THE deluge of files on Peter Mandelson dumped on Westminster today bring a stench of corruption that puts the Scottish National Party’s woes in perspective.

That is not to say the Peter Murrell scandal is unimportant, or to indulge Nicola Sturgeon’s unconvincing innocent victim act.

Whether or not we buy her claims never to have noticed the luxury goods appearing in her house, a string of resignations from the SNP’s finance and audit committee in 2021 showed questions were being asked — and footage of the then first minister warning party officers to be “very careful” about suggesting there were “any problems” with SNP book-keeping suggest she was deliberately deterring scrutiny.

The sense that politicians are on the take, and think rules only apply to little people, corrodes trust. It’s a major driver of the collapse in support for established parties — though sadly the biggest beneficiary of that currently, Reform UK, is as awash with dodgy money as any of them.

Murrell’s embezzlement of party funds is a betrayal of SNP members.

It differs in detail from former Welsh first minister Vaughan Gething’s leadership campaign accepting £200,000 from the owner of a firm being investigated for environmental offences, or indeed from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s acceptance of over £100,000 of freebies, including designer suits and glasses, from Lord Waheed Alli within weeks of entering Downing Street.

But it gives a similar impression, and could be serious for the SNP. Though it was an incumbent and Starmer-Labour an opposition, its election shows some similarities with his: a win secured by the unpopularity of others, on a reduced vote.

Starmer confirmed everybody’s suspicions that his was a party without principle by immediately using high office to obtain personal benefits; an unenthusiastic public became decidedly hostile, and remains so. Welsh Labour had, until Gething, been able to sell itself as purer and truer to its roots than the British party; since his brief spell in office its support nosedived.

These cases were not criminal but arguably more serious than Murrell’s, since those in receipt of favours are then beholden to donors likely to expect repayment in kind through policy or procurement decisions.

This is the core corruption problem in British politics. It is pervasive, from the retired generals and ex-defence secretaries demanding increased military spending while in the pay of arms companies, to the industry-captured regulators letting energy and water bosses fleece the public, to the private healthcare interests lavishing money on pliant MPs with the future of our NHS in their hands.

Which brings us back to Mandelson. MPs will ponder over a thousand pages relating to his appointment as ambassador to Washington: the second-largest document ever put before the Commons, after the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war.

But we already know what we need to. Mandelson embodies the perversion of public office to private interest.

Leaking the planned sale of British assets to a US financier while a minister was wrong whether or not he knew the financier was a paedophile. Partying — alongside top Tory George Osborne — on Russian aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska’s yacht before lowering EU aluminium tariffs as trade commissioner was, well, suspicious. But par for the course.

The cancer has not been cut out. Unison is right to demand US tech firm Palantir be excluded from developing the new NHS database: but this firm has snapped up lucrative contracts across multiple state sectors since Mandelson — of whose Global Counsel firm Palantir was a client — used his ambassadorial role to arrange a private meeting between Starmer and its founder Peter Thiel.

Agonising over who read which documents when is a distraction. Cleaning up politics means stopping the revolving door between state and private sector, cutting opportunities for corruption by nationalising services and insourcing delivery — and cancelling every contract linked to the baleful influence of Peter Mandelson.

Starting with Palantir.