Peer Mandelson was ‘intensely relaxed’ about ‘filthy’ amounts of wealth – and said worrying about working-class voters was a waste of time. Now Keir Starmer hopes bringing him in will appeal to voters who deserted Labour over Brexit
Keir Starmer has called in former Blair adviser Peter Mandelson to get him out of the hole he has dug for himself, completing his headlong rush back to the worst of ‘New Labour’.
Starmer has no hope of getting near power without winning back the working-class voters he drove away from Labour with his 2018 sabotage of Labour’s promise to hold a new EU referendum with ‘nobody… ruling out remain remain as an option’ – and has embarrassingly draped himself in the Union Flag, as if that’s what working-class people want to see. Unsurprisingly, working-class people see right through the ruse and both Starmer and Labour have fallen sharply in the polls.
So now ‘Forensic’ has decided that the way to save himself is to bring in Peter Mandelson, the elitist peer who infamously said that worrying about working-class voters was a waste of time because ‘they’ve got nowhere to go’:
Mandelson has also said that he was ‘intensely relaxed’ about people becoming ‘filthy rich’ – a guaranteed vote-winner with millions in poverty and approaching another million people out of work because of the Tories’ mishandling of the pandemic crisis.
The same Boris Johnson Tories leaving Starmer flailing in their wake.
Not satisfied with that, Mandelson went on to ‘shake UK politics’ by meeting Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on his ‘superyacht’, where he chatted cosily with Tory then-Shadow Chancellor George Osborne – and subsequently gave trade concessions that benefited the billionaire by an estimated $50 million:
And, of course, Mandelson was at the heart of attempts to overturn the Brexit referendum result as a director (until 2019) of Open Britain, which promoted the so-called ‘People’s Vote’ campaign – exactly the way to the hearts of the leave-voting towns Labour has to win back to have even a sniff of getting into Downing Street.
Senior Labour back-bencher Jon Trickett recently mocked the ‘strategic genius‘ of Starmer’s disastrous tenure so far. It will be interesting to see what he and other working-class MPs make of this latest fiasco, but it’s a safe bet that working-class voters will be ‘intensely unimpressed’.
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