The second tranche of documents related to Mandelson’s appointment were published on Monday (Alamy)

4 min read11 min

On Monday afternoon, the government published the second tranche of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment and tenure as UK ambassador to Washington. 

The files, which number more than 1,000 pages, show that Mandelson said that Starmer is “consistently going for direction B” in a July 2025 exchange of messages with  Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Pat McFadden, who was then chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. 

In the messages, Mandelson told McFadden: “I went in to No 10 after I saw you. It is beleaguered and bereft. It requires complete revamp and infusion of purpose and confidence to get anywhere.”

While discussing staff in No 10, Mandelson suggested the team around Starmer “are not led and none of them really know what Keir thinks or wants. In fact most of them don’t think Keir knows what he wants”.

Mandelson was sacked from his role as UK ambassador to Washington in September 2025 after new details came to light about his relationship with the paedophile financier Jeffery Epstein. The former Labour peer later resigned from the House of Lords, with the government committing to removing his peerage.

Starmer later accused Mandelson of betraying the country and lying to Downing Street about the depth of his relationship with Epstein. The row led to the resignation of Starmer’s chief of staff and long-time ally Morgan McSweeney, and has contributed significantly to Labour MP unrest with Starmer’s leadership.

 Mandelson is currently being investigated by the police over allegations that he leaked confidential government documents to Epstein while he was a minister in the New Labour government. 

In February, the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, tabled a humble address requesting the disclosure of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment and time as ambassador to Washington, with the first publication taking place in March. 

Former Foreign Office permanent secretary Olly Robbins was sacked following reports in April that Mandelson had not cleared the UK Security Vetting (UKSV) procedure for appointment as US ambassador in late January 2025, before starting the role the next month. 

After leaving his position, Robbins accused No 10 of having had a “dismissive approach” to the vetting process. 

Addressing the House of Commons on Monday afternoon, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, told MPs that the publication of the second tranche of documents had cost the Cabinet Office alone over £1m.

The files published on Monday also reveal that Mandelson told then-foreign secretary David Lammy in November 2024, ahead of his appointment, that Lammy would “never regret it” if he were to appoint Mandelson to the role of US ambassador. 

Following the local elections in 2025, in which Reform UK made major gains, the files show McFadden asked Mandelson how Labour should fight Nigel Farage’s party, describing the results as “a shellacking”.

Mandelson suggested that Starmer should be more “Trumpian” in his approach.

“The problem is the government doesn’t give a sense of crusading to turn round and change Britain. That’s what I mean by panache, verve,” he messaged.

“It does start right from the top, I am afraid, but you must all contribute more to it by breaking out of the Whitehall system and mould and appearing less like business as usual conventional ministers and, dare I say it, behaving in a more Trumpian risk-taking and dare-devil way.

“At the moment ministers seem to be looking more to the Whitehall machine and the party base than to the public who are crying out for leadership.”

Other disclosures reveal that on the week of the government’s U-turn over winter fuel payments last year, McFadden told Mandelson in WhatsApp messages that the situation “doesn’t feel good for Keir”. Speaking about conversations with Labour MPs, McFadden said: “Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions”.

The government was forced to abandon reforms to the welfare system after large numbers of Labour MPs threatened to inflict what would have been a humiliating defeat on Starmer.

Messages published today also reveal that Mandelson told McFadden that he thought the former health secretary Wes Streeting was having an “early mid-life crisis” after he raised concerns that Israel was “committing war crimes before our eyes”.

10 min read6 min

Lord Grade is a titan of British television. Over four decades as an executive at ITV, the BBC and Channel 4, he greenlit and oversaw some of our most cherished programmes, including the launch of EastEnders and Casualty, the importing of Friends and Neighbours onto UK screens, and the broadcasting of Bob Geldof’s Live Aid concert in 1985.

The 83-year-old peer has re-taken the Tory whip after sitting as a non-affiliated member for the last four years while serving as chair of Ofcom. Appointed to the role under Boris Johnson’s government in 2022, his term concluded in April this year.

But despite his extraordinary career in television, he says that what drew him to the job was not in fact its role regulating the world of broadcasting.

“What interested me about the Ofcom job was I started to worry about online safety,” he says, “and there were the beginnings of talk about a bill coming.”

