Suella Braverman said she is “ashamed to have Keir Starmer as our Prime Minister right now”.

The former Home Secretary spoke to GB News earlier today, following the sacking of Peter Mandelson this morning.

She said the damage is not limited to the Prime Minister though, whose judgement she claimed “has been found to be severely lacking”.

She told the People’s Channel at an event at the Prosperity Institute on leaving the ECHR: “This is humiliating, not just for the Prime Minister, but more importantly the United Kingdom. We’ve now lost our main man in Washington at a critical time of global insecurity right before the state visit.”

The shocking details of the depth of the friendship between the Labour grandee and the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein could hardly have come at a worse time.

The US President has his “unprecedented” second state visit to the UK next week, and No10 knows how important it is to keep Donald Trump onside.

Up until the last few days, the appointment of Peter Mandelson, though controversial, had been seen as a big success, given the preferential trade deal Britain has gained with the US and the warm relations between Lord Mandelson and the President.

At an extraordinary press conference earlier this year, Mr Trump has praised Lord Mandelson as “a good-looking fellow” and said he loved his accent.

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Ms Braverman went further though in her condemnation of Mr Starmer, stating: “Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed to this role in the first place.

“Proper checks obviously didn’t take place, and the Prime Minister’s judgment has been found to be severely lacking.”

Mr Starmer and the Foreign Secretary met this morning and decided to sack Lord Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US following new emails published by Bloomberg laying bare just how vehemently Lord Mandelson continued to support Epstein up to and after his conviction for child sexual offences in 2008.

Yet the PM robustly defended the ambassador during an uncomfortable PMQs yesterday, as Kemi Badenoch used all six questions to maximum advantage.

Now James Roscoe has been put in as interim US ambassador. He’s the former communications secretary to the late Queen, and has been Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy in Washington since July 2022.

And it has emerged that warnings were given before Lord Mandelson’s appointment, but not heeded.

After all, he’s been sacked twice before over scandals due to his connections with wealthy individuals, first in 1998 and then in 2001.

This marked another huge embarrassment for the Government, less than two weeks into a new parliamentary term in which Labour promised a “second phase” just last Monday.

Cue days of damaging headlines about Angela Rayner, a resignation, major reshuffle, and then the same pattern this week, only with the US ambassador and a sacking.

“It’s embarrassing the the United Kingdom as a whole”, Ms Braverman said. “This is more chaos from the Prime minister and it’s a farce.”