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Peter Mandelson did not want, he wrote disdainfully to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, to “live by salary alone”. Not for him the life of the little guy, slave to a mere six-figure salary: he had always aspired to something grander, a lifestyle well beyond his means, to which rich men such as Epstein were so often his passport.
First it was his millionaire colleague, Geoffrey Robinson, from whom Mandelson secretly borrowed money to buy a house he couldn’t afford. In 2003 and 2004 it was Epstein, at least according to files released in the US this week, suggesting the financier paid £55,000 into Mandelson’s bank account, though he now says he can’t find records of it. Five years later, in 2010, the files record Mandelson confiding in Epstein of his hopes for a gig with merchant bankers JP Morgan, where he could leverage his “networks” to make the really big deals.
How lucky, then, that he had allegedly been so helpful to Wall Street just a few months earlier at the height of the banking crisis: passing on inside snippets of government thinking during the crash, according once again to those telltale files, and suggesting via Epstein (at the time recently released from jail) that JP Morgan should “mildly threaten” the British chancellor, Alistair Darling, to get around a proposed ban on bankers’ bonuses. Meanwhile, the files record Mandelson’s partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, asking Epstein for £10,000 for an osteopathy course and a laptop, which the latter promises to wire over immediately. No such gift was ever declared, and Mandelson insists he has no record of it. But what’s striking about the email is its casualness, almost as though da Silva were one of the dreaded wage slaves, filing his expenses.
And so the man with a rightful claim to have co-created the modern Labour party has quit it, seemingly before it could quit him. Like the former Prince Andrew, he is now effectively banished from court, facing the loss of his title. There is surely no coming back for either man from an affair that encapsulates everyone’s worst suspicions about the relationship between wealth, power and the suffering in this case of young girls trampled in the process. But exile is not enough. There will be no restoring the public’s shattered trust without a full and formal investigation into both men’s conduct, free to go wherever it leads, no matter how embarrassing for the British establishment. Gordon Brown has now called for such an inquiry into Mandelson’s conduct.
As a gay man, Mandelson has argued he was never likely to witness the side of Epstein’s life described by Virginia Giuffre, who detailed her experience as a young girl of being groomed, abused and passed around Epstein’s powerful friends “like a platter of fruit”. But the money is a different story, leaving a trail that should be easy enough for the relevant authorities to follow. (Though he loftily suggests that the alleged cash gifts require “investigating by me”, the last person who should be investigating Peter Mandelson is Peter Mandelson.)
Given the seriousness of the allegations now surrounding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – including those of a woman who came forward this week to claim that, when she was in her 20s, Epstein sent her to Britain to sleep with him, a story clearly echoing Giuffre’s – meanwhile, it is astounding that the only professional interrogation he has faced came courtesy of Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis. How hard would it be for British detectives to establish where a man famously guarded round the clock by police protection officers was on the night he is accused of meeting Giuffre?
Everyone in British public life should be acutely aware of the dangerous emotions stirred by talk of sex trafficking among the rich and powerful. It’s catnip to conspiracy theorists, who see their wild-eyed imaginings about so-called global elites vindicated, and the combination of this scandal with the white heat of an angry byelection in Gorton and Denton, where Reform UK may well try again to weaponise anger about grooming gangs, is potentially explosive. Under those conditions, nobody should seek to exploit the pain of Epstein’s young victims for their own political ends, including Labour politicians.
But there are legitimate questions to be asked not just about Mandelson’s behaviour inside the last Labour government, but about what exactly Keir Starmer and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, knew when he was appointed US ambassador just last year. His friendship with Epstein was common enough knowledge to come up in vetting. Did they decide, in the end, that the risk was worth it? Do they still think that now, reading emails that heap shame on the Labour party, and can only stoke the anger building against Starmer on his own backbenches?
With little sign of prosecution pending for the men for whom these girls were procured, meanwhile, all this week’s data dump does is fuel people’s worst suspicions about how the super-rich behave in private, without the release of feeling that justice has been done.
Scrolling through these fawning exchanges between Epstein and his famous friends, so many seemingly anxious either for invites to his island or for his money, makes me feel almost grubby by association. I can’t imagine how it would feel reading them as a victim of sexual abuse. How does a mother of daughters not much older than Epstein’s victims, as Sarah Ferguson was, find herself sending gushing emails to the man who regularly settled her debts even after his conviction, ending with the words “just marry me”? Why is Richard Branson making jokes about bringing “your harem” to a man convicted of sex offences? Why did so many people seemingly struggle to believe he did what a court said he had, or live up to their public promises about ending the friendship?
Alongside an inquiry that gets to the bottom of Epstein’s role in British public life, the prime minister now needs to demonstrate something more like moral leadership: to offer some sense of catharsis, not just for Epstein’s victims but for all those who have suffered at the hands of men like him.
If the political system can’t now articulate and share in the anger the public feels, then it risks leaving the truly corrosive impression that this is just how everyone in power behaves behind closed doors; that the curious inability to see Jeffrey Epstein for what he was is more feature than bug of a system looking after its own. For all that we have learned this week, I still don’t believe that to be true. But we are long past the point of expecting people to take that on trust.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
