Enda Brady: Latest Mandelson revelations put Starmer's judgement in question

Fresh Epstein allegations expose arrogance, judgement failures and the risks Keir Starmer took by resurrecting Labour’s most controversial fixer

Peter Mandelson (pictured), the former business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, must have thought he had escaped relatively unscathed from the whirlwind of sleaze generated by the Epstein files. File photo

Just what was it that attracted you to the billionaire Mr Epstein? Everyone remembers the laughter that greeted the one-liner Mrs Merton famously used when chatting to Debbie McGee about her husband, the millionaire magician Paul Daniels.

The problem for Peter Mandelson this week is that nobody is laughing in Downing Street and the Metropolitan police are circling amid allegations of misconduct in a public office. The British political establishment is aghast and in shock. Rocked, even.

Mandelson, the former business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, must have thought he had escaped relatively unscathed from the whirlwind of sleaze generated by the Epstein files. That friendship cost him his role as UK ambassador to the United States in September when photos and emails linking the two first emerged.

Mandelson hinted in interviews back then that there was probably more to come, but with the media obsessed with the House of York’s involvement, the headlines soon went away.

When Keir Starmer sacked him, Mandelson made a point of stating how much he regretted that relationship and pointedly mentioned Epstein’s victims in his statement. He’d been forcibly removed twice before from high-profile government roles, so he knew how to handle the media fall-out.

Privately, however, he was fuming, telling friends that he could have ridden out the storm and stayed on as ambassador, dealing with the Trump administration. That says much about the arrogance of the man.

But what has happened in the last 48 hours ramps the pressure up to a whole new level. It takes something seismic to remove the crassness and stupidity of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson from the UK’s front pages, but Mandelson has managed it.

Sharing State secrets

Never mind the cringey pictures of him in his y-fronts with a woman in Epstein’s luxurious Paris apartment, the real issue here — and one that could land him in prison — is the allegation that he forwarded market-sensitive information via email to Epstein.

It was June 2009 and Mandelson — or ‘Petey’ as Epstein called him — was serving as business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government in the midst of a global financial crisis. Information that was meant for the PM and his inner circle was landing in the paedophile’s inbox within minutes.

What a hold Epstein had on Mandelson that he would betray his leader and his country at such a time of national crisis. For someone like Epstein who made oceans of cash dealing with the richest people in the world, that information was effectively a licence to print even more of it.

Epstein even knew that Brown was going to resign, way before anyone else did because his friend ‘Petey’ had emailed him.

“Finally got him to go today,” read the email, in May 2010. Brown duly resigned as British prime minister a few hours later.

Mandelson says he has no idea whether $75,000 was sent to him by Epstein, as the latest dump of files suggest. He says he’ll have to do some investigating, but I’m not buying that. 

No matter how much money you have, you’d surely have noticed a figure that large just randomly dropping into your bank account. (For comparison, the salary of an MP last year was just shy of £94,000).

He does, however, acknowledge that $10,000 was sent from the billionaire to his Brazilian husband Reinaldo to pursue a course in osteopathy. Epstein must have been laughing at the return he was getting on what amounted to little more than loose change to him.

'The smell won’t go away'

So what now for Mandelson, the big beast of Labour politics and the architect of ‘New Labour’ in the ‘90s? Starmer has already said that he must be removed from Britain's House of Lords, but the mechanism for doing so is arcane and hasn’t been used since the First World War.

There are also questions for Starmer and his right-hand Cork man Morgan McSweeney. What does it say about their judgement that they brought Mandelson back into the fold in the first place?

The rationale for bringing him in from the cold was that Britain needed a big beast to schmooze Trump and his administration and to get deals done.

The Washington DC ambassadorial role is the prized plum of UK overseas appointments and the feeling at the highest level in London was that Mandelson was so accustomed to dealing with big personalities that he could easily handle Trump and Vance.

He had decades of experience of dealing with the egos of Tony Blair and Brown and the ensuing personality clashes (referred to in Labour circles back then as outbreaks of the ‘TBGBs’).

So as cringingly embarrassing as this now is for Mandelson, Starmer and McSweeney have unwittingly set themselves up for blowback from not just the Conservatives and Reform UK, but the British public too. An immensely unpopular PM has just added another negative to the growing list.

Mandelson’s most recent interview saw him describe Epstein as being “like dog muck, the smell won’t go away”. He’s not wrong.

While Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage will take this latest gift and run and run with it, the real problem for Mandelson now is the looming threat of police involvement. Losing a lordship title he can live with, but the prospect of jail time is something he must barely ever have countenanced.

Peter Mandelson resigning from the British Labour Party following renewed scrutiny over his links to Jeffrey Epstein in 2000. File photo: Paul Sharp/RollingNews.ie

Detectives in Scotland Yard are said to be looking at these latest allegations to see if they meet the threshold to spark a formal investigation into claims of misconduct in public office. Those emails make a compelling case.

And so it all ends in disgrace for Mandelson, after a 40-year political career. The man who transformed Labour into an election-winning force, ended Conservative rule, brought Blair and Brown to the gates of Downing Street and artfully danced his way through British and international politics and all the personalities and crises in between.

‘Petey’ came back from the political dead twice, but this time round the stench of that friendship with Epstein will be as impossible to shake as the ‘dog muck’ he recently spoke of in his last interview.

The way things are looking, his next interview may well be with police detectives.