Consequences are rare in British politics. A well-handled resignation can be temporary. If you’re resourceful enough, exit from Westminster can be parlayed into directorships and consultancies, or the media circuit might beckon. Such soft landings aren’t available to Peter Mandelson, whose long-deserved fall is finally absolute. Mandelson was fired as ambassador to the United States in September, after the release of an initial tranche of files relating to the sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein. These files demonstrated that the friendship between the two was deeper and more enduring than Mandelson had claimed: he is found encouraging Epstein to ‘fight for early release’ from his eighteen-month sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor. A second tranche of more than three million files, released on 30 January, revealed a series of emails from Mandelson seeking self-advancement through Epstein’s devices, grubbing for cash to pay for his partner to take a course in osteopathy, and passing confidential government material to Epstein and his banker associates. This second wave of documents, which made clear that his description of the relationship had been deceitful, prompted Mandelson’s exit from the House of Lords and the Privy Council. It may also have initiated the Starmer government’s death spiral.
The Epstein files reveal the existence of a network of wealthy and powerful men who speak openly and frankly about power and its exercise. Epstein’s proclivity for underage girls does not faze his correspondents. The scale of the release was a piece of technical good fortune: the conversations were conducted by means of unencrypted email. That much has changed. Similar networks today communicate largely through encrypted, disappearing messages, so exposure is much less likely – unless like Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defence, you add a journalist to the group chat.
Mandelson claims he was ‘kept separate’ from Epstein’s sex crimes because he is gay. He initially said the only people he encountered at Epstein’s properties were ‘middle-aged housekeepers’. (A humiliating photo from the second release shows Mandelson in white Y-fronts and a T-shirt talking to a young woman in a bathrobe.) It’s just about possible that Mandelson didn’t notice the abuse – the girls simply didn’t matter to him – but like most of Epstein’s circle he knew that squalid innuendo and sexual jokes were the currency of friendship. In an email about the 2010 general election Mandelson says he’s ‘praying for a hung parliament. Alternatively, a well hung young man.’ His messages mostly read like those of a social climber trying to fit in and maintain his contact, but there are hints of something darker. In October 2009, Epstein asks whether Mandelson has ‘made any decisions’ about a ‘cuban-american’, to which he replies ‘desp for CuAm’, but Gordon Brown’s precarious mental state keeps him in London. Earlier that year he implores Epstein not to go away: ‘You are the only person who knows everything about me.’
Money, rather than sex, seems to have been the chief motive for Mandelson. There are direct gifts from Epstein: $75,000 in 2003-4, and an unclear amount (probably in the tens of thousands) to pay for the osteopathy course in 2009-10. (Mandelson says he has ‘no recollection’ of receiving the first amount, and that he believed the second was a bursary. Epstein reminded Mandelson at the time to call it a loan to avoid tax.) But it was the lucrative post-ministerial gigs that really fired his imagination. His question – ‘need a lord on the board?’ – is one that many peers ask. Eleven days after Labour lost the 2010 election, Mandelson sought Epstein’s advice on landing a gig at the mining conglomerate Glencore. He wondered about a senior role at BP, then in crisis as Deepwater Horizon gushed hundreds of millions of litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. He asked whether his political experience and connections meant he could ‘come in fireman role as highly paid adviser etc?’ They considered leveraging his offer of a million-pound retainer at Deutsche Bank against Glencore. Being unable to monetise his connections and experience was a long-term frustration for ‘Petey’. During the European sovereign debt crisis in 2012, his primary concern was not the collapse of social democratic rule, the political problems of a plurinational currency union, or the vast social misery imposed by austerity. ‘Europe is in meltdown, bringing down the global economy, I am ex EU minister and I cannot make any money talking about it?’