The Online Safety Act, passed by Rishi Sunak’s administration in 2023, is enforced by Ofcom. Companies in breach of the legislation can be fined up to £18m or 10 per cent of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater.

Ofcom is up against “very powerful companies who have unlimited access to the best legal brains, and will challenge everything we do”, says Grade, who acknowledges concerns that the regulator moves too slowly.

“When you’re regulating, and [despite] the strong powers that Ofcom has, we’re not a star chamber. Its processes have to be fair and defensible in court.”

The legislation, he argues, is just one part of a wider global regulatory effort to which the big tech companies have been forced to respond.

“I’ve got kids and grandkids and they’re on their screens all day long. The tech companies are beginning to wake up to the fact they’ve got to change. The mere fact of the legislation, and Ofcom’s engagement with the big tech companies, has created quite a bit of change – some of it voluntary.”

Grade’s term at Ofcom also began less than a year after the launch of GB News. The regulator is still regularly accused of failing to hold the channel to the same standards of impartiality as other broadcasters. “The same rules apply to GB News as apply to the BBC, Sky, ITN, whoever,” he insists.

 “All news programmes are the result of editorial choices made all along the line. What story are we going to cover? How are we going to cover it? Who do we interview? What are we going to ask them? What are we going to use? Where does it go in the running order?

“Everything’s a choice, all the way up. Because GB News make different editorial choices necessarily on each news day from the BBC, ITN or Sky, doesn’t make it wrong.”

GB News “haven’t always played by the rules”, he admits, but it has been penalised accordingly. He adds: “They’ve actually got better and better. It’s not difficult to comply – sometimes it’s only a sentence in a script.”

Does that mean GB News’ critics should really be angry with how the rules are written, rather than the way Ofcom is enforcing them?

“No, I just think,” he says, before pausing for a moment. “I can now speak [freely], as I’m not at Ofcom. I honestly think they’re embarrassed by the fact that there is a news organisation that has a different news agenda to them, that speaks to the agenda of the majority – if you look at the polls, a large swathe of the voting population, who have no voice on the BBC.

“Immigration, Brexit, these are all issues that don’t get the weight on the BBC, or haven’t been able to, that GB News will give, so what’s the problem?”

To unite that “large swathe” of voters, speaking as a Conservative peer, does he think the Tories and Reform UK should do a deal to win the next election?

“No, I think they’ve got to slug it out to the election,” he says. “If there’s a hung parliament at the end of that, then that’s the time, maybe, for Reform and the Conservatives [to work together]. You can do a confidence and supply agreement, you don’t have to have a coalition – see who’s got most seats.”

Grade is proud of his tenure as a TV executive, his face lighting up as he recalls there being “nothing better than backing a hunch, and the show goes on and it’s beautifully executed, the audience find it and love it, and critics love it”.

His time at London Weekend Television (LWT), a regional franchise of ITV, saw the broadcast of The Fosters in 1976, which featured Lenny Henry in his first regular TV role. It was the first British sitcom to have an all-Black cast, adapted from the American sitcom Good Times.

“What we’re at risk of losing is big drama designed specifically for the British audience”

“Encouraging a lot of Black actors in a lot of shows that we did was a big step forward,” says Grade.

“The critics rounded on it and said, ‘We don’t understand this show – this could have been played by a white family,’ and I said, ‘That’s exactly the point.’ That drove me crazy, but that was great fun.”

Finding TV hits could be the “hardest thing in the world”, he recalls.

“My first boss at LWT, who brought me into television, was the late Cyril Bennett. I said, ‘How do you get a hit, Cyril?’ He said ‘90 per cent luck and 10 per cent accident’,” Grade chuckles.

“You’ve got to know what’s not going to work. You have to know exactly what has got no chance at all – after that, it’s up to the audience. The audience decide what’s a hit and what isn’t.”

As controller of BBC One in the 1980s, Grade almost axed Blackadder after its first series – which had been shot, expensively, on location.

Grade also found it unfunny, so he made the programme’s renewal conditional on its producers moving it into a cheaper studio format, with an audience to react to the jokes.

“Very grumpily, they put it in a studio and the rest is history. You watch the first series – it’s a mess. They [the audience] knew what was funny and what wasn’t funny.”

He made a more committed attempt to kill off Doctor Who, forcing the series to go on an 18-month hiatus and to swap its lead actor from Colin Baker to Sylvester McCoy. Does he expect fans will ever forgive him?

