Still “a fighter, not a quitter” and ever the spin doctor, Peter Mandelson is getting his defence of his unwise and lingering friendship with Jeffrey Epstein in early.
Mandelson seems to know – maybe tipped off, maybe that feline sixth sense of his, maybe from his own memories – that there is stuff in the Epstein files yet to be released that, as he himself admits, will be gruesome. He told The Sun: “I have no doubt at all that there’s a lot of traffic, correspondence, exchanges between us, absolutely. And we know those are going to surface. We know they’re going to come out. We know they’re going to be very embarrassing, and [we] know that I’m going to profoundly regret ever having met him and been introduced to him in the first place. But I can’t rewrite history.”
Massaging expectations, then, if you’ll pardon the expression – and, as it happens, Britain’s ambassador to the US seems to be having quite a good go at rewriting history. In his interview with Harry Cole, Mandelson makes some implausible suggestions. For example, he seems to think that his status as a gay man exempts him from any suspicion regarding what Epstein was up to – “All the time I was an associate of his, I never saw the wrongdoing. I never saw any evidence of criminal activity. I never sought, nor did he offer, any introductions to women in the way that allegedly he did for others.”
This does sound a little too much like when Prince Andrew, in a less successful broadcast interview with Emily Maitlis, pleaded that he hadn’t noticed a number of nubile young women flitting around the Epstein mansion in their underwear. Even if Mandelson didn’t “see” anything and didn’t attend any orgies, that doesn’t necessarily mean he would not have had a shrewd idea of what might be occurring not so very far away.
But, as Cole pointedly asks him, why did he stay in Epstein’s home even after Epstein had been convicted and jailed for soliciting prostitution from a minor? The answer, as Mandelson puts it, is that he was “conned”. He says: “I regret very much that I fell for his lies. I fell for and accepted assurances that he had given me about his indictment, his original criminal case in Florida.” Thus, it seems as though one of the most sophisticated and smart operators in British politics, and now diplomacy, over a period of about 40 years, is asking us to consider him akin to the frail victim of a phishing scam. Pushing it a bit there, Peter.
As an aside, what I find most disquieting in the 10-page handwritten birthday greeting Mandelson prepared for his “best pal” is the description of how much he looked forward to seeing Epstein “in one of his glorious homes he likes to share with his friends (yum yum)”. Rarely have two words carried more creepily unspoken meaning.
The more we see of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein, the more it should remind us of Prince Andrew’s association with him, and for similar reasons. As in the case of Andrew, much of the revulsion derives from what we know about Epstein’s sexual crimes, but we also know there was luxury, splendour, money swilling around.
Despite Mandelson claiming that “we didn’t do any business together”, it also seems that Mandelson, as business secretary in 2008, did have some involvement in a billion-dollar deal between the British government and JPMorgan for the latter to take over part of the nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland – an arrangement in which Epstein acted as a sort of broker.
Both Andrew and Mandelson have been badly damaged by their association with Epstein, and both basically say they were not aware of his wrongdoing, or believed his excuses, and kick themselves that they didn’t cut him dead after his initial conviction. Both have used interviews to explain themselves, with varying levels of success.
The main difference seems to be that, as the latest biography of the Duke of York by Andrew Lowndie makes clear, Andrew isn’t the brightest of men and could easily have been manipulated by Epstein to such an extent that, in his infamous 2019 interview with Newsnight, he said he still didn’t “regret” being Epstein’s friend. The other difference is that Andrew has had to become a virtual recluse, and has lost the regular use of the title His Royal Highness. Mandelson, at least for now, is still enjoying the perks of the ambassador’s role in America.
Mandelson, it’s only right to add, does “very, very deeply” regret the friendship – something that should be recognised. However, he does not suffer from the same naivety as Prince Andrew does, and he cannot use that as an explanation or any kind of excuse. Mandelson even now says: “Like very many people, I took at face value what he said; with hindsight, with fresh information, many years later, we realised that we had been wrong to believe in him as a charismatic, criminal liar.”
The question remains: how did it come to be that Mandelson could be deceived in such a way? Did he perhaps suspend his own critical faculties in such agreeable surroundings? These are, in fact, questions that Keir Starmer needs to ask, with some urgency, of one of his most senior colleagues. The prime minister needs to decide if he is going to fight to keep Mandelson in post, or ask him to quit.