Avarice and moral flexibility are not unusual qualities in former politicians. But solicitousness for the wealthy was also a characteristic of Mandelson’s time in office. Immediately after the financial crisis, while first secretary of state under Gordon Brown, Mandelson forwarded confidential advice given to the prime minister to Epstein (‘what salable assets?’ Epstein asked). He conspired with Epstein, as well as J.P. Morgan’s chief executive, Jes Staley, to ‘mildly threaten’ the chancellor, Alistair Darling, over a proposed tax on bankers’ bonuses. He acted as a pipeline for private and potentially market-altering information: the following year he passed on information about proposed restrictions on US banks. These actions amounted to conscious betrayals of his country in order to protect and impress the powerful. Whether or not Mandelson is successfully prosecuted for misconduct in public office, that betrayal will remain his political epitaph.
In the introduction to his autohagiographic memoir from 2011, The Third Man, Mandelson defends his choice of friends. He is, he says, ‘a restless soul’,
drawn to individualists, to people whose achievements and strong personalities make them interesting company. I am more interested in what people do and think than their ideologies, and I judge them by their character, by their personal qualities, rather than by how they are perceived. There is no escaping the fact that people who are successful in politics, business, journalism, fashion or the arts give off energy, have thought-provoking insights and attract dynamic company around them.
This passage summarises the Mandelsonian ethos. The people who matter are successful, and their success is proof of their qualities. It is essential to be inside the charmed circle. The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated. Needless to say, Epstein makes no appearance. Other diarists of the period are less flattering. In May 1996 Alastair Campbell mentions Mandelson’s ‘ridiculous social life’; at his 43rd birthday party later that year, hosted by the ‘social-climbing Tory’ Carla Powell, Campbell is put in mind of ‘Peter’s absent friends, the ones he used to have before he entered a new magic circle’. In 2008 Chris Mullin was forthright on the danger of Mandelson’s return to government: ‘He has a tendency to go gaga in the presence of rich men.’
There is a way of reading the Mandelson story as a tragedy. The wheedling and ingratiating tone of the emails reveals a man who is never certain that he really is on the inside. His own success brought him into contact with the truly powerful and wealthy, but he had no real money of his own; his tendency to deceit and double-dealing cut short his tenure in every big political office he held, with the result that he left no significant legacy. His desire to be useful to Epstein – his reassurance that he was ‘on the case’ – was a determination to stay on the right side of power. No single piece of information he passed on was of the highest grade, but betrayal is usually a matter of small increments. Epstein was a socially adept manipulator: his complaint that their relationship had been ‘a one way street … jeffrey can i have, jeffrey can you give jeffrey can you organise’ must have terrified Mandelson.
In October 2002, Campbell observed that Mandelson was a ‘wasting talent’ (he had been forced to resign from the government for the second time in 2001), and wondered if he could be found another job. This didn’t happen, but in 2004 he went to Brussels as EU trade commissioner. The Mandelson affair is certainly a case of talent wasted. His initial desire (in his own account) to widen the social and electoral base of the Labour Party beyond ‘sectional interests’ turned into a willing infatuation with the very highest reaches of oligarchy. The Third Man mentions his early determination to rid politics of the distorting effects of donor money. It is not an ambition the later Mandelson would recognise. Political obituarists remark on his unparalleled insight, but the recent messages released by Wes Streeting don’t show much evidence of it. Banality (the government should have an economic policy) is combined with boilerplate: the solution to Israel’s annihilation of Gaza is to make the Palestinian Authority less corrupt. The impression is of a man whose mental map has refused all updates since the mid-1990s.
Most of the schemes he cooked up with Epstein failed: Glencore never called back. Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel, founded in November 2010 with his former staffer Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, proved the best vehicle for his ambitions. Global Counsel acts as a concierge service for large corporations, arranging meetings with politicians and advising on weakening or circumnavigating regulations. It does not disclose its client list, though it has acted for a multitude of corporate villains, including Shell, Palantir, TikTok and privatised water companies (these are just the clients that surfaced through the UK’s laughably weak regulatory regime for lobbyists). Its reported revenue last year was £21.6 million, but the new revelations prompted a client exodus and the firm called in administrators on 19 February. Only familiarity dulls the outrage that its founder sat for so long in the House of Lords for the party of labour.
