Peter Mandelson and Sir Keir Starmer after the appointment [Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street]

LABOUR candidates in Camden have been given election nerves as they watch their friend, the prime minister, deluged in the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Sir Keir Starmer had said he wanted the four weeks of the council election campaign to be spent talking about his government’s response to the cost-of-living crisis and how he had refused to get involved in the bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel.

But with just two weeks to go until Camden votes – the real “squeaky bum” time in football parlance – there has been wall-to-wall coverage of who knew what and when before he appointed Mr Mandelson to the prestigious job of UK ambassador to the US.

The party, locally, had raised questions last week over the vetting of new Green Party candidates in Camden, but that word – vetting – has been the term which keeps coming up in regards to how Mr Mandelson, who maintained a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the paedophile financier’s conviction for a child trafficking offence, got the job.

Questions have also been asked about whether sensitive government information was passed to Epstein by Mr Mandelson, although it has now emerged that other security concerns had been raised without being acted on.

Camden’s Labour candidates and supporters with deputy prime minister David Lammy

Labour teams would rather be talking about virtually anything else on the doorstep, albeit canvassers who have spoken to the New Journal this week insisted that Mr Mandelson’s name has not been brought up much.

His name might not have been, but Mr Starmer’s name has – and the biggest fear for the party’s strategists is that anybody with a grievance towards the prime minister will see the local elections as a chance to punish him, rather than concentrate on the more everyday business of running council services.

Labour has a huge lead in the council chamber, occupying 45 of the 55 seats, but nobody is pretending that it will be easy to repeat its landslide victories in the current circumstances.

The party is facing one battle after another as the Greens, Lib Dems, Tories, Reform and the Camden’s People’s Alliance target individual wards.

Andrew Feinstein, from the Camden’s People Alliance, which is standing in two wards, said: “No one now believes a word Keir Starmer says.

“Now we learn that Peter Mandelson was also judged a security risk by the vetting service – and the prime minister claims that he did not know and apparently did not bother to ask.”

Mr Starmer has already parted ways with his favourite aide, head of staff Morgan McSweeney, and now Sir Olly Robbins, the foreign office chief, has been sacked after the PM said he had not been properly briefed about Mr Mandelson.

While the PM told parliament on Tuesday that it was “incredible” that he was not told about the security concerns, opposition MPs jeered – ironically agreeing with his statement that it “beggars belief”.

Mr Starmer said: “Throughout the whole timeline of events, officials in the Foreign Office saw fit to withhold this information from the most senior ministers in our system in government.

“That is not how the vast majority of people in this country expect politics, government or accountability to work, and I do not think it’s how most public servants think it should work either.”

Even before Mr Starmer brought Mr Mandelson on board, his chosen ambassador had the nickname “The Prince of Darkness” in UK politics and had twice resigned from the cabinet in past scandals.

Mr Mandelson lives close to Regent’s Park and is one of Mr Starmer’s constituents in Holborn and St Pancras, although he has only very rarely been seen at local Labour events.

It was a different story in neighbouring Islington, where the local Labour Party enlisted Mr Mandelson to help with the unsuccessful campaign to stop Jeremy Corbyn getting elected as an independent MP.

“If you want to say you are as far away from Corbyn as possible, the big public appointment of Mandelson couldn’t be clearer – but Corbyn had already been beaten, there was no need for a sledgehammer” said one frustrated Labour candidate this week.

Mr Starmer told the New Journal ahead of the campaign that the elections would be about a “bit of both” – local and national issues.

He said: “The question obviously is whether people want to carry on with this good Labour council or not. I think they should, but we’ve got to fight for every vote.”