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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 controlled drop of more than 3 million Epstein files by the US Justice Department 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 now appears to be in its final death throes.

The leaked files not only confirm that Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein had not just continued but 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 Vladimir Putin’s Russia — despite the fact that Putin was seemingly one of the relatively 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.”

The FBI document also records the suspicion that Epstein was directly trained by the Mossad. The documents dump evens includes a photo of Epstein wearing an IDF sweatshirt:

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

This tweet nicely encapsulates the brain-melting absurdity of the “Esptein = Russian asset” narrative the media are trying to peddle:

The most bizarre aspect of this collective media effort to protect Israel from public scrutiny of its central role in the Epstein scandal is that any British citizen or resident who uses social media to inform themselves can learn all 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 drive a stake through 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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40 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.,

    1. tegnost

      Unfortunately palantir et al are doing gods work making certain it all stays opaque. The mind boggles at the possible extent of back room deals, most of which we have not and may never be informed of.
      As to being sanguine, two people have been killed by a masked paramilitary and nothing is being done as the dems are just as committed to globalism and police state…maybe even more committed…remember mandelson is UK’s version of any one of a number of corrupt democrats.
      We knew the repubs wouldn’t save us and the dems are probably worse for their back handed dealings, a glimmer of which are exposed in this mandelson affair. I don’t think it’s a given we make it out of this craptastic carnival.

    2. barefoot charley

      I appreciate your optimism but can’t share it. Alternative media flourish today like never before–and so they are ever more systematically choked by our ‘last-mile’ media before delivery. These recent years were similar to the late 1960s when media accidentally showed some truth about the Vietnam war, because journalists were embedded with troops without the censor safeguards innovated ever since, perfected by Israelis but practiced everywhere. While oligarchs contended over who bought what, for a time social media delivered uncurated sites of interest to consumer eyeballs. That window is slamming shut. (Ask Palestine advocates.)

      Kids turned against Israel because of Gaza genocide info from TikTok. That window is closed. (Ask Ellison.) Our leaders warned that Chinese TikTok was a security threat because of the info it would steal from us. Whoopsie-doodle–their actual threat was the info it delivered. Window closed.

    3. Tom Hall

      There is another unfortunate consequence to be considered. As these feudal barons fall out among themselves and wage every kind of war to secure power in what’s revealed to be a zero sum game on a zero sum planet, everything is wrecked beyond our power to survive. I think that’s too pessimistic, but the expectation that alternative media will play a decisive role in how things develop is quixotic. I remember when “the whole world is watching” was the watchword on many a lip, yet the war ground on in Southeast Asia year after year after year. The whole world is watching now, or has been, in Gaza, and no letup is in sight. Certainly, alternative media have a role to play. But merely seeing is not transforming. It may even in the end be so dispiriting that strength and energy are lost when nothing changes. We may come to a point where we know everything we need to know, yet that knowledge contributes to our powerlessness.

  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.

    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.

      1. John Webster

        I spotted Matt Damon/Jamie Dimon (puke) confusion too – but this is such a great article I resisted the urge to gloat. It should be widely circulated – it has everything of relevance in it – particularly the stuff by Whitney Webb. When I first came across her I thought she was freaky, but she is spot on…a new form of surveillance is being constructed. This is what the digital ID was/is all about. I would trust it in China (because you know where you stand) but I wouldn’t trust it at all in ‘the west’.

          1. Ben Panga

            I’ll repost the two Whitney Webb links I put in links yesterday.

            1. She has explicitly encouraged people to download her book “One Nation Under Blackmail: vols 1 & 2” for free from archive.org . There are 6 different uploads of it, I’m not sure which has the best formatting which is often an issue for me with archive.org books.

            2. Long podcast interview covering Epstein from Sept 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwejUh3m9Fg

            And a puzzle: Webb has a huge AI fake video issue. If you search for her on YouTube almost all the results are AI slop cutups. The effect is to make her real stuff quite hard to find. I’m trying to think of a party with both motivation and a long history of muddying the online waters… /S

    1. nycTerrierist

      Agreed, excellent overview! and as for the US,
      renewed concern re: Thiel’s creature J.D. Vance

    2. JMH

      Why am I skeptical that there will be a US version? I want there to be one. I would not be averse to the whole slimy lot of them being removed to a far off place. There are some perfectly lovely Antarctic Islands that might serve nicely. In one of Robert Heinlein’s stories there is a reservation called Coventry, a large area in the American west that is fenced off with futuristic means that is almost impenetrable — almost provides the drama, we need not have it so. You get the idea. But for starters empty out the House and Senate. Pick their replacements by drawing lots in each state. Someone once proposed the phone book but that is so yesterday. But however, no computers. No digital anything. Do the same with the Supreme Court. Clean sweep. Suggest that the president and vice president might consider resigning — let the new speaker of the house act as president. New elections — but I fantasize — still, something has to end this charade of a government. Something needs run the idea of techno-feudalism, fascism with total surveillance, off the road.