Global Counsel and similar lobbying firms can be understood as legal, formalised counterparts to informal and personalised influence networks of the sort Epstein created. They trade on the connections and access gained in public office for private advantage. The parallel also occurred to Epstein: when Ehud Barak came to him for advice on a lucrative life after politics, Epstein advised him to start by making a list of ‘who has IOUs to you’. A political realist tasked with defending Mandelson might say: so what? Lobbying is legal, even for firms we find distasteful. Progressive governments need to talk to big business or they’ll be cut off at the knees. And critics who stir up class division, or resentment at bankers’ bonuses or privatised utility dividends, themselves constitute a populist faction of the elite seeking their own preferment. Such bromides make the relationship between business and politics sound like a protection racket. Its benefits are certainly questionable. The deference of the current Labour government to business has afforded it little respite from criticism over its workers’ rights bill. Politicians with an eye on post-ministerial careers will want to avoid truly difficult decisions of the kind that inconvenience people who can get hold of your private phone number. Mandelson, famously, was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes’. It’s the second part, of course, that’s the tricky bit. Almost a third of Labour’s new MPs in 2024 were former lobbyists; Starmer’s initial apparatus included a startling number of Blair functionaries.
The political consequences of Mandelson’s fall are not yet clear. Two key members of staff at Downing Street have gone: Tim Allan and Morgan McSweeney, both of them close to Mandelson. McSweeney was formally Starmer’s chief of staff, but in practice functioned as the prime minister’s political brain. Mandelson and McSweeney share an unremitting hostility to the left of their party, but anti-progressive execration has proved a thin basis for actual governing, as Labour’s cratering poll numbers suggest. Sacrificing McSweeney may have saved Starmer’s premiership, at least temporarily, but awkward questions remain about the sketchy vetting process that preceded Mandelson’s selection as ambassador, which appears to have been designed to produce the desired result. Starmer seems palpably and sincerely furious that he was lied to, but he has yet to explain why he acceded to a process that took as read Mandelson’s honesty and good character.
It doesn’t help that a second sex offender scandal has emerged. Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s former communications director and another Blair-era retainer, was nominated for a peerage in December. By that point, Starmer had already been warned that Doyle had kept up a friendship with, and even campaigned for, a former Scottish Labour councillor who had been charged with the possession of indecent images of children (he was later convicted). A Number Ten investigation conducted by Tim Allan, Doyle’s successor as communications director, rubberstamped the peerage. Starmer now insists that Doyle, too, ‘did not give a full account of his actions’. The two stories together suggest a deeply dysfunctional Downing Street. It should not be difficult to say, in the immediate wake of a paedophile scandal, that involvement with a sex offender should prohibit a functionary from elevation to the peerage. Whatever senior Labour apparatchiks think, a seat in the Lords is not a retirement benefit.
The prime minister’s stay is temporary. The arrest of ex-prince Andrew will keep the story prominent in the royal-obsessed media, and leave many wondering when Mandelson’s own arrest might come. Labour, in a panic, accepted an opposition motion that will force the disclosure of potentially thousands of documents relating to the Mandelson appointment, including private messages and correspondence. Labour is likely to lose the Gorton and Denton by-election at the end of February, then collapse in the votes for the Senedd in Wales and the Parliament in Scotland, and in England’s local elections, in May. Starmer has bought himself, at best, a few weeks.
The consequences for involvement with Epstein have been perversely distributed. Trump, who is all over the files, faces no real threat of impeachment. It would be strange if they precipitated the fall of Starmer, a leader who had no involvement at all with Epstein. But it would only be a proximate cause: Starmer is vulnerable because he is unpopular and weak, and has squandered the goodwill and electoral authority with which he arrived in office. It is still common to hear people in Westminster talk of the government’s seriousness and focus on delivery. It is hard to square this with its apparent willingness to embroil itself in scandal in order to reward party grandees and donors with peerages and embassies. These two catastrophic errors in judgment – Mandelson and Doyle – arose from the total empowerment of the party’s oligarchy, the same oligarchy responsible for a strategy that has driven Labour voters away without replacing them and failed to deliver the change its manifesto promised. The same internal oligarchy continues to insist, pyrrhically, that it has saved the party from oblivion.
