Comment: How did the Prime Minister miss the warning signs about Mandelson?

The long-awaited papers, published yesterday, show that the Government's own ethics advisor had warned the Sir Keir Starmer's team that Mandelson had 'a particularly close relationship', and his appointment as ambassador to the US posed a 'general reputational risk'.

A vetting file on the Labour grandee said Epstein’s personal records showed that Mandelson remained in close contact with the disgraced financier long after his 2008 conviction, even to the point that he stayed at Epstein's house in June 2009.

The relationship continued “across 2009-2011”, including the time when Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown's government.

Sir Keir Starmer says he was not aware of the extent of Mandelson's relationship with Epstein. But even taking the Prime Minister at his word, it surely raises serious questions about his judgement.

It seems hard to imagine that eyebrows would not have been raised in the corridors of power about a senior government minister staying at the home of a convicted paedophile while he was serving a jail term. Sir Keir will no doubt say that he was not in parliament at that time, but surely even the most cursory investigation into Lord Mandelson's background would have uncovered this information?

And what is the point of having a Cabinet Office Propriety and Ethics team if the Prime Minister makes such a high-profile appointment without familiarising himself with its advice? It's not as if the warning signs were not there: Lord Mandelson's two previous resignations from government should surely have set alarm bells ringing.

The most charitable explanation is that the Prime Minister was so anxious to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump that he overlooked the normal due diligence to appoint the man he believed could build bridges with the US President. 

That haste has now rebounded on an already beleaguered Prime Minister, and it seems unlikely this controversy is likely to go away soon.

In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer built up a reputation for forensically tearing apart for Boris Johnson for his sloppy, careless approach to parliamentary ethics and probity, but it now seems that he is guilty of just the sort of carelessness that brought about the downfall of his predecessor.

It is perhaps too early to speculate whether the affair will bring down Sir Keir in the brutal way that Mr Johnson was defenestrated. But with the police investigation yet to be concluded, this is one bad smell that shows no signs of disappearing.