THERE was a moment of clarity in the House of Commons today regarding the decay of the government and the Labour Party.

No, it did not come in former Downing Street head honcho Morgan McSweeney’s evidence to the foreign affairs committee. To no-one’s surprise he spent his time feigning injured innocence over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington while playing down his career-long association with Labour’s “prince of darkness.”

The clarity was offered by Labour MP for South Shields Emma Lewell, the first Labour MP to speak in the debate over whether Keir Starmer should be referred to the Commons privileges committee for misleading Parliament.

The charge is that he was wrong to claim the “full due process” had been followed at every stage in the Mandelson appointment. There appears at very least to be a case to answer.

Government whips had dismissed the debate as a “political stunt” and directed MPs to vote against the Tory motion, in contrast to the Conservatives who did not whip their MPs when Starmer tabled a similar motion against Boris Johnson over the “partygate” scandal in 2022.

Lewell was a model of moral rigour. She said: “I have watched this whole sorry saga play out for weeks now, like the public, I feel let down, disappointed and I am angry. 

“Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed. This was a fundamental failure of judgment. Matthew Doyle should never have been given a peerage. This was also a failure of judgment.

“I feel the way that today’s vote has been handled by the government smacks, once again, of being out of touch and disconnected from the public mood.”

She added: “The fact that MPs like me are being whipped into voting against this motion is wrong — it has played into the terrible narrative that there is something to hide, and good, decent colleagues will be accused of being complicit in a cover-up.”

And, indeed, all Labour MPs who voted against the Tory motion will now be damned for collusion in the disgrace of appointing a multiply dismissed and apparently mendacious friend of a wealthy paedophile to the most important diplomatic posting.

It will damn their reputations still further on the doorstep. But what will Starmer care for that? His only interest is now self-preservation.

He has already thrown multiple aides and civil servants to the wolves while refusing to take any personal responsibility for the disastrous Mandelson episode. 

As independent MP Shockat Adam quipped last week, the Prime Minister “will run out of buses before he runs out of people to throw under them.”

It is a further example of how Starmer is destroying the Labour Party. “Country before party,” he used to piously intone. Myself before either has proved the practice.

He has no thought for the thousands of Labour candidates struggling in the face of voter hostility before next week’s elections.  Forcing Labour MPs to vote to block scrutiny of his conduct — and that is all the motion amounted to — will still further reduce their chances of winning.

Starmer is already arraigned in the court of public opinion as dishonest, disloyal and dysfunctional. It is only the Emma Lewells who can rescue the Labour Party from the pit of moral obloquy into which the Prime Minister, McSweeney and Mandelson have plunged it.

And that will take more than stirring speeches in the Commons. It demands action to prise Starmer out of Downing Street, change the party leadership and, most importantly, shift government policy towards serious, radical working-class change. 

Anything less means simply prolonging a death agony.