Prime Minister Keir Starmer avoided a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday evening over whether he misled the House of Commons. (Alamy)

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The House of Commons voted against the move by 335 to 223 on Tuesday night, with a majority of Labour MPs rowing in behind the Prime Minister.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has accused Starmer of misleading Parliament in his claim that due process was fully followed in the appointment of Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US.

The PM has apologised for his decision to appoint the former Labour cabinet minister, but insisted that due process was followed throughout.

Starmer said the vote, which was granted by House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, was a “political stunt” by rival parties ahead of next week’s local elections.

While the majority of Labour MPs sided with the government, a small number on the left of the party voted to refer Starmer to a Privileges Committee investigation.

15 Labour MPs voted for the motion, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell and former Labour leadership candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey.

Another rebel was Emma Lewell, MP for South Shields, who, speaking in the debate before the vote, said it was wrong that government whips had ordered Labour MPs to oppose the motion.

“I have watched this whole sorry saga play out for weeks now,” said Lewell.

“Like the public, I feel let down and disappointed. I am angry. Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed. This was a fundamental failure of judgment.”

Over 50 Labour MPs did not take part in the vote, though some of those will have been granted permission by the government to be elsewhere.

Starmer’s original decision to appoint Mandelson to the senior diplomatic role has put intense pressure on his leadership and resulted in the resignation of Morgan McSweeney as his chief of staff earlier this year.

Appearing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee earlier on Tuesday, McSweeney said Mandelson had withheld information about the true extent of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein before being appointed to Washington, adding that he regrets not asking Whitehall ethics officials to carry out more scrutiny of his appointment.

“How I understood it at the time was a passing acquaintance that he regretted having, and that he apologised for,” he told MPs.

“What has emerged since then was way, way, way worse than I had expected at the time.

“And it was when I saw the pictures, when I saw the [Bloomberg revelations] in September 2025, I have to say it was like a knife through my soul.”

(Tracy Worrall)

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It was meant to be all about the big policy announcement. The next phase of a major programme to lift the poorest communities out of poverty, announced by the PM personally.

It just happened to be the week we learnt about Peter Mandelson’s secret dealings with Jeffrey Epstein during the financial crisis, sparking the gravest political crisis of Keir Starmer’s premiership to date. So, in the end, Pride in Place got very little time or coverage that day, and only one, nominal question at the press conference that followed.

It wasn’t the first time a major policy programme meant to tackle dire, endemic poverty has been eclipsed by a Westminster scandal or the rest of the news agenda.

By the time the successes of the New Deal for Communities programme were being felt, the New Labour government was in a new world of problems. David Cameron’s Big Society vision fizzled out with austerity. Levelling up, announced in March 2021, was soon consumed by partygate. And Rishi Sunak’s Long-Term Plan for Towns only really got going in April 2024, three months before he was out of office.

All, in their own ways, sought transformative change for the poorest communities. All fought the more sensational stories of their days for coverage, to gain the popular traction they needed to pick up true engagement and not fade quietly into the history book of good ideas.

Is the Pride in Place Programme (PiPP) going to be different? Is it any better as a policy? Is it political, a means of staving off Reform in the places it currently thrives?

PiPP dates back to before the election of 2024, a planned major policy of a future Starmer government. It was the administration’s first secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, Angela Rayner, who introduced it – conscious from the start that this wasn’t the first policy of its kind.

Writing in The New Statesman in March 2025, Rayner led with the line that “Labour has learned from the failures of ‘levelling up’”. And she identified one of those failures. “It has to be local communities that decide the future,” Rayner wrote, “and that’s what ‘levelling up’ failed to grasp. Whitehall can’t micromanage our towns and cities.”

Up to £20m of funding per place, spread over 10 years, was set aside for an initial phase-one tranche of 75 towns. To this, a further 169 places were added in phase two, and then on 4 February, at the ill-fated press conference in Hastings, 40 more towns were announced.

A total of 284 places, receiving £5.8bn over 10 years. In the words of current MHCLG Secretary Steve Reed, a “pilot in a new way of governing” that “dwarfs anything that has come before”. Memberships of the first wave of neighbourhood boards have already been confirmed and, from this month, delivery funding will start flowing into local authorities in those areas. The plan is up and running.

Communities are not homogenised, self-organising groups. How do you set up the decision making ability?

But is it a good one? Carola Signori is policy and research officer at the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, and also a consultant for 3ni – the national network for neighbourhood improvement. She says that Pride in Place shows promise, if it continues the local-first approach.

“The community objective is very much there. And I think this is one of the most important things in terms of the goal of this, which is to create capacity in these places, create social capital, create trust, create engagement with the communities.

“That means not just having them being consulted on things, but actually to decide what they think is most needed.”

That’s the idea behind one of the key tenets of the revamped policy. Neighbourhood boards are made up of local residents, community leaders, businesspeople, campaigners, councillors and the MP. Their job: to design unique local 10-year regeneration plans to “revitalise their neglected high streets, create new spaces for young people… to breathe new life into neglected communities”.

Business in the Community has spent years developing programmes to enable the public and private sectors to work together to lift their towns. Its director of place, operations and strategy, Amanda Anderson, sees genuine merit in the principle, but raises questions about the delivery.

She says: “I think the intention is right but there’s a question of how they develop the policy to the boards in these areas. How are you going to get £20m into these places? Communities are not homogenised, self-organising groups. How do you set up the decision making ability for these local communities?

“We believe that we can really only solve complex long-term challenges with genuine collaboration between public and private sectors. We need to support the next generation of community leaders, and not just give more to an already overwhelmed community and voluntary sector. I hope that’s in somebody’s line of sight.”

Certainly, the government claims that it is. An MHCLG spokesperson says: “For too long, high streets across the country have been overlooked and neglected, and vital community assets have fallen into disrepair.

“We’re changing this by investing up to £5.8bn in communities across the country, giving them the freedom to invest in local priorities like buying beloved community spaces and revamping high streets.”

One city councillor on the front line of delivering the funding, to an area badly in need of investment, sees evidence that this freedom has been built into PiPP as a priority.

Councillor Linda Smith is cabinet member for housing and communities at Oxford City Council and representative of the Blackbird Leys ward in Greater Leys, one of the most deprived areas both in the city, and nationally.

She says the inclusion of Greater Leys in phase two of the PiPP is a “welcome boost” to the area, evidenced by the level of local engagement the plan has received.

We need to support the next generation of community leaders, and not just give more to an already overwhelmed community and voluntary sector

“There’s massive potential in this”, she says, as “£2m per year for 10 years in a small geographical area has the potential to make a huge difference”.

“We’ve seen really high levels of interest in the public engagement events we’ve held, at drop-in sessions for residents. I’ve never seen so many people at a community event in Greater Leys, including teenagers from the local youth club.

“If you look at the programme prospectus, there’s a list of things that can be spent on that goes on and on, and is so diverse. Nobody can say that Whitehall is mandating how the money can be spent.”

Perhaps not now, but that has certainly been the case historically. If PiPP is to succeed, Labour will need to keep its local champions on side.

There are some reservations, of course. Breaking down the sums, regeneration experts will tell you that £2m per year will go much further in some places than others.

And different places need different types of funding. Some need money to invest in buildings, others need revenue for services. PiPP guidance, that 70 per cent of funding should be used for capital projects, could be storing up frictions for the future.

As Smith says: “The problem in Greater Leys is not derelict buildings. The council’s made the investment in the bricks and mortar. Where we’ll struggle is to get that revenue funding in place to really make the most of it.

“With more revenue funding, so much more could be happening there.”

And then there’s the politics. The government might not want the programme to look it, but you can’t target a policy, however obliquely, at towns where arch-rival Reform is thriving, without being called political.

Back in February before the barrage of questions about Mandelson came in, the Prime Minister had a stern word for those “exploiting the social scars” of Britain, those “telling you that entire cities and towns, the great communities of this country are ‘wastelands’, ‘no go zones’. I reject that – completely.”

Presenting the final policy paper, in September last year, Reed declared that Pride in Place was about allowing communities to “take back control”, an “answer to those who feel silenced, ignored and forgotten”. And in a candid swipe at Reform, this is Labour’s “alternative to the forces trying to pull us apart”, he claimed.

Can one policy reverse the “geography of discontent” that think tank UK in a Changing Europe believes set the UK on the road to Brexit, or “the politics of grievance” Keir Starmer has pledged to rid from the system? Can Labour convince the silenced and forgotten towns that they, not Reform, offer a hopeful, alternative future?

Much of that is out of their hands. Events dictate history. But for now, at least, the fates of the country’s forgotten places and the government in No 10 appear to be aligned. Pride in Place needs to succeed, both for the people and places who badly need change, and the politicians promising to deliver it. 

Morgan McSweeney appeared before MPs in parliament on Tuesday

4 min read16 min

Speaking on Tuesday, Morgan McSweeney said he initially believed that Mandelson was telling the truth about the extent of his relationship with the paedophile financier ahead of being appointed UK ambassador to the US, but then realised in September 2025 that he “didn’t get the full truth”.

It was in September when Bloomberg published correspondence between the pair that further evidenced the depth of their friendship.

“The nature of the relationship that I understood he had with Epstein was not a close friendship,” said McSweeney, giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

“How I understood it at the time was a passing acquaintance that he regretted having, and that he apologised for.”

He added: “What has emerged since then was way, way, way worse than I had expected at the time.

“And it was when I saw the pictures, when I saw the [Bloomberg revelations] in September 2025, I have to say it was like a knife through my soul.”

He told the committee that he regrets not asking the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team (PET) to probe Mandelson’s appointment more extensively before he was appointed as US ambassador. 

“When I look back on it, I certainly think it would have been much, much better if I’d asked PET  to ask those follow-up questions,” he said.

“My thinking at the time was, if I put follow-up questions to him in writing, and that if a senior member of staff did that, that he would feel more obligated to give the truth and the full truth.”

He also insisted that there was no “improper” pressure put on the Foreign Office by Downing Street while he was there to formalise Mandelson’s appointment.

“There’s a world of difference between saying we want to go quicker and saying we want to be reckless. One is proper. We want things done quickly. The other is wholly improper.

“Nobody in No in 10 ever thought it would be appropriate to skip steps,” he said.

In a rare public appearance, McSweeney gave evidence to the Emily Thornberry-led committee as part of its look at the decision by Prime Minister Keir Starmer to appoint Mandelson as the UK’s most senior diplomat in Washington.

McSweeney, a close ally of Starmer, resigned from his Downing Street role in February amid growing pressure over the decision to appoint the peer despite his links to Epstein.

His appearance also comes ahead of a House of Commons vote later on Tuesday on referring the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee on the question of whether he has misled Parliament about the process by which Mandelson was appointed.

Starmer has apologised for the original decision to appoint Mandelson but insists that due process was followed throughout the process. 

Appearing before the committee earlier this morning, Sir Philip Barton, the former chief civil servant in the Foreign Office, said No 10 had shown an “uninterested” attitude towards Mandelson’s security vetting.

In his opening statement, McSweeney referenced the victims and survivors connected to Epstein’s crimes and apologised to them, adding that they were often forgotten in the middle of political stories and drama. 

“Women and girls were abused, exploited and scarred. They deserved protection then, and they deserve to be remembered now. I am sorry for any part this controversy has played in causing further hurt or distress,” he told MPs. 

He admitted that recommending Mandelson’s appointment was a “serious error of judgement”.

“I advised the Prime Minister in support of that appointment, and I was wrong to do so.”

McSweeney argued that, ultimately, the primary problem in his appointment was that Mandelson withheld key information from Starmer about his relationship with Epstein.

He denied the suggestion that the former cabinet minister was a “hero” and “mentor” to him, explaining that he felt Mandelson’s experience as an EU commissioner made him particularly suited to the task of helping secure a post-Brexit trade deal with the US.

McSweeney also said Mandelson probably would not have been appointed to the role if President Trump had lost the election to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in November 2024, and revealed that the two leading candidates for the role were Mandelson and George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor. 

McSweeney also sought to play down the significance of Mandelson’s influence in the Labour government.

While he admitted that he was in Downing Street during the September cabinet reshuffle and texting him his thoughts, he did not respond, and none of his suggestions ended up happening.

Text messages between the pair will soon be released in the next tranche of files as part of a separate investigation into the Mandelson appointment.