“No, no, no. That show was well past its sell-by date in my time.”

Grade complained that the visual effects were terrible compared to Star Wars and Close Encounters of The Third Kind. He credits Russell T Davies, who resurrected it in 2005, for performing “a miracle with a great brand”.

But he adds: “I have to secretly admit, which I don’t normally admit – I’m not a big fan of sci-fi in any event. I know that’s a blind spot of mine, so I’ve always had to be very careful not to let my own taste intervene.”

Case in point, perhaps, came when he flew out to California to decide which American shows to buy for Channel 4. In a Hollywood screening room, he and his colleagues watched the pilot for a new sci-fi series.

“We all looked at each other and said: ‘This is garbage, it’s hard to stay awake.’ You know, jetlag and everything else… so we turned down The X-Files, which was a big miss.”

Later at Channel 4, the station’s head of comedy presented another pilot episode to him. Grade found it “mindless” and “really stupid in places”, but said to carry on if there was enough belief in it. That series was Father Ted.

These days, Grade warns that British TV is in a perilous place. He shares the concerns raised last year by Wolf Hall director, Peter Kosminsky, that it is becoming increasingly unaffordable for public-service broadcasters to produce high-end British dramas.

“I’ve had many discussions with Peter, who I admire enormously,” he says. “Something’s got to happen, because what we’re at risk of losing is big drama designed specifically for the British audience.

“If it has a life after that, internationally, fine. I think ITV were very surprised that Mr Bates vs The Post Office sold in as many territories as it did, because it was a very domestic story.

“But Happy Valley, Wolf Hall, those sorts of shows are very much at risk. The answer is, the BBC has a secure income, [and] it needs to continue to have a secure income so it can play its part.”

Kosminsky called for a levy to be put on US streaming services, with the proceeds collected into a British cultural fund. A similar proposal was put forward by Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, but was turned down by the government.

“That’s been rejected, and it’s a hard sell,” says Grade, who argues it might be possible for the private sector to instead create a one-off fund, which the BBC and others could come to for support in making their more expensive series.

The intellectual property of programmes produced from it would stay in the UK, but the fund’s private backers would be the first to benefit from international sales.

He doesn’t see any feasible alternative to the licence fee as a way of funding the BBC – and he cautions that a subscription model would discourage producers from taking risks on shows which might not sell.

Grade also warns, however, that the corporation is still too big and says cuts should be made so that the licence fee can be re-based at a lower amount.

The rise of working from home, he suggests, means the BBC could free up some funding by selling off some of its physical estate: “When you go to some of the BBC headquarters outside London, you just can’t believe the scale of them.”

He argues, too, that the licence fee should be made progressive by tying it to income in some way.

“It’s wrong that I pay the same as a single mum with three kids in a rented room somewhere – it’s just wrong.”

The peer is optimistic about the corporation’s new director-general, Matt Brittin: “I’m excited and encouraged that they’ve brought in someone from the outside, which I think is what the BBC needs. He seems to be making all the right noises…

“I’m very hopeful that we’ll see some radical change at the BBC, definitely. He’s got to appoint a deputy who’s going to control the journalistic minefield, so they don’t have another editorial crisis – of which there have been too many.”

The last government’s decision not to privatise Channel 4, he argues, was a missed opportunity – despite having fought previous attempts at privatisation when he was the station’s chief executive under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

“It’s wrong that I pay the same [licence fee] as a single mum with three kids in a rented room”

“There were only five channels in those days. It was a very different world,” he explains. “The question is, can Channel 4 make a virtue out of being small? That’s the challenge. There’s a new team in there, a great new chairman, a very exciting chief executive – let’s see if they can make a fist of it.”

Asked to rate, out of 10, how hopeful he feels about the future of British TV, he gives a score of two. Perhaps two and a half.

“I am very, very worried. Part of it is being kind of misty-eyed about the golden age of which I was privileged to be a part.

“But also the creative industries are one of the most important growth sectors of the economy, and have been for the last decade. The bedrock of that is public service media, and if we lose public service media, eventually that will ripple through into our position as a major provider of international exports, soft power. It’s gobsmacking what we achieve.” 

