I’m not a great fan of Keir Starmer’s, my main gripe with him having been over his re-categorisation of ‘Palestine Action’ as a ‘terrorist’ movement in August last year. Noisily demonstrating, holding up incendiary placards and even daubing planes with red paint, are not ‘terrorism’. They don’t ‘terrorise’ – or even ‘terrify’ – anyone.

However, I welcomed his elevation to the Labour leadership, and later to Number 10, as a concession, as I thought, to the rabid right-wing press, who surely couldn’t find or manufacture the charges against him that had helped it bring down Jeremy Corbyn.  Starmer, with a distinguished non-political career behind him, and one to boot that required careful thought, forensic objectivity and keen intelligence, would restore what in the 18^th century was called ‘bottom’ to the Labour Party. He clearly has little of the ‘charisma’ that today is felt to be essential in a political leader; but then neither did Clement Attlee, who led the most constructive – even revolutionary – peacetime British government of modern times. (‘A modest man, who has much to be modest about’, as the very charismatic Winston Churchill waspishly called him.) I was hoping that Starmer might follow in Attlee’s path, and at the same time serve to undermine this appetite for personal ‘charisma’, which has blighted British politics in recent times. (Look at Boris Johnson.) Starmer is decent, honourable and pragmatic, and gained a stonking majority – if a misleading one – at the last General Election.

What he appears not to have – this is what the press and even some Labour MPs are throwing at him now – is political judgment. Some of us thought we could see a certain kind of judgment when he appointed Lord Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington. Distrusting ‘Mandy’ as many of us did, we nonetheless went along with the idea that, in view of the complexion of the current US government, it might be a good idea to send a snake to parley with the other snakes there, rather than someone more traditional and moral. It was certainly a pragmatic decision, which Corbyn could never have made. Some of us – me included – even thought it might be ‘brilliant’. How wrong in retrospect we were.

I’m glad that Starmer has announced today that he won’t resign over this. His excuse is that he believed Mandelson’s lies when he questioned him over his ties with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which at one point involved Mandelson’s passing secret documents to him. Mandelson insists that he knew nothing of Epstein’s dirtier activities, featuring underage girls, which he thinks were kept from him ‘because I’m gay’. Starmer’s acceptance of his lies may say a lot about his naivety; but is that a resigning matter, if it stands alone on the charge sheet? (A historian is reminded of the Profumo affair here; Macmillan didn’t resign over that issue either.) Besides, one is uncertain about his possible successor, and the boost it might give to the quasi-fascists in ‘Reform’. That’s a plus for Starmer, who may be living on borrowed time. But if he uses that time well – more radically, in my view – he might well come to be seen to stand on that pedestal beside the modest Attlee.