The Epstein Files revealed that Labour Party consigliere Peter Mandelson was in regular contact with Jeffrey Epstein and that, as Business Secretary under Gordon Brown in 2009, he shared British state secrets with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. This political scandal, now known as The Mandelson Affair, is Britain’s biggest in more than 60 years. It has brought the credibility of the already unpopular Prime Minister Keir Starmer into question and may yet bring him down.

More important than the salacious details of Mandelson’s misconduct, which likely reach the threshold for treason, are the political consequences. The resulting weakening of Starmer’s government means that his relatively moderate faction within Labour will lose ground, and the balance of power will lurch to the left.

The British Labour Party has three factions: the hard left, the soft left, and the right. The hard left, or “militant tendency” represented by Jeremy Corbyn, has been purged and sidelined. This faction is avowedly socialist, comprising grassroots Marxist, anti-war, and pro-Palestine activists. While it no longer wields much power within the party, it remains vocal and somewhat popular. Corbyn failed to establish a new party with fellow pro-Palestinian socialist and former Labour MP Zarah Sultana due to infighting and a lack of organization. Thus, a third-party alternative to Labour, the Green Party, has swooped in to capture the anti-establishment energy on the left. The Greens have consistently polled around 15 percent, while Labour is at a mere 19 percent—a shocking drop for a government still in its first 18 months. 

The right faction within the Labour Party is represented by former Prime Minister Tony Blair and “Blue Labour.” The Blairites are the business-friendly neoliberal center, tremendously powerful in a top-down organizational sense, but not at all popular with Labour’s base. The basic Blairite message is that Labour cannot win elections by being left-wing, so they must pretend to be right-wing. 

The key policy ideas of the Blairites are: fiscal conservatism overseen by regulatory agencies stuffed with Blairite bureaucrats; private-public partnerships that outsource key state functions to multinational corporations; evangelism for the integration of digital ID, surveillance, and AI into every imaginable part of life; “patriotism,” by which they mean pretending not to be woke, pretending to love the Union flag, and saying “the British people” a lot; tough talk but little action on crime and immigration; and pathological support for every neoconservative war project.

While many on both the right and left despise Blair, he has been a moderating force within the Labour Party, and Mandelson has been one of his chief operators. Mandelson’s protégé is Morgan McSweeney, who, until the Epstein scandal  forced his Feb. 8 resignation, was Starmer’s chief of staff and the beating heart of “Blue Labour.” Visibly shaking during the last Prime Minister’s Questions session in Parliament, Starmer refused to resign but threw McSweeney under the bus and with him, seemingly, the entire Blairite grip on the party.

McSweeney served as a dam against a torrent of left-wing madness. One can imagine the 400 Labour MPs in Parliament as a pack of rabid dogs with Woke Tourette’s, all desperate to howl their undying love for Black Lives Matter, their inability to tell men from women, their belief that immigrants are the only thing that makes Britain great, and so on. Now imagine McSweeney whipping them back into their cages, shouting, “Repeat: ‘I love this country!’ ‘I proudly fly the flag!’ ‘Immigration must be reduced!’”

Labour’s soft left is represented by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and forms an internal bulwark against the Blairites. While Blairism has dominated the elite layer, the party itself is overwhelmingly “soft left.” This faction is more comfortable with “big government” and welfare, more openly progressive, and more obsessed with “Net Zero” policies. Where the Blairite always worries about the threat from the right (presently Nigel Farage’s Reform Party), the soft left is more concerned about the threat from the left (presently the Green Party). For the soft left, the Blairites have pretended to be right-wing so much that they have basically become conservative and “lost sight of core Labour values.” 

On the same day McSweeney resigned, Starmer gave an impassioned speech to Labour MPs, saying he is “not prepared to walk away.” Miraculously, despite Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s call for Starmer to resign, the entire party rallied behind the prime minister. What seems to have happened is a kind of double ransom: Starmer agreed not to call an immediate general election (which would wipe Labour out) and the “soft left” agreed to back him. As part of this deal, it seems Starmer has agreed to drop all the “Blue Labour” rhetoric, which means being more straightforwardly left-wing and dropping the patriotic pretense.

Recently, Sir James Ratcliffe, the billionaire co-owner of Manchester United, said the “UK has been colonized by immigrants.” A few months ago, Starmer would not have commented on this at all, but the new Starmer, who has just remembered he’s left-wing, immediately demanded Ratcliffe apologize, and did not temper his demand by saying that he understands the public’s concern about immigration. The next election is not scheduled until 2029; the soft left can do extraordinary damage between now and then. ◆

(This column will appear in the March 2026 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture)