personal vendetta — it was political principle. The contrast with Starmer’s judgement could not be starker.

The Mandelson scandal is not an isolated failure of vetting. It is the logical outcome of what the Labour right has built: a party structure subordinated to corporate lobbying, financial interests and Establishment networks. Mandelson personifies this system. A co-founder of Global Counsel, a multimillion-pound lobbying firm, he has spent decades circulating between ministerial positions, corporate consultancies and informal power brokering. He has been twice forced to resign from Cabinet for ethical breaches.

His relationship with Epstein exemplifies the “gilded circle” Corbyn described in Parliament — the web of contacts spanning business, politics and media where “favours were done and contracts were apparently awarded.”

The revolving door between government and corporate boardrooms, the normalisation of lobbying as governance, the protection of Establishment impunity — these are structural features of how class power operates under financialised capitalism. Corbyn’s project threatened to disrupt this arrangement by democratising the party, removing corporate influence, and subordinating Establishment networks to popular control.

The ferocity of the attacks on him reflected not his personal failings but the threat he posed to entrenched interests.

The broader context amplifies this analysis. While 14.2 million people in Britain live in poverty — with 6.8 million in deep poverty at the highest level in over 30 years — Starmer’s government has cut foreign aid to 0.3 per cent of gross national income (GNI) to fund military spending increases to £61.7 billion, with plans to reach 5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on core military spending by 2035, and a total of 5 per cent of GDP. The wealthiest 10 per cent hold 43 per cent of all wealth while the poorest 50 per cent hold just 9 per cent. Food insecurity increased 60 per cent between 2021/22 and 2023/24, and 3.8 million people including one million children now live in destitution.

This is class warfare prosecuted through policy, and the Mandelson appointment demonstrates which class Starmer’s government serves.

For socialists, this moment offers clarity. The corruption now spectacularly exposed is not a moral blemish on an otherwise neutral state apparatus but a structural expression of how ruling-class power reproduces itself.

Patronage, lobbying and revolving doors are the everyday mechanisms through which capital maintains political control.

Attempts to challenge this from within existing parties provoke systematic resistance including character assassination, institutional sabotage and media delegitimisation — precisely because they threaten not just policies but the social relations that underpin class rule.

The attacks on Corbyn were a pre-emptive strike against the kind of politics that could prevent a Mandelson from occupying high office. His exclusion of Mandelson from any role in government was not vindictiveness but recognition that figures embedded in corporate lobbying networks cannot serve popular democratic interests. The restoration of such figures under Starmer represents the completion of a counter-revolutionary project: the reassertion of Establishment control over a party that briefly threatened to escape it.

Corbyn’s intervention refuses the normalisation of corruption, demands institutional accountability, and exposes the continuity between personal scandal and systemic design.

Economic dependence on corporate lobbying, financial sector approval and Establishment networks creates political subordination. The solution is not better vetting procedures but structural transformation: abolition of the House of Lords, banning corporate lobbying, wealth redistribution through progressive taxation, public ownership of key industries, restoration of international aid and redirection of military spending toward social need.

Starmer’s government is now in terminal decline. The polling collapse, the ministerial resignations, the union demands, the Scottish Labour leader’s call for his resignation, and the parliamentary arithmetic all point toward an endgame.

John McDonnell, former shadow chancellor under Corbyn, predicted last September that if Labour kept losing, Starmer would recognise he was not the person for the job and resign. That moment appears to have arrived.

For the left, this creates openings but also dangers. The danger is that Starmer’s replacement will continue the same Establishment-managed politics with better public relations. The opportunity is that the scale of the crisis has delegitimised the entire post-Corbyn settlement. The narrative that the party needed to be “serious” and “electable” by restoring establishment figures has been shattered. The question now is whether a genuine democratic socialist alternative can be rebuilt, or whether Labour will lurch rightward in search of stability.

Corbyn’s intervention matters because it demonstrates what political principle looks like in practice. He is not in power, yet his refusal to compromise with corruption and his demand for accountability resonate precisely because they stand in stark contrast to Starmer’s collapse. 

History is being written now, and it records that the person depicted as dangerous and unfit was the one who maintained integrity, while those who claimed to represent responsible governance have presided over systemic corruption.

Starmer knowingly appointed a man with documented ties to a convicted paedophile and against whom we have evidence of leaking state secrets to Britain’s most important diplomatic post. When exposed, he deflected responsibility onto advisers, only to see his entire senior team resign in succession. His judgement is not merely flawed — it reveals a fundamental alignment with Establishment networks over democratic accountability.

The machinery that destroyed Corbyn’s leadership — the media campaigns, the parliamentary sabotage, the weaponised accusations — operated not to protect Labour’s integrity but to restore Establishment control. The restoration is now complete, and its corruption is on full display. 

While millions suffer deepening poverty, while military spending soars and aid is slashed, while wealth concentrates ever upward, this government has shown its true priorities: protecting the corrupt political-corporate networks that Mandelson represents. This is not governance — it is class rule exercised through patronage and shielded from democratic accountability.

Corbyn’s intervention has opened a space for this truth to be spoken. Britain’s working class faces an internal neocolonialism — formally democratic governance controlled in practice by corporate lobbying, financial interests and an Establishment circulation between state and private sector. The Mandelson appointment is the perfect symbol of this system.

The struggle continues. Starmer’s collapse vindicates the principles Corbyn defended. The task now is to build the movements that can transform those principles into transformative power. As Thomas Sankara declared: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.” The idea that government must serve people, not Establishment networks, cannot be killed. It will outlast Starmer, Mandelson, and every figure who subordinates democracy to class privilege. History is speaking — and it is damning.

Claudia Webbe was previously the UK Member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019 –2024). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.