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The Political Fallout from the UK’s Mandelson-gate Scandal Has Only Just Begun

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One thing is already clear: Peter Mandelson (aka the Prince of Darkness) is now a spent force in British politics. 

The most high-profile casualty so far of the recent data dump of more than 3 million Epstein files is Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, who is sometimes endearingly referred to as the “Prince of Darkness”. Together with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Mandelson was one of the three main founders of the New Labour project in the late 1990s — a project that is now in its final death throes.

The leaked files not only confirm that Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein had continued, and even flourished, after the financier’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, but also reveal the extent to which he was willing to betray his own government and country in order to curry favour with Epstein and Wall Street.

In 2009, Mandelson gave Jeffrey Epstein advance notice of a €500 billion bailout to save the Euro.

That information could, and probably was, used for the purpose of insider trading, including quite possibly by Epstein’s personal bank of choice, JP Morgan Chase. A NYT investigation revealed in December that the US’ largest lender “spent years supporting — and profiting from — the notorious sex offender.”

In June 2009, as the dust from the Global Financial Crisis was still settling, Mandelson sent Epstein a Downing Street memo on a £20 billion asset sale, with a comment: “interesting note that’s gone to the PM.” A year later, he even gave him advance notice of Gordon Brown’s resignation as prime minister, saying: “Finally got him to go today”.

The leaked emails also reveal the role Mandelson played as UK business secretary lobbying on behalf of Epstein and JPM to soften bank reforms on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. At one point, he even suggested to Epstein that JPM CEO Jamie Dimon should “threaten” the UK Treasury over its proposed taxes on banker bonuses.

From The Banker:

The correspondence shows Mandelson, then UK business secretary, agreeing to press Larry Summers, head of Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, to meet JPMorgan executives including [Jes Staley, then-chief executive at JPM’s investment bank division and Epstein’s point man at the bank] to discuss the lender’s opposition to US proposals to tighten banking regulation through the Volcker reforms.

Epstein urged Mandelson to intervene directly, writing: “I would like you to ask Larry Summers if he would meet directly with Jes.” Mandelson replied: “I can say this to him.”

Emails and internal government memos indicate that Mandelson sought and used talking points supplied by Staley in his discussions with Summers, the FT reported. The documents also show that he shared confidential UK government readouts of high level meetings with Epstein.

A Spent Force

One of the few positives to come out of the resulting scandal is that Mandelson is now surely a spent force in British politics. Granted, this is the third time he has had to resign in disgrace, but this scandal is of a whole different magnitude. It is about something far darker than political corruption and venality; it is about the systematic use and sexual abuse of minors for the benefit not only of the rich and powerful but also of political Zionism.

As the veteran journalist Peter Oborne writes for in an excellent article for Middle East Eye, the Epstein files “shed light on a deeply corrupt system of government that functions in the interests of criminal elites, who believe that they have no obligation to obey the laws that constrain ordinary voters.”

Mandelson has already stepped down from the House of Lords and will now face a criminal investigation over his possible misconduct while in public office, which may well lead nowhere. Meanwhile, both the Keir Starmer government and the broader political and media establishment in the UK are in a state of disarray and denial.

Starmer appointed Mandelson as UK ambassador to the United States in full knowledge of Mandelson’s ties to Esptein and other transgressions. The Daily Mail reported in September that Mandelson, as a political appointee, had not faced the standard security vetting for senior diplomats. At Mandelson’s inauguration ceremony, Starmer could barely contain his glee.

According to the Daily Mail article, it was Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a former Mandelson protege, who insisted on taking direct control of the recruitment process:

According to senior diplomatic sources, the Foreign Office was largely cut out of it all as Mr McSweeney pushed for the appointment.

The incoming Trump administration had wanted [the then-ambassador, Karen] Pierce to stay in post for at least another year… The US officials argued that if Ms Pierce was not going to have her tenure extended then the job should go to MI6 boss Sir Richard Moore, who, a source said pointedly, ‘could actually be trusted with sensitive material.’

However, in an echo of the so-called Dodgy Dossier which paved the way to war in Iraq, sources claim that the objections were watered down [in the final report].

In the end, Mandelson was forced to resign as ambassador in September as the scale of his involvement with Epstein became impossible to ignore or conceal.

In the clip below, Labour MP Richard Burgon argues, quite convincingly, that one of the main reasons why Mandelson was given the job, despite his sordid past, was as payback for the central role he had played in orchestrating former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s demise. In 2017, Mandelson famously said he was working “every single day’ to bring [Corbyn] down”:

In that endeavour, Mandelson and his fellow Blairites were able to count on the unyielding support of the British press as well as Israeli lobby groups like Labour Friends of Israel, which were terrified of the idea of a pro-Palestinian prime minister ever taking office in the UK. As Peter Oborne writes in his excellent article, “Vanishingly few politicians have stood outside [the corrupt system that Mandelson embodies]. The most notable was Jeremy Corbyn.”

The Damage Done

Starmer may have issued a public apology (see below), but the damage, it seems, is already done. When Mandelson was appointed, it was already public knowledge that he had stayed at Epstein’s New York townhouse while Epstein served out his prison sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor. That in and of itself should have disqualified him from any public role, particularly one of such import.

