If I were a Labour strategist, ‘apprehension’ would be the mildest word in my vocabulary, with ‘Mandelson’ the most bitterly expressed

Martin Shipton

As if Welsh Labour wasn’t in enough trouble, the Peter Mandelson scandal has come along to make matters that much worse.

And yet it would be wrong to suggest that the party in Wales is merely an inadvertent victim of events it has nothing to do with.

I first heard Mandelson’s name mentioned in the context of Wales around 30 years ago, when Rhodri Morgan mentioned to me that he and Ron Davies were convinced that the so-called Prince of Darkness was trying to persuade Tony Blair to dump them from the Commons front bench and replace them with Kim Howells.

At the time Davies and Morgan were respectively the Shadow Secretary of State for Wales and the Shadow Welsh Office Minister. I was working for Wales on Sunday at the time and would have a phone conversation with Morgan every Saturday morning to pick up on what might make a story for the paper. It was important to have something fresh that hadn’t been covered by the Western Mail and other news outlets during the week.

On one particular Saturday morning Morgan was anxious to tell me about what he rightly considered to be the conniving behaviour of Mandelson, who didn’t think the Cardiff West MP treated him with sufficient deference.

I remember Morgan speculating about what motivated Mandelson and his allies in the “New Labour” project. Was it ideologically driven or maybe it was based on the exercise of power.

Eventually Morgan came to the conclusion that it was driven by the desire for monetary gain. Events over the years have suggested he was right, and the final proof emerged this week with confirmation of large sums paid by Jeffrey Epstein to Mandelson and his husband. If a link is established between the money and the provision of secret Cabinet information to Epstein, Mandelson is likely to be in very serious trouble indeed. Someone who was once seen as a Machiavellian nuisance will become – and may even be already – an existential threat to the survival of the party.

However the criminal investigation plays out, the implications of the scandal for the Labour Party, including Welsh Labour, cannot be overestimated.

The man who engineered Starmer’s general election victory in 2024, and is now his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is a protégé of Mandelson’s, and stories are seeping out about Mandelson’s influence over McSweeney’s right wing Labour Together group, supposedly a think tank but also, it is emerging, a vehicle for funds used to spy on journalists, not to mention McSweeney’s failure to declare donations of £730,000 to it.

Welsh Labour MPs including Chris Elmore (£10k) and Nick Thomas-Symonds (£35k) received donations from Labour Together, at whose fundraising events Mandelson was sometimes a speaker. Their receipt of the money, used to employ research staff, may have been innocent, but they are inevitably tainted by association with a man who not only prolonged his friendship with Epstein following his conviction for sex trafficking, but saw nothing wrong in doing so.

Smoking gun

What’s inescapably bad for Labour is the knowledge that what has come to light in the last few days has only done so because of the mass release in the United States of documents from the Epstein files that have simultaneously provided a smoking gun and a silver bullet. One is left wondering what other incriminating material may emerge in the coming weeks, months and years.

The downfall of Mandelson could easily come to symbolise the downfall of the Labour Party as a whole. Its polling performance is precarious, and worryingly for the party in Wales at a lower ebb here than in Britain as a whole. Given the hegemony that Welsh Labour has enjoyed for so long, the decline is that much more cataclysmic.

And the more one delves into what has gone on inside the Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership, the more disturbing the picture becomes. For many on the left, deselection and exclusion from candidates’ shortlists have become the order of the day, often engineered without a thought for due process or natural justice. This has been deeply upsetting for many principled people who decided to join the party in the first place because they saw it as a vehicle through which a fairer society could be delivered.

Eluned Morgan’s mission to project the redeeming concept of a “red Welsh way” is flailing as her representations to Starmer are batted away within days of being articulated. Instead of two governments of the same party working together for the betterment of Wales, we have an unbalanced relationship in which Westminster Labour imposes muscular unionism with just as much vehemence as its Tory predecessor.

Snubbed

The spectacle of Eluned Morgan being constantly snubbed is unedifying. Her frustration sometimes gets the better of her, as it did the other day when she told people they should help the hospitality industry by getting off Netflix and going to the pub. Needless to say this went down badly, with a flurry of people on social media saying they couldn’t afford to go to the pub or take out a subscription to Netflix because of the cost-of-living crisis that has not been fixed by Labour.

In the normal course of events, such a careless throwaway remark would get some brief attention and then be largely forgotten. But in current circumstances it is likely to be amplified as a symbol of the First Minister’s inability to connect with the voting public. There’s a sense anyway that she knows she’s fighting what could easily prove to be a losing battle to retain her Senedd seat.

Where does the future lie for Labour in Wales if its Senedd group is reduced to a small rump after the election? None of the options are appealing.

They could become a junior partner of coalition, although history shows that such a status is unlikely to lead to a revival at the subsequent election. It could strike some sort of cooperation agreement short of a coalition with Plaid Cymru, if the numbers are right. Or it could opt to go into lonely and obscure opposition, supporting a minority government on a vote-by-vote basis.

It’s easy to forget how swift has been the decline in support for Labour. With consistent leads while Mark Drakeford was the party leader and First Minister a couple of years ago, the party’s support in YouGov polls slipped to 30% in June 2024 when Vaughan Gething was clinging on, to 27% in July 2024, 23% in November 2024, 18% in April 2025, 14% in September 2025, 10% in December 2025 and 10% again in January 2026.

So far, there are no real signs of revival as the Senedd election looms ever closer. If I were a Labour strategist, “apprehension” would be the mildest word in my vocabulary, with “Mandelson” the most bitterly expressed.