Starmer on the Edge

Largely overlooked in the US since the release of the latest tranche of the "Epstein Files" has been their effect in the United Kingdom. Not, it may surprise you to know, on behalf of the Prince formerly known as "Randy Andy," who appears in at least one of the photographs on all fours, posing above a fully clad and prone female figure with her face blacked out.

Or even on behalf of Andrew's wife, who appears to have carried on a chatty correspondence with Epstein far longer than anyone suspected, during which she seems increasingly desperate about her own situation, makes the occasional crude remark about her daughters, and appears to reveal at some point that Epstein fathered an illegitimate child.

No, the most recent Britisher caught up in Epstein's net is the man formerly known as "Lord" Peter Mandelson, who, until September 2025, was the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United States, having been appointed as such by Keir Starmer in the Spring of that year. At the time of his appointment, Mandelson was known to have had some sort of relationship with Epstein (Mandelson is gay, and married, and helpfully suggested at some point that he was unlikely to have been involved in Epstein's sexual picadilloes), but had given assurances that all that was in his past.

And what a past it is!

For the sake of (relative) concision and clarity, I'll borrow from Wikipedia to draw out the trajectory of Mandelson's political career, the outlines of which I know to be broadly true:

He's 72 years old, and is the son of a cabinetmaker father who served in the Royal Dragoons in the Second World War, and a politically active mother who served in Prime Minister Clement Atlee's Cabinet. He attended college at Oxford.

He dabbled in Labour politics in the late 70s, but became disillusioned, and went into television for some years, after which Labour leader Neil Kinnock appointed Mandelson Director of Communications. For the next several years, he ran campaigns, communicated with the press, and acquired the soubriquet "Prince of Darkness" for his ability to spin any story to his own advantage.

He was elected to Parliament in the early 1990s and managed to make himself invaluable to Labour's leaders, especially Gordon Brown, and most especially, the younger Tony Blair. In the late 1990s he became enmeshed in a scandal about an undeclared home about which he allegedly lied to Parliament, and he was forced to resign by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 1998.

A year later, he was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, but had to resign from government for a second time for allegedly "using his position to influence a passport application." He was reelected as a Member of Parliament in 2001, resigning in 2004 to become a "European Commissioner," and handling the nation's trade portfolio with the EU. He resigned from that position, having--along the way--been mentioned in a few other scandals involving what look like "pay-for-play" scenarios. (For some reason [check the Wikipedia page] they all seem to involve cruises, yachts, "lifestyles of the rich and famous," and billionaires like Paul Allan, the Italian business mogul Diego Della Valla, a scion of the Rothschild family, and a Russian oligarch.)

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Mandelson returned to British politics in October 2008 as Gordon Brown's Business Secretary. (A move which required Brown to nominate him for elevation to the peerage, since Mandelson was no longer an MP. Only Members of Parliament, and Members of the House of Lords, can serve in the British Cabinet.) He lost his position in 2010, when the Tories won the national elections, and David Cameron became Prime Minister.

Since then, Mandelson has continued a high-profile life as a lobbyist and international celebrity, has had his hand in a great many business dealings (some of them regarded as shady) at the highest level, has been a player in the Bilderberg Group, and has generally continued making a nuisance of himself until Prime Minister Keir Starmer nominated him for the role of Ambassador to the US in December of 2024, announcing his formal appointment even before the ink on Mandelson's vetting was dry.

Things started to go pear-shaped in the summer, as "The Epstein Files" began their drip-drip-drip, when it became clear that not only had Mandelson's relationship with Epstein, which was formed in the early 2000s, been far more congenial than originally described—Mandelson has an entry in that infamous Epstein 50th birthday book, in which he called Epstein "my best pal"—but that it had continued much longer than originally implied. And so, in hopes of killing off the scandal involving a man who's never met a scandal from which he couldn't recover, or a zombie movie in which he couldn't "undead" himself, Starmer fired him.

And so here we are.

I don't know how many thousands of references there are to Mandelson in the latest Epstein files dump, but I do know that some of the email exchanges are astonishing, and that some of the photographs are toe-curlingly awful. (The photo of Mandelson looking over what appears to be a menu, presumably in his room on Epstein Island, accompanied by a young lady, and wearing only a T-shirt and some not particularly savory-looking underpants, is just one of them. The irrepressible Mark Steyn has--of course--dubbed him "Mandelpants.") Another shows Mandelson receiving a "foot massage." There are many more. Surely the cameras must have been hidden. Surely the visitors can't have been that stupid? Can they?

But the emails are--if possible--even worse. Epstein paid for Mandelson's husband to attend Osteopathic school, then apparently sent him money on a regular basis for a time afterwards. There's a long series of middle-school, mean-girl vibe messages during which Mandelson appears to be begging for favors, and Epstein seems to be complaining that he's done so much for "Petey," who hasn't been properly subservient or at all grateful. There are several which strongly imply that Mandelson was, during his time in government in the early 2000s, trading what may have been Official Secrets, or at least top secret government information, to Epstein to advantage him and his clients financially in the United States. One of the most bizarre incidental remarks in one of the emails from "Mandy" to Epstein goes like this:

Waiting to fly to Berlin...Upset cos lost the number of the Russian guy I knew there so no fun (again) for Petey...desp for Cu-Am.

Those in the know (I neither know nor want to know how they came to be so) say that the last few words are shorthand for "desperate for a Cuban American." As Tim Stanley said in his Telegraph sketch this morning, "Please God, let him mean a cigar, not Marco Rubio."

The wheels officially came off this morning during the weekly Prime Minister's Questions session in Parliament, when persistent questioning by Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch obliged Starmer to admit that, yes, he had known about Mandelson's continuing relationship with Epstein at the time that Mandelson was nominated as US Ambassador. Starmer's bluster centered on the the fact that there was a "process," and that Mandelson had "misrepresented," and "lied and lied" to the vetting authorities about his relationship with Epstein, I think hoping that his protestations would lead one one to conclude that Starmer was rightly aggrieved that Mandelson had managed to pull the wool over everyone's eyes.

All it does, as far as I am concerned, is beg the question (to use the term incorrectly), "then what's a vetting process for?" I mean, if MI5 and MI6, and God knows who else in British Intelligence circles can't sort out the sheep from the goats, or identify the lies from the truth, then what, exactly, is the point?

Anyhoo, things are pretty riled up in the old country now. Keir Starmer has referred the matter to the Metropolitan Police, a deft move, since once a police investigation is underway in the UK, the effect is similar to a national gag order, not only on politicians and the media, but on private citizens as well, and--although Starmer agreed to release the details of the "vetting" process used on Mandelson for public viewing, he did attempt a last ditch effort to make himself and his team the "vetters" for redacting the release in order not to compromise "national security" or cause "national embarrassment."

In what must surely be one of the most sublime political ripostes since "The lady's not for turning," Kemi Badenoch pointed out that the danger to national security, and the national embarrassment, had already taken place.

The Labour government may survive this. But I am not sure Keir Starmer will.