      1. Yalt

        Philip K Dick’s first published novel has a world leader selected by lottery. An assassin is also selected by lottery, whose task is to kill the leader, with the pursuit televised to entertain the masses. When the assassin’s successful, there’s another lottery.

        Needless to say, the lottery turns out not to be random, somebody has control of the process. A 1950s version of a techno-feudalist, naturally.

    3. DJG, Reality Czar

      Mark Gisleson and nycTerrierist: From your keyboard to the gods’ and goddesses’ ears.

      Yet if Fcbk is any indication, what I am seeing among USanians is lots of Trump Derangement Syndrome — people counting the references to Trump. And USanians have been conditioned by the Clinton Diehards to look for Putin under the bed.

      I wonder if the U.K. is lucky to have some vestiges of left-wing politics and some, few traditional conservatives (lowercase c).

      The U S of A is left with a thoroughly bought-and-paid-for House of Representatives. The Senate is all preening vanity and blather.

      Where is the impetus for wrecking the U.S. elites going to come from?

      1. Mark Gisleson

        I think the D’s are entirely focused on creating opportunities for unrest that could result in canceled elections.

        My only proof for this is that the usual suspects are suddenly writing stories/narratives about how Trump is maneuvering to cancel the fall elections.

  4. The Rev Kev

    Always thought it strange that Mendelson was appointed the UK Ambassador to Washington when at the time they really did not want him in DC. I guess that for his own reasons the Mendelson wanted that post and ordered Starmer to make it so. There must be an element of satisfaction on Jeremy Corbyn’s part right now to see Mendelson going down in flames and perhaps he is thinking of that Japanese adage that if you wait by a river long enough, that you will see the bodies of your enemies float by. The guys at The Duran are saying that as Mendelson goes down, that Keri Starmer will be dragged down as well-

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC4NMqLdmO8 (28:49 mins)

    At this stage the question of who will replace him is almost irrelevant. Both the Tories and Labour have made sure to eliminate any competent leaders and have salted the earth to boot. Whichever non-entity replaces Starmer will only be a place holder and may not even survive long.

    1. Ben Panga

      Am I too tinfoily?

      Assume Starmer goes down and Rayner becomes leader. There will be a lot of pressure on her to call an election. If she’s foolish enough to do so Reform will stroll to power.

      Now, let’s look at the source of the document’s: Trump’s DOJ. They have released only a fraction of the total files, and one would assume they are being intentional in who gets burned by the releases. I’m sure Trump and crew would be overjoyed to see Starmer out and Reform in.

      Job done!

      1. David

        Rayner has had her own corruption issue, few months later and she is getting allowed back into place.

        Starmer’s excuse that he would not have let Mandleson become ambassador if he had known all the Epstein details stinks. Largely because Mandelson had already been kicked out of government twice for corruption. Apparently that was ok. But again starmer has been found to be corrupt and that is a ok.

        I’m not sure Farage and his gang will have as easy a time of it as the media is pushing. A buelection in scotland and one in wales were both predicted by the media to be massive wins for Reform and they performed poorly in reality. Be interesting to see if the next byelection in england goes the same way.

    2. Michaelmas

      Rev Kev: Both the Tories and Labour have made sure to eliminate any competent leaders and have salted the earth to boot.

      Maybe, but that’s icing on the cake. The reality is, there didn’t need to be a conscious program to do that on either side. Rather, it was done by the neoliberal system, which itself selects for professional politicians who have in many cases done nothing but politics since their student days — forex, Streeting — and who see their roles as being not to actually govern but to rubber-stamp whatever their corporate owners want.

      Add to that the lower payoffs for professional UK politicians as compared to the US, and the odds against anyone having a successful, profitable career by becoming a cabinet minister or health secretary etc., and smart people in the UK don’t become politicians. It’s become a system effectively designed to select for the mediocrities and sub-mediocrities we now see.

      Rev Kev: Whichever non-entity replaces Starmer will only be a place holder and may not even survive long.

      Very likely. Recall, though, that Putin was reckoned a compliant placeholder, vetted by both MI6 and CIA as “a man we could do business with” when he was installed to replace Yeltsin. Likewise, Lyndon Johnson was never reckoned to push through the Civil Rights Act and every one of his fellow Southern senators felt mortally betrayed when he did. It’s only through retrospective accounting by the likes of Caro that we understand that Johnson got into politics with precisely such aims and strategically hid them till he gained power.

      In other words, when the transformation comes and the political leader appears who breaks with the old order it’ll likely be someone who all the previously existing establishment previously reckoned was “a safe pair of hands.”

