David Timoney

My point is he didn't need to list them. Mandelson would have been aware of unease among many in Israel.

Leaving aside the cynicism on display, this reads more like an address to Labour Party members than Streeting asking Mandelson his opinion. After all, you shouldn't need to explain Haaretz to him. It is also suspiciously free of typos.

An American Reckoning | Ben Rhodes Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis…

Vietnam "betrayed a fatal blind spot within American liberalism, a devaluation of human life itself: the belief that a cohort of enlightened people could manage an empire while casting themselves as democrats."
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

This Charming Man Mandelson is the British political system incarnate: bitchy, anti-intellectual, venal.

"The recent emphasis on Keir Starmer's "decency" might appear odd even if you only had a passing acquaintance with his track record of duplicity and spite, not to mention his readiness to sack others to save his own skin." More ...
fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/02/this...

Some politicians cannot help repeatedly stepping on rakes. Others have rakes thrust upon them.

Interesting to compare Nesrine Malik's fiery denunciation in the Guardian of the contempt that motivates the powerful with John Harris's latest Eeyorish bleat about the ignorance of the electorate.

A Farewell to Morgan McSweeney What a fantastic week. Peter Mandelson toasted to charcoal, the government being forced to make public all communications about him, the pos...

I think this is correct that the end of Mandelson and McSweeney really marks the terminal decline of the Labour Party, a death long foretold. The political debate now is what might arise from the wreckage.
averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-fa...

Pretty obviously AI, but still funny.

I barely knew the bloke ...

No, it did not. They junked it at the earliest opportunity.

I'd be more inclined to indulge commentators claiming "the game's gone" if they didn't also insist that getting a lucky penalty late in the game means "the title race is back on", as if we were already in May. The tedious narrative is a worse blight on football than pedantic VAR.

If you ignore the press hagiographies of the last 2 years, McSweeney's record as an election wizard is poor, e.g. Liz Kendall's leadership bid in 2015. He (and Starmer) won in 2020 on a false prospectus & massive media support and got lucky in 2024 due to Tory dysfunction.

The large number of seats captured in 2024 was the result of a split on the right. Labour's likely challenge in 2029 (or earlier) will be a split on the left. As this may go at least 3 ways in most constituencies, we may see some seats captured by a right party on less than a 3rd of the vote.

McSweeney & Starmer didn't initially reposition Labour. The proposition in 2020 was Corbynism without Corbyn. The junking of the promises on which Starmer became Leader led to flatlining support. What boosted Labour in 2022 was the Truss debacle. Btw 2019 & 2024, Labour support went up by < 2%.

McSweeney will obviously be given another party job, from which he'll probably then have to resign as well. Give it a few more years after that, and he'll be in the Lords. That's the Labour way.

Lords reform to be tackled by new group of MPs After The Observer raised the alarm, a new group aims to address filibustering and how to strip disgraced peers of their titles more quickly

"Wholesale reform" you say? Maybe it's time for something a little more radical, like abolition, but that would raise questions about the wider political system, so perhaps more tinkering would be for the best.
observer.co.uk/news/politic...

This Charming Man Mandelson is the British political system incarnate: bitchy, anti-intellectual, venal.

New Blogpost: This Charming Man - British politics has been reduced to a debate over whether Mandelson was simply a wong 'un, or whether he is the symptom of a rotten system. The press favour one view, the general public the other. More ...
fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/02/this...

Not while Rafael Behr and Polly Toynbee are still there.

But Malik errs in suggesting that the difference between corruption and payoffs is a matter of timing. If we learnt one thing from the expenses scandal last year, it is that Labour politicians believe they are entitled to cash and favours. The party has a culture of cupidity.

Malik does at least hint that Sir Tony's hands might not be entirely clean. While I doubt the then-PM was stupid enough to engage in insider-dealing, he has never shied away from accepting the generosity of the rich since leaving office (his net worth is estimated to be ~£50m).

An interesting difference of perspective between Andrew Rawnsley and Kenan Malik in today's Observer. The former answers the question we've all been asking: why hasn't Tony Blair made one of his "rare interventions"?

Get a grip, Labour donors warn Starmer | The Observer PM under pressure to replace Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff who paved his way to Downing Street

That this report opens with the opinions of the nameless rich tells you all you need to know about British politics today. That it ends with Pat McFadden decrying the popular belief that politicians are "in it for their own enrichment" is too on the nose.
observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Lol.

This article offers no real analysis and advocates nothing beyond stealing the new right's clothes. Thus it ends: "there is still a chance that the political centre can reinvent itself as the real defenders of national sovereignty". Lessons are determinedly not being learned.

The irony is that "national populism" has arisen because of the historic success of anti-communism and the delegitimisation of socialism & internationalism. This has been facilitated by the political centre, both by legitimising bigotry and promoting narrow national interest.

The biggest threat facing Europe is not a Trump invasion. It’s his global political revolution | Mark Leonard I am convinced that Europe’s ‘new right’ is a radically contemporary movement. Defeating it means understanding its critique of liberalism, says Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relatio...

Anti-communism was a product of the political centre, not the old right, so it's no surprise that it is now being recycled as an analytical framework for the new right, "a movement that is, to varying degrees, now being reinforced by a foreign power".
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"I've had a lot of bad luck!"', i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a Jilly Cooper character

Lol. Rayner should explicitly run on a platform of implementing the 2024 manifesto.

It’s tragic that a decent PM will be brought down by Mandelson’s sleaze – but it’s a matter of when, not if | Polly Toynbee With three years left and a huge majority, Labour can govern with more humility and deliver real change. But with Starmer at the helm? I can’t see it, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee

"I still don’t understand the reason for this level of public dislike for a good and serious man". I rmember Polly once published a book, 'Hard Work', in which she did a load of low-paid jobs far better than the one she now gets a handsome salary for.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Maybe, but why does politics select for people without a moral compass that the rest of us could identify with?