Over dim sum, we predict that Starmer will stride on

The Peter Mandelson Memorial Dim Sum Supper Club met in emergency session last night, prompted by our hero's third fall from grace.

- JOHN RENTOUL

We are a group of friends who were lunching in a Chinese restaurant when Mandelson resigned as business secretary just before Christmas in 1998. By coincidence, we were doing the same when he resigned again, as Northern Ireland secretary, in January 2001.

Since then, we have gathered at the turn of each year to make predictions about politics that have appeared in The Independent. Our forecasts have been noticed by David Cameron and Keir Starmer as a way of boasting about how we got them wrong. We predicted a hung parliament in both the 2015 and 2024 elections.

We persevere, however. So when Mandelson was sacked as our ambassador to Washington two weeks ago, we felt duty-bound to reconvene in his honour to mark the occasion and to update our forecast.

At this point, I expected to write about the demise of the Conservative Party and its replacement by Reform, which I think is an underappreciated historic change that is happening before our eyes. But what emerged over aromatic crispy duck and prawn dumplings was a different and more surprising story.

It turned out that the unanimous view of the assembled company was that Labour would be the largest party after the next election and that a Labour prime minister would form the next government. The majority view (which I shared, although I had not expected to) was that Starmer would be that prime minister. The minority predicted that it would be “someone else”, although they were unable to say who it would be.