Sir Keir Starmer has said “I beat myself up” over his decision to make Lord Mandelson US ambassador and “nobody has been harder on me in relation to the mistake I made there than me”.
The Prime Minister said he “dwells” on his appointment of the peer to Britain’s top diplomatic posting abroad despite the former Labour grandee’s association with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Sir Keir faces ongoing questions about his judgment after the release of Government documents that showed he was warned before approving Lord Mandelson for the role of a “general reputational risk” over the peer’s association with the financier.
Speaking to Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, he said: “Nobody has been harder on me in relation to the mistake I made there than me.
“And I’ll tell you for why, I’ve spent years trying to deal with violence against women and girls.
“And as I look back at it now and the mistake I made, I’ve been really hard on myself. In the immediate days after this all came out, I was particularly hard on myself. So yeah, everybody else was criticising, I get all that.
“But nobody was criticising me more than myself. I’m not trying to, you know, make that a mitigation or an excuse, but, I know I made a mistake.”
He added: “I know that after nearly 20 years fighting violence against women and girls, I made a mistake there. And I hate the fact I made that mistake. And I dwell on it. I beat myself up about it.
“It’s certainly not a mistake I’d ever repeat.
“But there’s no criticism anybody else can level at me that will be as harsh as the criticism I dished out for myself.”
Lord Mandelson, a political appointment rather than a career diplomat, was sacked from his Washington role in September last year over his links with Epstein, who died in 2019.
The first tranche of documents related to the peer’s appointment was published earlier this month, with more to follow.
Read MoreSlovenia says it has confirmed foreign influence on last weekend's election
What happened to Morgan McSweeney’s phone?
Keir Starmer warns against forgetting threat of Russia amid Iran conflict