THE Keir Starmer government is swimming in mud, to use a more polite and less scatological metaphor. Curiously, they show no inclination to head for shore. Mired equally in delusion, they insist on slogging onward into ever deeper sludge.

This is a government that cannot bear to lose, even though losing appears to be the one thing they are spectacularly good at. Instead, Starmer keeps steering his ship into one iceberg after another.

This government is desperate, and what it is most desperate for now is a win, any kind of win. The ostracising of Peter Mandelson and the far too belated departure of his Svengali successor, Morgan McSweeney, are too little too late. Starmer’s Titanic is portside up and ready to capsize. It’s just a matter of time before it disappears beneath the waves.

Starmer clearly knew of Mandelson’s reputation, including his two previous resignations from government positions. And yet, he chose him for the plum US ambassadorial role anyway. Last year, during a visit here to Washington DC, plucking a leaf from the “boys will be boys” playbook, Starmer even joked of Mandelson: “Many people love him. Others love to hate him. But to us, he’s just Peter.”

That’s the same “just Peter” who had failed to disclose a £373,000 “loan” from fellow MP Geoffrey Robinson to purchase a home. It’s the same “just Peter” who didn’t spot an extra £55,000 landing in his bank account from convicted paedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. How stinking rich do you have to be not to notice that kind of bump in your bank balance?

It’s also the same “just Peter” who caused then prime minister Tony Blair to worry in 1999 that Mandelson’s feud with Gordon Brown would cause the party to become “casualties of some titanic but ultimately irrelevant personality feud.” What an apt choice of imagery. Prescient really.

While McSweeney was still quietly at the helm of a vessel where power and plotting were paramount and policy-making secondary, any new captain who might indeed have saved the sinking Labour ship was summarily thrown overboard. Andy Burnham and the Gorton and Denton by-election spring to mind. For Labour, that ship may now have sailed. Bookies are rating a Labour victory there at 9/1, with the Green Party candidate the favourite (not, in itself, a bad outcome.)

Blocking Burnham wasn’t such a great surprise given that control has been the driving force for Starmer and his allies from the start. After all, it was they who formed the piratical cabal that forced former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to walk the plank, even though Corbyn had more than doubled party membership during his four-and-a-half-year tenure, from 200,000 in early 2015 to more than 560,000 by 2018. Current membership numbers under Starmer have plummeted back into the 200,000s.

None of this abated once Starmer duly became party leader and then prime minister. There would be absolute fealty or the whip would be withdrawn, including for opposing Labour policies that his own Cabinet later reversed.

For example, in July 2024, seven Labour MPs were suspended for six months for breaking with the party and voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, something Chancellor Rachel Reeves eventually did anyway. Reeves then had the gall to crow about how it was “not right that children in bigger families are penalised through no fault of their own,” exactly what her own party members had argued when they were suspended.

When it comes to Gaza, losing has rankled the Starmer government so much they would rather spend fruitless time and taxpayers’ money pursuing futile retribution than attend to the more important matters of state.

Therefore, when a judge refused to prosecute Mo Chara, a member of the Belfast band Kneecap, who was charged under the UK Terrorism Act for allegedly lofting a Hezbollah flag during a November 2024 concert, the government announced it would try to revive the charge and have another go.

And when the first six of the Filton 24 Palestine Action activists were all acquitted or not convicted under the revised Terrorism Act that proscribed their own organisation, the government said it would consider a retrial.

All of these behaviours smack of a petty vindictiveness that should be entirely beneath the dignity of a sitting government. But Starmer and his acolytes dispensed with dignity long ago and are hungry only for absolute power.

Perhaps the Epstein scandal really has swallowed the deknighted Mandelson whole and taken down “just Morgan” with him. But the person who really needs to jump into the lifeboat is Starmer. Send up a flare, Keir, and get going.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Her book, No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, will be published by Pluto Press in March.