The Labour party has reached a new low in its desperate attempt to distance itself from the toxic fallout of the Peter Mandelson scandal. While the public is rightly appalled by revelations that a man with deep ties to a convicted paedophile was handed a plum diplomatic post, the party’s internal attempts at damage control are even more stomach-turning.

According to leaked documents revealed by Chief Political Correspondent for The Times Aubrey Allegretti, Labour strategists have proposed “suggested interventions” for their MPs to use when Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer addresses parliament on Monday that involve using an Epstein survivor as political cover to deflect from their own catastrophic failures in judgement. The survivor in question is Rachel Benavidez, who has bravely spoken out about the horrific abuse she suffered at Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch.

Instead of treating her testimony with the dignity it deserves, Labour’s parliamentary briefing suggests MPs use her recent NBC interview as a tactical shield. The suggested line of questioning asks if it was “absolutely right” to sack Mandelson because he “refused to believe those victims,” which is a shameful attempt to weaponise a woman’s trauma to rewrite the history of a disgraced appointment.

This is a calculated act of exploitation that conveniently ignores the fact that the Prime Minister was warned of the “general reputational risk” surrounding Mandelson long before the appointment was made. Newly released files show that officials flagged Mandelson’s continued contact with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, yet these warnings were explicitly overruled or ignored by the Prime Minister’s closest aides.

Now that the vetting failure has been exposed, the party machine is frantically trying to flip the script, pretending their primary concern is the welfare of victims rather than their own political survival. Keir Starmer’s claim that he was “staggered” by the vetting failure lacks any shred of credibility when one considers the repeated red flags his team consciously chose to disregard.

To suggest that his MPs stand up in the House of Commons and invoke the name of a survivor to justify a sacking that should have happened months ago is an insult to the public and a disgrace to the party’s alleged values. The Labour party owes Rachel Benavidez a profound apology for suggesting her life and suffering be used as a convenient rhetorical device for a government in terminal crisis.

The British public was promised a return to propriety and stability, but what is being delivered instead is the cynical politics of the gutter. Sacking senior civil servants and hiding behind the trauma of survivors will not mask the fact that this administration prioritised a factional ally over national security and moral decency. If this is what passes for a “moral crusade” in the modern Labour party, then it has truly lost its right to be heard.