The Sunday Ishmael: 15/03/2026

Beware the Ides of March

Or if you go down to the Senate today, You're in for a Big Surprise. Or Happy Mother's Day.

Back in 2009 and 2010, mr ishmael  found himself very puzzled by the ease with which ducks slid off The Right Honourable the Lord Mandelson like water off a shit shovel. Had he lived to see Mandy's appointment in 2025 to the post of British Ambassador to the United States by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Leader of the Labour Party, mr ishmael might have concluded that the sickness that beset Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had mysteriously also infected Starmer, whose appointment of Mandy was "weirdly rushed", according to Jonathan Powell, Starmer's national security adviser, as revealed in the  tranche of Mandelson documents, released on the 11th March inst. Is it as simple as Starmer's brains being out to rent? Boyant as Mandelson is, or was,  surely Starmer had some recollection of past unpleasantnesses? Let us remember times past with mr ishmael.

HOW COULD SOMEONE TWICE DISGRACED, 

PLAYTHING OF RUSSIAN GANGSTERS, 

AND DISHONEST AS THE DAY IS LONG 

WALTZ INTO THE POSITION OF DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER

AND  FIRST SECRETARY FOR EVERYTHING? (or, indeed UK Ambassador to the USA, interjects mrs ishmael.)

Ever since we have been blogging, commenting or writing to the newspapers, my young friend, stanislav and I, have chosen to refer to the former Labour Party as the Blair-Brown-Campbell-Mandelstein Project and we have characterised its central, abiding  theme as being the power of potential mutual blackmail among that eponymous Quartet of the Damned. Why doesn't Blair sack Brown, why is Mandelstein unsackable, why does a press secretary call the shots;  is it the case that they hang together or are hung separately, what do they all have on each other?

l to r: Brown, Mandelson, Campbell, Blair

Often we have lamented that the governing of Britain, as well as being largely in the hands and at the whim of shadowy, international gangsters, or financiers as they term themselves, Ambassadors of Greed, was rendered more than  customarily incompetent by the alleged criminality of its central characters. They were hamstrung, suspended in mid-air not only by their amorality, their moral bankruptcy, their dubious, elastic sexuality, their greed and mendacity but  ultimately, in practical terms,  by the unlikelihood that those both driven and constrained by unfulfillable personal vendetta would or could ever make objective, nationally beneficial judgements on domestic or foreign policy or on public administration, that they were, in other words, a bunch of cunts.

 Estranged from Truth and Decency, the longer they were in office the grosser became their manoeuvrings; paradoxically, the more distant they personally became from the rule of Law,  the more furiously they heaped the potential for criminality - a guilty conscience - upon the populace; burning all the money in the Downing Street cellars, forcing rights and liberties and conventions through the shredders, upstairs;  seemed like every time you turned around there was a new law you might be breaking.

Surveillance, molestation by law enforcement, illegal detention, the brutalisation of jurisprudence in HMP Britain and the encouragement of neighbours narking  each upon the other, Stasi-style,  generated in government an opposite polarity, opposite to the restrictive, looking-over-the-shoulder, paranoid  climate inflicted upon the citizen; theirs was an unchallengeable  lawlessness. 

Whilst we  at home were harangued,  photographed, scolded, barracked, detained, beaten, ejected, confined, batoned, tasered and  shot dead by a constabulary headed by gobby political apparatchiks;  whilst we at home were more legislated against than ever before, our own Gang of Four was engaged, abroad, in crimes against humanity; international law wilfully misinterpreted,  the casus beli summonsed from thin air, contemptuously cyber-plagiarised,  fabricated - with a dark aptness -  by a drunken, bisexual  pornographer,  the whole rotten episode  made glorious by Colonel Rupert Golightly-Jockstrap and eventually vindicated by mealy-mouthed commissions and enquiries, staffed by hand-picked, lousy, wigged and ermined lickspittles, masters of the full and far-reaching cover-up,  the Wretched of the Oxbridge civil service, pinstripe, weasel popinjays,  whose gilded  careers were  case studies  of Vice made Noble.