Also, as Philip Pilkington points out in the tweet below, Mandelson was not just part of the liberal establishment in Britain; he WAS the liberal establishment in Britain. This is why the fallout from this scandal has only just begun.

It’s not as if the Starmer government is in any position to weather a political crisis of this magnitude. For months, Starmer has been polling as the most unpopular prime minister on record. As Oborne writes, the party Starmer leads is a husk of its former self:

It is no longer a vehicle of the left. It has broken its relations with the trade unions, becoming a vehicle for the billionaires who today own British (and world) politics.

Ideologically and practically, Starmer’s Labour is closer to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform than to Harold Wilson’s Labour Party of the 1960s.

Though others bear a share of responsibility, Mandelson can claim with justification that he, more than anyone else, has turned Labour into what it has become today.

Through charm and force of personality, he hypnotised three Labour prime ministers: Blair, Brown and now Starmer. Through them, he turned Labour from the party of the working class into a party of the rich.

This meant forging alliances with the big newspaper groups, especially the Murdoch media, while taking Labour’s traditional supporters for granted. This strategy worked in the short term by securing three victories in the polls for Blair – hence Mandelson’s reputation as a political genius.

Greed and self-interest

Yet over time, Mandelson hollowed out the party, causing millions of voters to defect to Reform or to insurgent groups on the left.

This was a strategy that left Labour infatuated by power, obsessed with money and bereft of values. Hence the fundamental Mandelson paradox: an individual who loved billionaires joined the party of the working class.

Of course, it wasn’t just Mandelson who developed a love of billionaires during his time in office. His close friend and former boss, Tony Blair, was also besotted by the riches of the business and financial elites with whom he liaised as prime minister. When he left politics, Blair was quick to cash in, securing advisory roles for JPM and Swiss-based insurer Zurich International.

Blair would go on to amass huge sums of money as well as a £39 million property empire. For a man who, in his own words, is “not interested in money,” Blair has an incredible knack of attracting it.

Today, Blair has secured himself a place on Trump’s Board of Peace which, as former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy explained in an interview with Declassified UK, “continues to create new layers of a permissive environment for the continued destruction [of Gaza]”:

What is going on is not rebuilding. What is going on on the ground in Beit Hanoon and Rafa is finishing the job of making sure there is nothing.

It is not clear who paid the $1 billion contribution fee to secure Blair permanent membership of the Trump-led board. But there are plenty of potential contenders, including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is already the largest donor to Blair’s eponymous foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

If Blair (aka Teflon Tony), rather than Starmer, was prime minister right now, he might find a way of wiggling out of the current predicament. But Starmer has neither Blair’s eloquence nor his political acumen, as the following clip makes abundantly clear.

Another problem Starmer faces is that his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who helped engineer Corbyn’s downfall as well as Starmer’s electoral triumph in 2024, also happens to be a Mandelson protegé. If McSweeney falls, it’s hard to see Starmer surviving for long, especially given his vertiginous disapproval ratings. But who would replace him?

Labour’s neo-Blairite health secretary, Wes Streeting, recently seemed poised to mount a leadership challenge, but he has also been soiled through his close association to Mandelson. Plus, he is about as soulless and characterless as Starmer.

Another possible successor is — or at least, was — Manchester City Mayor Andy Burnham, but he would need to become a member of parliament to be able to run as Labour leader. And the Labour Party just blocked him from being able to stand as a candidate for the upcoming parliamentary by-election in Gorton and Denton — a move that Oborne describes as a “mortal error” — akin to “a dying man refusing to call an ambulance”.

In other words, there is no clear successor. Meanwhile, the party is haemorrhaging support and even fawning presstitutes like Andrew Marr are calling time on Starmer’s premiership.

The Epstein-Mandelson-Palantir connection 

One possible silver lining from Mandelson-gate is that Palantir’s massive expansion of UK operations is finally getting the attention it deserves — and not a moment too soon. As readers may recall, one of Mandelson’s few “accomplishments” during his brief tenure as UK ambassador to the US was to arrange a visit for Starmer to Palantir’s facilities in Washington.

As we noted at the time, the visit immediately sparked accusations of conflicts of interests:

Palantir is a long-standing client of Global Counsel, the lobbying company Mandelson co-founded during his time out of politics. Now that he’s back, Mandelson may have stepped down as chairman of Global Counsel but still retains “significant control,” according to Companies House.

Palantir UK’s chief executive, Louis Mosley, the grandson of Britain’s most famous fascist, Oswald Mosley, who was also in attendance, said Starmer “gets” Palantir — hardly a surprise given Starmer’s authoritarian impulses. From Politics Home:

Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir UK, met Keir Starmer that day. “You could see in his eyes that he gets it,” he tells The House from Palantir’s London office, in his first sit-down interview since joining the tech giant eight years ago. “The ambition is there – the will is there.”

The Prime Minister has described AI as the “defining opportunity” of the age. With economic growth at a standstill, Labour has rested its hopes of becoming an “AI superpower” in Palantir’s hands.

