Starmer – 1: MPs – 0

Tuesday blog

I’m embarrassed to say that I watched (IMHO) slimey sleazeball Starmer’s weasel-worded squirming in the Commons yesterday over what he knew and (claimed) he didn’t know about the Mandelson security vetting debacle.

I hate to say it, but I thought (IMHO) Slimeball Starmer did a pretty good job. Let me briefly explain why.

There are many models of decision-making. A very basic one is that with any decision there is the process and the context. To give a stupid example: The captain of an oil tanker may decide to sail through the Strait of Hormuz and his ship gets sunk by the Americans or the Islamists. The captain could say that he followed the process – he sailed at the right speed, he stayed in the correct shipping lane and so on. However, the context was that there was a not insignificant war going on so it wasn’t so smart to sail there at that time.

What Starmer did brilliantly (IMHO) was bore MPs to tears with an excruciatingly detailed description of the process which was followed during the Mandelson appointment while totally avoiding the context. The process consisted of all the detailed discussions and letters and memos and suchlike. This bogged down his critics so that many MPs’ questions ended up being what the Finns call – “point fucking” – banging on and on about small details while totally missing the main issue.

The main issue was the context – namely Mandelson’s history of what some cynics might consider to be rather dodgy dealings:

• being forced to resign twice from government
• the extraordinary coincidence of the EU cutting tariffs on Russian aluminium at the same time as Mandelson was EU Trade Commissioner and friendly with a Russian aluminium billionaire
• Petey Mandelson allegedly (but not proven) sharing confidential details of government policy with one or more of his banking chums
• the main and possibly most lucrative clients of Mandelson’s advisory business being close to the Chinese Communist Party and jolly Mr Putin’s Russian regime
• and, of course, Mandelson’s ‘friendship’ with billionaire that nice Mr Epstein

Pattern Recognition is a process in which we use multiple senses in order to make decisions. As we go through our day, our brain’s pattern recognition abilities help us recognise certain objects and situations. Without these abilities, it would be impossible to make progress, as we’d be living in a kind of Groundhog Day, where everything we encounter would appear completely new, over and over, and would therefore need to be learned and understood each time.

With Mandelson even the most modest use of Pattern Recognition would have screamed that Mandelson was a wrong ‘un. The adorable Diane Abbott was the MP who came closest to asking how on earth Starmer could have seriously considered making someone with Mandelson’s back story Britain’s ambassador to the USA. But every time an MP got near to this issue, Starmer just batted it away by saying something like “I made the wrong decision and I apologise for that“. Unfortunately no MP tried to probe the question as to why Starmer even considered Mandelson and whether someone (Monsieur Blair, par exemple?) told Starmer to appoint Mandelson. This would have been a much more interesting line of questioning.

So, by taking on his enemies on ground where he was strongest – boring detail after detail after detail of the process followed, pedantic lawyer Starmer managed to drag his critics into a kind of ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ kind of argument. Moreover, by claiming he had now changed the process of appointing and vetting ambassadors, Starmer had already disarmed most of his critics.

Conclusion: Britain’s worst ever prime minister lives on and, by focusing only on the details of the process rather than the context, has dumbfounded all those who claimed he would have to resign.