      Who and what it won’t be is someone like Corbyn who’s been in parliament since 1984 — since 1984, FFS — and in all those forty-two years has achieved absolutely nothing except appear at every possible demonstration where he can do a performance of radical politics that he can.

    1. Sean Gorman

      Agreed. Feudalism had obligations going both ways, fascist states have no obligation to their citizens.

  7. Carolinian

    Time for the guillotines yet? With a gerontocracy that insists on feet first exit, lifetime appointments it may be the only way.

    Not that concerns about corruption are new since watchers of old movies know that they were a theme of American films in the 1930s and 40s. It’s the theme of perhaps the best American film of the time, Citizen Kane. That generation was dominated by the miseries of the Great Depression and very receptive to tales of elite misbehavior.

    Here in the 21st we aren’t there yet, but ethics may yet make a comeback–if the planet itself survives.

    1. samm

      And not only to politicos. The media talking heads have to go too. The fact they would rather attempt to make Epstein into a fake Russian asset rather than report the real crimes of the elite says everything about them that needs to be known. They need to be next in line for said guillotine.

  8. Aurelien

    A couple of points at the beginning are worth underlining.

    First, Mandelson seems to have leaked the contents of confidential British government documents and conversations to foreigners, and to people who were not entitled to know them. Now I’m aware that there are people here who defend leakers and “whistle-blowers”, but I can’t believe that the most resolute anti-secrecy activist would approve of Mandelson’s behaviour, not least because he profited personally from his actions. Laws exist in every country against unauthorised disclosure of official documents, and as far as I can see, Mandelson has broken those of the UK. Possibly some way will be found of not prosecuting him, but given the nature of the evidence it’s going to be difficult. Moreover, the careless way in which he did this, using a Blackberry phone, suggests that he was supremely confident, or very stupid. Perhaps both.

    Second, his nomination as Ambassador seems even less comprehensible. The idea that “as a political appointee, (he) had not faced the standard security vetting for senior diplomats” is ludicrous. Every Foreign Office official likely to go places would have been thoroughly investigated several times already in their career before they were in line for a senior Ambassadorship (the same is true of many other Departments.) These investigations are time-consuming, extremely intrusive and cover all aspects of your personal and professional life. The kind of jobs Mandelson had perviously had would not have demanded such investigations, but the Washington post is one of the top handful in the Diplomatic Service, and the Ambassador basically sees everything and discusses the most sensitive issues with the host government. There’s no way he could just have been waved through as a “political appointee.” In fact, the simplest check would have shown that he was vulnerable to all sorts of pressure, which is what these investigations are intended to turn up. But there’s also the reputational risk to the Embassy and the UK, and even cursory enquiries would have shown that that risk was bound to be extremely high. How they wound up in this situation, I really can’t imagine. I can only assume the system doesn’t function any more.

    1. bold'un

      ” I really can’t imagine. I can only assume the system doesn’t function any more”

      I suspect their imagination was [ Trump will understand ;) ] & [Trump will block publication].

      One conclusion: if anyone is going to do bad stuff, it’s really stupid to do it on email…

    2. Revenant

      “Is he a Zionist of negotiable other principles and loyalties?”
      “Yes.”
      “Send him over!”

      Bonus question: “Does he look good in silk stockings?”

    3. Michaelmas

      Agreed on all points.

      Except this: How they wound up in this situation, I really can’t imagine. I can only assume the system doesn’t function any more

      If the system simply didn’t function any more, the default action of the most poorly performing civil servants and intelligence services left to themselves would have been to do the safe thing and reject Mandelson, given his previous history of dismissals, corruption allegations, etc.

      So, Mandelson’s appointment required strong and continuing pressure to prevent the system from defaulting into rejecting him, and that pressure would have to have been exerted forcefully from above — that is, 10 Downing Street and whatever Blairite figures still have strong pull.

      However the details play from here, therefore, Starmer is politically a dead man walking, and deservedly so. More than that, this was corruption on a scale that arguably outdoes the previous Tory government and from a Labour government that’s already been comically corrupt with:
      An Anti-corruption Minister in the Treasury, Tulip Siddiq, who resigned over an anti-corruption investigation taking place against her in Bangladesh; ·
      A Homelessness Minister, Rushanara Ali, who quit after excessive rent hikes at properties where she was landlord;
      A Transport Minister (ex-police) who resigned over lying to Police in a historic theft case; ·
      Angela Raynor, Housing Minister, who resigned after she was caught not paying sufficient stamp duty on a house purchase.

      Thus, both political enemies and enterprising journalists are likely to ask the next question and start digging into Starmer’s history as Queen’s Counsel in 2002, Director of Public Prosecutions and head of Crown Prosecution. This scandal is likely have legs and keep running, whatever the establishment would wish.