Rupert Lowe launched his party Restore Britain earlier this year (Alamy)

5 min read8 min

When former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe launched his own party, Restore Britain, in February after falling out with Nigel Farage, there was scepticism that it could have a meaningful electoral impact. There was a belief that there was limited space for a right-wing, fringe party to have an impact as long as Nigel Farage’s Reform continues to lead the polls.

However, at this month’s local elections, there were signs that Restore Britain could prove to be a headache for Farage. Lowe’s party, which has hard-right policies like the mass deportation of all illegal immigrants and shutting down universities that “brainwash students into hating their own culture”, helped deny Reform a majority on Norfolk County Council by winning all 10 seats they contested in Great Yarmouth.

Looking ahead to next month’s crucial by-election in Makerfield, Labour activists in the northwest told The House magazine this weekend that Reform would be on course to defeat Andy Burnham were it not for Restore Britain’s participation. A Survation poll this week put Labour candidate Burnham in the lead on 43 per cent, with Reform’s Robert Kenyon close behind on 40 per cent. Restore Britain candidate Rebecca Shepherd was on 7 per cent.

Lowe, who has cultivated large followings on social media, is now seemingly building support at campus level.  

Jared Allman, a second-year philosophy student at the University of York (UoY), is president of the university’s newly ratified Restore Britain society. The society was originally set up by Nye Gollings, who was previously president of UoY’s Reform UK society.

Allman, 22, whose favourite historical figure is French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (“he is the best military commander of all time”), told PoliticsHome that his support for Restore Britain comes from the belief that British people must “come back together and reaffirm their national identity”.

Other members of the society name Henry VIII’s executed chancellor Thomas More, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, William the Conqueror and ancient copper merchant Ea-nāṣir as their favourite historical figures. 

When asked whether it would not be more appropriate for his favourite historical figure to be British, Allman said: “That does make absolute sense, but if there were one that I thought was better than him, then I would have put him down.”

Currently, the society has about 25-30 members, the majority of whom, Allman admitted, are men, apart from “two or three female members”. In terms of the ethnicity of the group, Allman reckoned about five or six are “ethnic members”.

On the lack of women, Allman said: “That end of politics probably has a bad rap to it, and I feel like people perhaps just are intimidated…especially a woman, but I would absolutely love to get more female members, and that could be really beneficial to the society.”

York’s Student Union (SU) anticipated that the ratification, which gives a group training and funding opportunities, access to resources, and support from student union staff, would be so contentious that it published a full explainer on why the decision had been made, insisting it was “not an endorsement” and the organisation was “legally bound” to do so.

Unlike his predecessor, Gollings, Allman is not a former Reform UK member. He described Reform leader Farage as a “chameleon” who has done “nothing whatsoever” for his parliamentary constituency of Clacton since he was elected almost two years ago.

“I just like how Rupert Lowe’s not afraid to say it, and there really aren’t a lot of people that have a backbone and stand firm with what they say,” he told PoliticsHome.

“On the whole, the greatest issue facing our country is the cultural decline of England and its native people,” Allman told PoliticsHome, but insists he does not have a problem with international students on campus, as they have come to the country through legal routes.

York St John University, on the other side of the city, also has a ratified Restore Britain society. While other societies exist at universities across the country in Warwick, Durham, Bristol and London, they are not yet ratified. Allman said the society leaders keep in touch via a group chat.

Following the ratification, the SU received backlash from other university societies, culminating in a protest outside the SU building against the decision on 22 May. “I expected there to be more people,” Allman said, but described the atmosphere as “hostile”.

“I just find it ridiculous, not only the fact that they think they can suppress a view they disagree with, but also that they think the best way to go about that is to mob up and basically use intimidation tactics, lots of screaming through a megaphone, like lots of loud, sharp noise.”

Going forward, Allman told PoliticsHome he wants to take the society towards putting on “more intellectually-based activities” and bringing speakers and guests to the university. The group also has plans to travel to Makerfield to campaign for their candidate, Shepherd.

Musk, the controversial billionaire owner of X, has indicated support for Restore Britain in his inflammatory online commentary on British politics. Allman admitted that Musk’s support is a bit of a “double-edged sword”, telling PoliticsHome: “He’s got quite a bad reputation”.

“It’s good that he’s endorsing Restore, because he has got a large following, and he is the richest man on the planet, but he also has been accused of meddling with foreign affairs and foreign politics,” he said.