All was news-managed from Downing Street, the worthless shit, Brown, bullying and intriguing, Son of the fucking Manse, heedless of warcrime, stewing rancidly in his monstrous  ambition as wog children fried, the horrible fucking bastard; Tony and Imelda, lining-up bribes and freebies, Mandelstein in the background. 

Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson

Tony Blair and Mandelson

An early mentor of NewLabour was, ominously, Mr Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of skymadeupnewsandfilth and a press baron vile beyond caricature, although generous in that he allows many of his employees to moonlight as MPs,  the apologetic, motormouthing Mr Spit-Gove being one of Rupe's boys.  Any government alarmed  by the cheapening  of the national discourse, the sexualisation of infants, the bombardment of readers with lust and greed and stupidity and the wholly unwarranted, cruelly destructive intrusion into the lives of ordinary human beings would tell Rupert and his stable of rancid Nazi hacks, Kelvin McCunt and the rest, to go and fuck themselves, tell Murdoch to  fuck off back to Australia, where crudity such as his is worshipped, where they know no better, where ethnic cleansing is still on the agenda, where Sheilas are treated like shit, where the politicians imbibe stupidity with their mothers' milk. Our politicians being what they are, however, and Murdoch being what he is, there will be another level of blackmail at work, NewsCorp will have unused files bulging with indiscretions and worse, much worse, insurance against anyone attempting to curb the filthy bastard's excess.

Murdoch, anyway,  has  sought to levy a subscription from online readers and in an attempt to glamourise his product, to entice unwary readers into parting with their money in exchange for his  cruel, bigoted drivel,  he has acquired the serialisation rights to Lord Crabs'  bouillabaisse  of gossip, innuendo and lies, entitled: The Third Man.

For much of the NewLabour epoch, through personal disgrace,  Mandelstein was unelected. Mandy now publicly revels in his relationships with gay gangsters as well as with previously-owned Brazillians,  such as Reinaldo de los Tory rentboys.

 Campbell, in Mandy's memoir,  is seen, if at all, only through frosted glass because he is an oik, effective at ramrodding the craven filth in the Lobby but plain vulgar,  whereas Lord Crabs, we should remember, confided to the nation, whilst stuffing the Millennium Dome with rubbish, that he was "born to govern," his grandfather virtually a post-war Labour aristocrat, Campbell's, if he knew him at all, probably worked down the pit. And drank pints.

One would think it a snobbery too far to expunge Mr Campbell from the record as Mandelstein has done but Peter is, by his own account,  the owner, the trademark holder of the QueerProject which begat NewLabour and he should know; his, as Rupert will insist, is the Inside Story of  Ruin and if he says there were but three gay conspirators - two with attendant  lavender spouses - then three it was and all the imagery of Ali and Tony closeted together deciding our fates to the clunking accompaniment of a Prime Minister's Edition Fenders Stratocaster must be errant imaginings, les dossiers sexy et fabrique, we must have dreamed them, Mr Campbell's mateyness with John Shit-Scarlett of MI5, his castration of the BBC and the mysterious matter of the Lonesome Death of David Kelly,  these must be the doings of a lowly penpusher and not a member of the Ruinous Gang of Four, for as Lord Crabs tells us in his penny dreadful it was but a Ruinous Gang of Three. 

The Third Man - Then

And now.

Is the Starmer/Mandelson/Epstein affair enough to bring down the Starmer government?

  

That's the happy sight of pigs flying overhead. Duck, that's the sound of shit falling on our heads from a great height.

Martha's Vineyard, 2012
l.to r. Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson
"A man is known by the company he keeps" - Aesop's fable 

"The Ass and its Purchaser"

'Twas an evening in November,

As I very well remember,

I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,

But my knees were all a'flutter

So I landed in the gutter,

And a pig came up and lay down by my side.

Yes, I lay there in the gutter

Thinking thoughts I could not utter,

When a colleen passing by did softly say,

"Ye can tell a man that boozes 

By the company he chooses" -

At that, the pig got up and walked away.

.................................................................

They'd better get a move on and sort themselves out - there's another war in the Middle East to attend to. Seems to be a Labour Thing.

....................................................................

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.