Details matter in political scandals. Who knew what when, or who ought to have known, or who ducked a decision in order to placate a powerful ally, are matters that can destroy careers. But details can also obscure larger questions. Why appoint Mandelson in the first place? Explanations have centred on his supposed affinity with Trump or glossed it as a reward for a powerful ally of McSweeney’s. Both may be factors. But Starmer’s reliance on Mandelson and McSweeney is a result of his desire to separate governing from politics, and his accordingly weak political instincts. A source close to McSweeney once described Starmer as ‘not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the [driverless] DLR.’ The next phase of the Starmer government might well be even more chaotic.
Why did a man whose political expertise was acquired in the departed era of broadcast television maintain such influence over Labour? Mandelson tended his own mythology and influence over the party, of course. But many were attracted to the politics of pure means that he represented, irrespective of ends (though his own ends lay at the rightward edge of the party). It is no secret that many politicians are attracted by people who have a reputation for ruthlessness, manipulation, the amoral pursuit of victory. Many get a thrill from proximity to the electoral ‘dark arts’. It can be paradoxically alluring for politicians who dislike staining their own conscience. In this case, Starmer, a man who once contrasted his own probity with the flagrant corruption of Conservative government, has found himself afflicted with accusations of serial mendacity in power. Perhaps that more than anything else accounts for his poll ratings.
Nobody in the Epstein files cares much about democracy or politics, except as a site where the powerful can exert their will. (One thrilled email from Epstein to Peter Thiel the day after the Brexit referendum rejoices that it is ‘just the beginning’ of a ‘return to tribalism’.) The intellectuals he gathered around him favoured ‘scientific’ theories of natural inequality or eugenics of the sort that must be reassuring to those atop the human pyramid. Feminism, obviously, was out. What mattered to Epstein was his network and the power it afforded him. While individual responsibility – criminal, political and moral – matters, the most disturbing questions here are collective. The young Mandelson’s intuition was, in one sense, correct: the only meaningful question is whether you’re on the inside or not. The distinguishing feature of the true insider is impunity, and the violation and trafficking of other human beings, the breaking of sexual taboo, is the darkest affirmation of that impunity.
What kind of culture produces such an elite? That is not an easy question to answer. It troubles the divide between public and private life that is foundational to modern political thought: private decadence cannot easily be separated from public corruption. Another element is the ‘corruption of moral sentiments’, identified by Adam Smith as the ‘disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful’. This syndrome is endemic in our culture; Smith observed that it produces the rule of ‘flattery and falsehood’ over the ‘great and awful virtues’ required in statecraft. Overturning it will be extremely difficult, though the first step must be a determination to end the culture of impunity. Elites that fear their authority is collapsing tend to take violent measures to preserve their status.
There are further dangers. Febrile psychosexual conspiracy theory and black-pilled nihilism will find much to feed on in the Epstein files; its electoral results may be catastrophic. Nostalgia for better historical elites can be potently articulated in nationalist, isolationist terms, though it is mostly fantasy. The politics of virtue also invites hypocrisy and cant, sporadic orgies of denunciation and intellectual conformity. Few people, least of all those of us in easily targeted sexual minorities, would welcome a new crop of Savonarolas. Yet it is impossible to imagine a real resolution that does not challenge some of the knee-jerk scepticism that greets any talk of political virtue.
Mandelson’s model of politics replicated Epstein’s mode of manipulative insiderism. The recent revelation that Labour operatives paid a PR firm to investigate and smear journalists echoes a story Mandelson tells of how he first acquired his reputation. In 1985 a young Tony Blair described Thatcher as ‘unhinged’ at a press conference, and an ITN political editor decided to lead News at Ten with the story. Mandelson leaned on the editor: it wasn’t what this quite recently elected MP meant and, in any case, Blair was clearly the future – wouldn’t it be an awful thing to lose access to him over such a minor matter? The story duly disappeared. Mandelson may be gone, but Mandelsonism remains the default mode of British politics.
20 February
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