THE government is a busted flush. Each day brings revelations exposing the dishonesty and impropriety of the Starmer gang.

It is hard to see it continuing to function with trust at the top so broken — between ministers and civil servants, and between the Prime Minister and ministers too, Downing Street’s bid to dish out ambassadorships as personal rewards while keeping the Foreign Secretary in the dark being the clearest example.

Trust between government and the people is already gone. MPs wanting to bridge the gulf need to look beyond the shady methods that smoothed Peter Mandelson’s path to Washington and be honest about the politics.

Mandelson’s appointment followed the same logic as the famed instruction from Tony Blair’s chief of staff to then Washington ambassador Christopher Meyer: “Get up the arse of the White House and stay there.”

In the context of the Trump presidency, the court of a vain and crooked mob boss, the qualities that might lead Mandelson to fail a vetting process were the very ones which qualified him for the job: a lifetime of fawning on the super rich.

There was an element of “what Mandelson wants, Mandelson gets,” as John McDonnell put it — his political sway over Starmer was significant. But Starmer no doubt also congratulated himself on having someone who could deal with Trump.

That needs pointing out, not just because appointing paedophile-associates as ambassadors is wrong, but because the decision to fawn on Trump is wrong.

US gangster imperialism is wrecking the planet.

Even Starmer recognises that the bloody chaos unleashed by the unprovoked attack on Iran is a bad thing, though he remains complicit through allowing US use of British bases to prosecute the war.

Trump’s equally illegal attack on Venezuela, involving the massacre of 100 people and the kidnapping of a foreign head of state and his wife, provokes no such unease at No 10. Nor has Starmer responded to considerable parliamentary pressure to condemn Trump’s attempt to starve the Cuban people into submission.

This is all of a piece with Trump’s bid to substitute a corporate-style Board of Peace answering to himself alone for the United Nations, and to dismantle the whole architecture of international law.

They represent a desperate attempt to use US military might to reverse the decline of its global economic power, the rise of China and the global South, and the emergence of a multipolar world in place of a Washington-dominated one.

That project that needs to be opposed in its entirety. Besides the direct destruction resulting from Trump’s wars, it promotes a far-right, often openly racist transformation of our politics and the rejection of the reality of climate change, committing to unrestricted exploitation of remaining fossil fuels for corporate profit whatever the social and environmental cost.

Politicians pretending the rise of China is a greater threat than this nightmare prospectus need telling where to go.

Those who say China is an equally unpalatable rival to the United States should recognise that Beijing’s support for the UN and international law, and its world-leading role in developing renewable and green technologies, are positive contrasts to US policy.

There is a growing political will to distance this country from Donald Trump.

What we are not seeing is acceptance that Trump’s use of violence to assert US supremacy is a continuation, for all its symbolic ruptures, of the policy that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, crimes in which Britain was a partner due to that same determination to “get up the arse of the White House” expressed decades ago.

We do not just need distance from Trump.

We need an end to the US-British alliance responsible for the greatest crimes of the 21st century, an alliance that exists simply to perpetuate an unjust and exploitative world order. We need an independent foreign policy that welcomes multipolarity and the emerging global South.