      1. Michaelmas

        Pursuant to the above, here’s how far Starmer, McSweeney, and co. may have pushed the system to get Mandelson appointed —

        UK civil servant Sue Gray spent much of her time in the Cabinet Office and later as Second Permanent Secretary enforcing standards, investigating ministerial behaviour, and had a rep for stopping or scrutinizing questionable actions by politicians, as with the Partygate investigation of Boris Johnson.

        Here’s her timeline with Starmer: ‘Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition’ from September 2023 5 July 2024, became Downing Street Chief of Staff from 5 July 2024 till 6 October 2024, when she left after losing a fight with Morgan McSweeney.

        Gray was made a member of the House of Lords on February 4, 2025. Starmer then appointed Mandelson as ambassador to Washington on February 10, 2025.

        So, based on that timeline, it’s reasonable to surmise that the fight Starmer and McSweeney had with Gray was at least partly over her resistance to appointing Mandelson, that she was forced out over it, and then her silence was bought with a peerage.

        These are remarkably stupid people with Starmer in Downing Street.

  9. Balan ARoxdale

    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.

    It is for precisely this reason that I view the Mandelson/Palantir/Israel revelations as an ultimately ephemeral affair. The media will do double time to baffle and disperse this in every direction. There will be no serious will within the UK political class to break from US or Israeli networks. Expecting it to come from the likes of Starmer, Streeting, Badenoch or Farage is delusional. They will put on a show and nothing more. What little will remains in the backbenches will be smothered in the face of coming economic problems and IMF bailouts and associated levers of control.

    I have said it before, but I think the UK is destined to end up like on of the Arab regiemes. Poor and under political, technocratic, technological and cultural control of foreign interests in the US and Israel who dictate foreign policy, and leave domestic affairs in the hands of largely criminal compradors. I see no major reform or revolutionary group seriously taking hold within the UK political class, certainly not after what happened to Jeremy Corbyn. Breaking out from under foreign control would require a political and cultural revolution that the UK security (sub-contracted) services would never permit. Saudi and Jordan are more likely to flip than the UK.

    Mandelson will blow over and business will carry on, downhill, as usual. Corruption is a stubborn, apparently terminal, habit for a political system to break.

  10. lyman alpha blob

    Regarding the attempt to tie Epstein to Russia –

    A while ago I was able to trace a lot of these anti-Putin rumors (corrupt oligarch, richest man in the world, huge personal places, etc ) back to Bill Browder, one of the Western financiers who looted Russia in the 90s and then fled once Russia went after him for massive tax evasion. Browder then had a massive axe to grind with Putin and started the smear campaign. Browder’s accountant was Magnitsky, and his death in a Russian prison led to the US passing the bogus Magnitsky Act. Browder clearly has some pull.

    So just for a lark I did a quick search on Epstein and Bill Browder. I was not at all surprised to find this – https://xcancel.com/fredomhauer/status/2017514973996396635

    “In the recent tranche of documents released by the US DOJ, an intriguing email from Thomas Pritzker (billionaire cousin of billionaire Illinois governor JB Pritzker) to Jeffrey Epstein is found.
    In it, Pritzker writes he has spoken to Bill Browder and conveys that he is happy to speak with Jeffrey Epstein, but that Browder wants this kept secret.
    Browder and Epstein were already connected by family and business, as Jeffrey’s lover Ghislaine Maxwell was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who employed Browder when he moved to the UK from the USA at Maxwell Communication Corporation, not long before Robert died in mysterious circumstances off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine.”

    It’s unclear form that exactly how extensive the connection to Browder was, or what he and Epstein spoke about if they did meet, and it’s not impossible that a person like Epstein could play both sides. However, it seems unlikely that Epstein would be helping out the Russians and also Browder, the man who despised Putin from the bottom of his black rotting heart.

  11. Bugs

    I hope there is still good technical documentation for how to make decent printing presses and hot type. I still have a shortwave in good working condition. Maybe I should get a ham outfit. The digital world is telling me to log off.

  12. Will

    >> 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.

    Is this true? In Canada, it’s possible to be party leader without being a member of parliament. For example, Carney won the party leadership and thus Prime Minister in March 2025 but didn’t enter Parliament until the general election the following month. An election which he called as Prime Minister.

    For parties not in power, a newly elected leader, if not already in Parliament, will usually have someone in their party resign their seat and take their place in the subsequent by-election. As a matter of courtesy, the other parties only run token opposition.

    1. David

      I think it depends on individual party rules. For example the SNP don’t require the party leader to be a member at Westminster (but I think they do at Holyrood). For a large part it is a practical convention. It would be difficult to keep a party’s MPs unser control as the leader if not also in parliament.

  13. Historicality

    Epstein’s 17:30 email tells Mandelson that his (Epstein’s) sources indicate 500B Euro bailout.
    Who were those non-Mandelson sources?

  15. elkern

    Epstein was definitely not running a honeypot op for Mossad. /s

    Can I get arrested for an end-snark tag?

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