In 2023, the government awarded Palantir a £330m contract to manage NHS data, facing opposition from the British Medical Academy, patient groups and privacy campaigners.

But its rate of adoption since has been startling. Palantir is now being used across the NHS, Ministry of Defence (MoD) the Metropolitan Police and local authorities…

Palantir is not only closely tied to Mandelson but also features prominently in the latest Epstein files drop. It is now clear that Palantir co-founder and Chair Peter Thiel maintained a business relationship with Epstein from 2014 to the paedophile’s final arrest in 2019. Email exchanges reveal that Thiel repeatedly met with Epstein after the latter’s conviction for child sex offences and cultivating a relationship of scheduled meals, calls and linkups.

The leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski is now calling for Palantir’s most controversial contract in the UK, to manage the NHS’s federated data platform, to be rescinded. Digital rights groups are demanding that all details of Mandelson’s ties with Palantir be released.

If Mandelson-gate does bring greater scrutiny to bear on Palantir’s role in the UK’s public sector, that can only be a good thing — especially in light of the Home Secretary’s recent shocking admission that the government is developing a digital panopticon, with the assistance of companies like Palantir.

Whitney Webb, author of One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, warns that Palantir is essentially the new Jeffrey Epstein:

Lastly, on the topic of who exactly is behind Epstein, the British media (and parts of the US media) are twisting themselves into a pretzel as they try to make the case that it was Putin’s Russia — despite the fact that Vladimir Putin was seemingly one of the few national heads of state or government to have never met Epstein.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room, Epstein’s blatant ties to the State of Israel, are being systematically ignored and obfuscated. This is despite the fact that in one of the leaked documents the FBI appears to confirm that it was Alan Dershowitz who told Alex Acosta, then US attorney of the Southern District of Florida, that Epstein “belonged to both Israeli and allied intelligence.” There’s even a photo of Epstein earing an IDF sweatshirt:

Despite the lack of any real substance or logic behind the allegations, media outlets in the UK , and then more broadly across the West, have been falling over themselves to portray Epstein as a Russian agent while doing their damnedest to ignore the elephant in the room.

Arguably the most absurd example of this trend came from Murdoch-owned Sky News, which claimed in a report that a newly released voice recording appears to show Epstein advising an unknown person on how to approach President Vladimir Putin. That “unknown person”, as X readers pointed out, was almost certainly former Israeli prime minister and Mossad chief Ehud Barak, who was extremely close to, and in constant communication with, Epstein.

Then there’s this little snag in the narrative:

Things just keep getting weirder…

The most bizarre aspect of this collective media effort to protect Israel from public scrutiny of its role in the Epstein scandal is that any British citizen or resident who uses social media to inform themselves can learn about it with relative ease. And it is mainly the younger generations that will end up doing that. Perhaps that’s why the political class in the collective West are so desperate to put an end to online privacy and anonymity.

While the legacy media in the West seems willing to destroy what remains of their reputation among the generations of the future in order to protect Israel, the political fallout from Mandelson-gate has only just begun. As Oborne notes, “Starmer’s Labour, Kemi Badenoch’s Tories, and the oligarch media are all part of the system that functions in the interests of criminal elites.” Mandelson was the perfect embodiment of that system.

For that reason alone, Mandelson’s demise should be celebrated. Yet one should be mindful that while the Epstein scandal has exposed the rot at the heart of the political, business and media establishment in the collective West, it also reveals why the oligarch class is so desperate to build an AI-powered surveillance and control grid through the development of so-called digital public infrastructure (DPI) like digital identity and central bank digital currencies.

Our current system of managed democracy is no longer fit for (their) purpose. If we are not careful, it will soon give way to a system of techno feudalism in which we will have no personal privacy, anonymity or autonomy. The digital panopticon is under construction — not just in the UK but just about everywhere. As Webb warned in November, the only way to stop it is to opt out of AI, digital ID and the surveillance state that Epstein associates built — while we still can.

 

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3 comments

  1. HH

    Social structures built on lies and treachery are intrinsically unstable. It is highly unlikely that the squabbling pack of global billionaires will engineer a dystopia that preserves their privileges. The next Epstein will fall in a similar manner as the world grows increasingly transparent. As alternative media displaces the oligarch media, the whole world will be watching the dirty doings of corrupt power.,

    Reply ↓
  2. Henry Moon Pie

    Wow, just wow. No wonder the world’s so screwed up.

    One little edit point. I think you mean Jamie Dimon, not Matt (Damon?). Funny how our brains work. Maybe Matt Damon will play Jamie Dimon in a future tell-all mini-series because Dimon has risen through the ranks with the help of some of the sleaziest characters around–and that’s saying something.

    Reply ↓
    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      Oh, my days, that’s a big un. Thanks for the correction, Henry.

      Don’t know if you’ve seen Margin Call, but I always thought the young ambitious bank exec played by Simon Baker was the spitting image of Jamie Dimon, which I always found curious given the role JPM played in pushing Lehman Brothers over the edge by draining it of cash in its biggest moment of need, for which it paid a $1.42bn fine in 2016.

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