Sarah Harte: Our Irish-style corruption cannot hold a candle to the rot in Britain

The fallout from the Epstein files has rocked the British establishment, but if that's the sort of political intrigue they like, they can keep it

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor reclining across the laps of five people while Ghislaine Maxwell stands above. File picture

Some of the most stomach-churning images of last week were of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on all fours, bent over a supine young woman with his hand placed on her flat stomach or looking into a camera with vulpine eyes, reportedly in Epstein’s New York mansion.

In general, the British royals are a bunch of pretty dull non-entities whose principal role is to stand on balconies, waving their limp hands. Presumably in an attempt to improve the gene pool, they have dipped into a puddle of socially aspirational duds who drive around the place in shiny new Land Rovers with their white-toothed kin.

The late Queen Elizabeth II was ‘a class act’, as Padraig ‘Pee’ Flynn might have put it (we’ll come back to him). She was dignified, worked hard and did her duty, but her offspring and consorts are a rum lot.

We all have relatives we pray won’t turn up to the wedding or funeral, but the queen drew the familial short straw.

Then there’s the picture of Peter Mandelson, former big dog in the Labour Party, reportedly in Epstein’s Paris flat in his tighty whiteys. Meanwhile, the British police raid Mandelson’s homes.

He is being questioned for alleged misconduct in public office. Newly released documents as part of what is known as the Epstein files appear to suggest “likely market-sensitive information” being passed on to Epstein by Mandelson in 2009. 

At the time, Mandelson was business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government. The Metropolitan Police force is investigating to ascertain whether Mandelson has a case to answer. Mandelson’s position, according to the BBC, is that “he had not acted in any way criminally and that he was not motivated by financial gain”.

Will Keir Starmer lose his job for his decision to bring ‘Mandy’ back? He appointed Mandelson as US ambassador, knowing about his friendship with Epstein, which continued after Epstein had been in jail for procuring a girl below the age of 18 for prostitution. Why did a fundamentally decent man see fit to overlook this damning fact? 

The misguided political decision is part of a broader cultural question about how we minimise abuse of women and girls. And the allegation that Mandelson was peddling in commercially sensitive state secrets, could shape up as one of the highest-level political corruption scandals ever — the Economist has described it as “the worst political scandal of the century”.

For now, Starmer staggers on, having quelled his backbenchers’ revolt. Sacrificial lambs so far have been our own Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, who was instrumental in the decision to hand Mandelson the Washington job, and Starmer’s director of communications, Tim Allan.

Interesting that boring, reliable Keir has out-scandalled Boris Johnson. When Mandelson resigned in 1998, Johnson’s Daily Telegraph column attacked Mandelson for his sexuality, slurring all gay men in the process. “Weep, O ye … In the Ministry of Sound, the tank-topped bum boys blub into their Pils … for Mandy is dead!’ It was a revealing insight into the public schoolboy thinking that still prevails among that cohort.

The sight of Andrew leaning over that petite body surely hammered the final nail in the royal coffin. If the British monarchy is to survive, it will likely be thanks to cold hard cash, meaning how much the British state gains from tourism generated by the royals.

One of the most stomach-churning images of last week was Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on all fours, bent over a supine young woman with his hand placed on her flat stomach, looking into a camera with vulpine eyes, reportedly in Epstein’s New York mansion. File picture

The whole thing is corruption writ large, in different ways. Moral corruption at the core of the British establishment, that most basic wrong of treating other people like things. The women and girls impacted just playthings for an unaccountable elite.

The scandal of Mandelson’s frantic back and forth messaging with Epstein at the height of the financial crash is a more traditional sort of corruption — the files also show a payment of £10,000 to Mandelson’s husband, small change given the scale of the gains Epstein and his banking buddies stood to gain if Mandelson really did give them that market-sensitive information.

But who are we to judge? It’s not like Ireland is immune from political corruption — at least, in the past, it seemed to be everywhere.

Back in the day, I did some work adjacent to the Flood tribunal, established in 1997 to investigate planning corruption. It became the longest-running tribunal in the state, later becoming the Mahon tribunal. My job was to help figure out how many bank accounts one Fianna Fáil politician, Ray Burke (also known as Raphael Patrick Burke), had. Burke held many senior ministries over a long career.

Using a combination of three names, Irish and English, plus sometimes an initial, it’s possible to come up with different names. It was a frustrating, time-consuming slog. Burke had undeclared bank accounts, including offshore ones through which substantial sums of money passed. He claimed they were legitimate political donations, an explanation the Flood tribunal rejected, concluding the payments were corrupt. Ultimately, he went to jail for tax offences. He was one of the few to pay a price. The same tribunal found that Padraig Flynn, mentioned above, took £50,000 from developer Tom Gilmartin.

The Flood tribunal was a costly joke. Tribunals generally personify a certain shamelessness on the part of the Irish body politic about not dealing with things, instead burying them in mounds of paper, overly long reports, and toothless bodies that are not courts, while enriching a section of the legal profession. Following this and the Moriarty tribunal, the British media took pleasure in portraying a culture of corruption in Ireland. In some ways, they were right. But we cleaned up our act, a fact acknowledged by international monitoring bodies, including Group of States Against Corruption (Greco).

In December 2025, Greco closed its evaluation of anti-corruption measures in Ireland concerning “MPs”, judges, and prosecutors due to “progress achieved”.

However disappointing Irish politics may appear at times, those scandals appear to have been the pinnacle of that sort of corruption here.

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They pale in comparison to what has been revealed about the high level rot in the British establishment. In an analogy that might please that same British press, they are small potatoes.

An article from the Spectator written by an Irish woman in the UK — being lampooned by one of our own is always worse — came back to me this week. She wrote that Irish people lost our ability to have craic due to our ‘liberal authoritarianism’. I suppose part of her thesis is that we have become wet blankets.

Looking at Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten and Mandelson and their version of having the craic as revealed by those files, I thought, if that’s your definition of fun, you can keep it. Give me the “liberal authoritarians” in the Dáil who were well out of the orbit of this carry-on, unlike high rollers in the UK, Norway, and France.

Behind all of the heated speculation — whether Starmer is a goner, whether “Lord Mandelson” (product of the British ‘honours’ system, every new peerage a hostage to fortune) could face trial — there are faceless young women who were trafficked or abused and live with the consequences.

There is a heartbreaking photo doing the rounds of Virginia Giuffre standing behind a knot of people, including the supermodel Naomi Campbell and Jeffrey Epstein, reportedly on a yacht in St Tropez. She looks so young, so vulnerable, and so alone. She is basically holding the coats, although that would have been the least of her duties.

Virginia Giuffre had the bravery to break the Epstein story, bringing it into the mainstream and taking on a collection of exceptionally powerful people. Her claims were rubbished. She was mocked, vilified, and took her own life.

As the focus tightens on investigations, scandals, and resignations, the victims are again out of focus, out of sight, their abuse minimised once more as we focus on powerful men.