“Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” as Oliver Hardy used to say to Stan Laurel in the famous old film comedy series ‘Laurel and Hardy’.

Sir Keir Starmer must be looking round to see who he can say this to, as the latest scene from the film “Mandelson: My Part in Labour’s Downfall” unrolls.

But there’s nobody left to blame.

Before Sir Keir entered Downing Street, we saw a stream of Tory Prime Ministers enter and leave Downing Street, each one arguably worse than the one before. Keir Starmer seemed like a breath of fresh air – not, perhaps, a man of great charisma but someone of competence and integrity.

But disappointingly, that has proved not to be the case.

With the important exception of foreign affairs (where he has shown a sureness of touch he has not demonstrated in other areas of government), the Prime Minister’s term in office has been characterised by one mistake followed by one U-turn after another (15 at the last count).

It began badly enough when, within days of coming to office, it was revealed that Starmer had accepted an embarrassing number of ‘freebies’ – including suits, dresses for his wife, expensive glasses and tickets for concerts and football matches.

The refrain ‘They’re all the same’ rang out, with some justification.

But the ‘misjudgements’ about freebies pale into insignificance compared to what followed – misjudged policy after policy, announced to a fanfare and then reversed, following protests, sometimes by his own backbenchers but more usually protests led by our largely right-wing press.

Now Sir Keir is facing the worse crisis of his premiership and, again, it’s a result of his own misjudgements.

His decision in the first place to appoint Mandelson as our Ambassador to Washington will rank as one of the great political mistakes of modern times. In what world was Starmer living in when he thought it a good idea to appoint someone who twice has had to resign from government for serious misconduct? And, as we now know, continued his misconduct by revealing government financial secrets to the convicted paedophile and close buddy Jeffrey Epstein?

The most likely explanation has to be that Mandelson was under the sway of his former Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeny, who wanted his political mentor to be given the job. And what Morgan wanted, Sir Keir delivered.

The second of Starmer’s misjudgements was his decision to announce Mandelson’s appointment as US Ambassador before he had been vetted – this, despite being advised not to do so. Again, the question has to be asked: why did such an apparently cautious man take such a risk?

The third misjudgement by Starmer was his decision to sack Foreign Office boss, Sir Olly Robbins, on the spot, for not telling him that despite Mandelson failing his security vetting, he had let his appointment go through.

Sir Olly was given the chance to respond on Tuesday in front of MPs when he wielded his diplomatic scalpel as effectively as any surgeon, slicing and dicing, not just the PM but most of his Downing Street staff as well.

However, when it comes to misjudgements, Robbins has his own questions to answer – most notably, why did he think himself more competent than the security experts in waving away their (now justifiable) concerns about Mandelson’s integrity and then failing to tell the Prime Minister that this is what he had done?

Just as serious was Sir Olly’s role in initially trying to deny MPs the right to see documents about the internal process that led to Mandelson’s appointment, despite being instructed to do so by Parliament.

His explanation, that to reveal anything about the vetting process – and here we are not talking about the actual details of the case, only the decision – was against the ‘usual practice’.

It was an explanation straight out the TV comedy series ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, when the hapless PM Sir Jim Hacker learns that the Foreign Office is keeping important information from him.

“What is it?” he asks Bernard, his Private Secretary.

“I don’t know, they’re not telling us,” he replies.

Apart from Starmer’s obvious failings as a politician – and these have been on display these past many months – what this whole farrago points up is a serious failure in our current machinery of government. An over-secretive civil servant and politicians (of all parties) lacking judgment is a recipe, if not for a failing state, at the very least for a Laurel and Hardy-style ‘fine mess’ – which is, more or less, what we’re in.

Ivor Gaber is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex and a former Westminster political correspondent.