Brown: Starmer a man of integrity but faces serious task amid leadership speculation
As speculation over Starmer’s future as prime minister continues, Brown has come to his defence, saying he is “a man of integrity”.
But he acknowledged that Starmer is facing a “serious” battle to keep his job.
“I mean, there’s always speculation. It happened to me, it happened to Tony Blair. It happens to everybody about how their future should be gauged,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“But this is serious, and the task is very clear. The task is we’ve got to clean up the system, a total clean-up of the system, an end to the corruption and unethical behaviour. And if we don’t do it, we’ll pay a heavy price.”
When asked if Starmer was the right man to take the country forward, he said: “I can look in his eyes and I can see that he is a man of integrity. He wants to do the right things.
“Perhaps he’s been too slow to do the right things, but he must do the right things now, and let’s judge what he does, on what happens in the next few months when he tries to, and I believe (he) will try, to clean up the system.”
Key events
There is a systemic failure to do proper vetting in government, says Gordon Brown
Former prime minister Gordon Brown said there was a “systemic failure’ in the way senior appointments are carried out in government.
While he believed Starmer was “misled and he was betrayed” by Mandelson when appointing him as US ambassador, he said that it was “not sufficient explanation for what happened”.
“There is a systemic failure to do proper vetting, to go through the proper procedures and to actually have, in my view, what should be public hearings for anybody who is going to be in a senior position representing the British government,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Writing in the Guardian, Brown said he “greatly regrets” making Mandelson a peer and bringing him back into government in 2008 as business secretary. He said he was told at the time that Mandelson’s record as EU trade commissioner had been “unblemished” and he did not know about any Epstein links.
“No one could say I promoted him out of favouritism,” he wrote. “I did so in spite of him being anything but a friend to me, because I thought that his unquestioned knowledge of Europe and beyond could help us as we dealt with the global financial crisis.
“I now know that I was wrong.”
You can read Brown’s opinion piece in full here:
PM says ‘significant volume of material’ needs reviewing before Mandelson documents can be released
Good morning and welcome to our UK politics blog.
Prime minister Keir Starmer has said a “very significant volume of material” related to his appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US will need to be reviewed before any documents can be released.
Starmer believes the documents will prove Mandelson lied about the extent of his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during the vetting process before he was given the top diplomatic job in Washington last year.
The prime minister had previously said he wanted to release the documents sooner and raise it at PMQs but was advised by police that doing so could risk prejudicing a future investigation or legal process.
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), a cross-party group of MPs and peers with access to highly sensitive information, will play a role in sifting through the emails, messages and documents, which could number in the tens of thousands, before they are released into the public domain.
Starmer wrote a letter to Lord Beamish, the chairman of the ISC, saying: “It is important that documents are made available to parliament as soon as possible, noting that there is likely to be a very significant volume of material that will need to be reviewed to establish whether it is in scope.”
It has done little to quell the anger among Labour MPs over his handling of the scandal, with some publicly suggesting the prime minister should consider his position, while also calling for him to sack his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who was instrumental in the decision to appoint Mandelson as US ambassador.
Meanwhile, Scotland Yard said enquiries were ongoing after police searched two properties connected to Mandelson as part of an investigation into claims that he passed market-sensitive information to Epstein.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown has said he “greatly regrets” making Mandelson a peer and appointing him to a ministerial role in 2008. Writing in the Guardian, Brown said the news that Mandelson was passing information to Epstein while he was business secretary was “a betrayal of everything we stand for as a country”.
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