REALLY it is not all about Peter Mandelson. Nor is it even all about Keir Starmer.

If this week’s drama has an exclusive focus on the Shakespearean denouement of the political career of the perpetually over-ripe Mandelson, or on the woodentop Prime Minister’s zombie-walk towards electoral apocalypse, the real import of the events will be missed.

For this is about the Labour Party, and the last 40-plus years of its history.

In Peter Mandelson is embodied not just its Faustian embrace of neoliberalism, but its eager indulgence of its most rancid expressions, its transition from flawed expression of a workers’ movement to the pliant servant of the global elite, the gothic horrors of which ooze from every line of the Epstein papers.

Mandelson has been the habit that Labour just could not kick; the oligarchic junk in its emaciated veins, all the way from Neil Kinnock to Keir Starmer.

Under Kinnock he was the red rose campaigner who had already discarded his teenage communism because, as he told a comrade, “I am a bourgeois at heart.”

He arrived at Labour marinating in a very bourgeois hatred of trade unionism and of the left in general. Spreading his policy wings after his 1987 campaign yielded scarcely better results than the debacle of 1983, he began to incubate the New Labour bacillus in the party.

Briefly marginalised under John Smith, an old-school Labour rightwinger, he flowered under Tony Blair, who was at once his instrument and his protector. Along with Blair and Gordon Brown he shaped New Labour, discarding not just any residual connection to socialism but the merest smidgeon of radicalism, along with union influence on the party’s counsels.

“Yes, we are embracing capitalism,” he told me in those days — and how.

Twice made a minister and as often dismissed by Blair, invariably because he flew too close to the sun of the super-rich, his weakness became evident — he craved the oligarch’s lifestyle while subsisting on a politician’s income.

Yes, he was “intensely relaxed about the filthy rich,” which will stand forever as the core belief of New Labourism, but he was much less relaxed at not being among their number.

Unlike his cannier Cabinet colleagues, content to serve the capitalists in office in anticipation of ample reward once they had left it, Mandelson could not wait.

He wanted the big house now. He craved the oligarch’s yacht this year, not next.

Yet each sacking was merely the precursor to a further recall. Even Gordon Brown, whose idea of public service and son-of-the-manse austerity could hardly be further from Mandelson, felt the need for his face around the Cabinet table.

He handed him a peerage and a key role in shaping those economic policies he was only too happy to share with his millionaire mate, by then a convicted paedophile.

Thus Britain’s effective deputy premier was also an intimate of the grotesque coterie of the mega-rich, amoral, entitled, still carousing after the bankers’ crash as if it were the last days of Rome, exchanging lubricious banter about the young women whose abuse they were at best indifferent to and at worst complicit in.

Mandelson has been for 30 years the Labour Party’s licensed representative in that milieu, its envoy to the most depraved, dissolute and degenerate sections of a ruling elite losing its internal coherence and governing confidence but entirely unwilling to be pried away from its pleasures.

Jeremy Corbyn had every right to remind the Commons that under his leadership of Labour Mandelson held no sway. Instead he was, in his own words, doing something every day to undermine the elected leadership of his political and moral antithesis in order to make Labour once more safe for the Epsteins of the world.

Yet still Mandelson was not done. Restored to influence under Starmer’s consigliere Morgan McSweeney, he stirred his brew once more. We learn that he was covertly given a role in weeding out left-wing Labour candidates for Parliament from the party’s lists.

This culminated in Starmer, surely prodded by the egregious McSweeney, sending the Prince of Darkness to the heart of the engulfing night, Trump’s Washington.

Inspired, no? As the distillation of plutocratic corruption assumed the US presidency, who better than the man who made Labour the rich man’s plaything to whisper in his ear?

But where was the resistance to this from Labour? Scarcely a murmur of disapprobation greeted each resurrection, a measure perhaps of the success of Mandelson’s transformative project.

And note that five months after his recall from Washington after his chumminess with Epstein became publicly insupportable he was still in a position to resign from Labour, not having been expelled.

Of course it is right for Labour MPs to now say “it is all about the victims” of this squalid network. So it should be.

But we are entitled to say to them — it is also all about you. Many of those now squawking most loudly were hand-picked for their positions by Mandelson and his acolytes. They cheered a leader who excluded Corbyn and enthroned Epstein’s groupie.

Those MPs are no friends of paedophilia, one may assume. But which of this week’s revelations came as a surprise? Did anyone really say “but that seems so out of character”?

And bear in mind that we only know of Mandelson’s leaking of government secrets to Epstein because the latter has twice been subjected to detailed FBI investigation, with results we can now read.

How many other super-rich pals may also benefited from inside information from the then-business secretary at that time of crisis for world capitalism, leaks we may be unaware of because their recipients are not exposed paedophiles? Worth investigating surely.

And will Labour now go cold turkey on its underlying Mandelsonism? That would mean not just removing the traitorous and corrupted Mandelson, his protege McSweeney and their place-man Starmer.

It would require a clearout of, at the very least, the whole Labour Together gang which engineered this scandal for the ages. So farewell, Steve Reed. Bye-bye, Shabana Mahmood. Sayonara, Josh Simons and Alex Barros-Curtis. And maybe it is time to look at the party membership of the member of Trump’s Gaza board, one Tony Blair.

For Mandelson is the symptom, not the disease, which is the 40-year poison of Labour’s service to neoliberalism and imperialism, most recently writ in the blood of the children of Palestine.

It is a long road back and there is no certainty it will be taken. But the necessity of walking that road is the only lesson worth drawing from the fall of Mandelson.