They flee from him that sometime did him seek. Poor old Peter Mandelson (still Lord Mandelson at the time of typing, but he should probably hold off ordering any stationery) spent Tuesday discovering that you’re never more alone than when your colleagues discover you were selling them out to a paedophile.
“This is a betrayal on so many levels,” said Health Secretary Wes Streeting. “It is a betrayal of not just one, but two prime ministers.” That’s Mandy: never doing anything by halves. Keir Starmer then declared himself “appalled” and the whole business “gobsmacking”. Having told us on Monday that it would be too difficult to remove Mandelson’s peerage, he said he now had a team working on it. It is the prime minister’s special gift to do the right thing only after having explained that the right thing is quite impossible.
What about Global Counsel, the lobbying firm that Mandelson set up back in 2010? Its website has been scrubbed of any mention of the man who was recently listed as its “President and co-founder”. The most recent entry on the company’s “in the media” page is last August, which definitely feels like an omission. Still, let’s have a look at the “Statement of Basic Principles”. First, there’s “Being transparent in what we do”. Hang on lads, I’ve got a call coming in from Downing Street. What else? “Exercising discretion in who we work for”. Do please tell us more.
This all seems to have caught Mandelson rather on the hop. A week ago, we now know, he was giving a comeback interview to The Times, complaining how hard done-by he was to have been sacked as ambassador. Sample whinge: “I was at the edge of something. Suddenly, I was put at the centre of it – as a result of historical emails of which I have no memory and no record.”
Unfortunately, before those words, accompanied by some lovely photos, could make it into print, we’d learned that he’d been close enough to the centre of things to receive tens of thousands of pounds.
Oh, to be able to forget receiving such sums!
A hasty supplementary interview had been carried out on Sunday evening, to allow him to explain that he actually could remember some of these bits of money, but even this had been overtaken by the news of his habit of forwarding Gordon Borwn’s private emails to Epstein, and who knows who else.
Presumably fearing that if they waited any longer, we’d learn that Mandelson had also been behind the JFK assassination, The Times rushed what it had into print, giving us an insight into the mind of a man with a knack for self-pity. Being fired from government was “a unique experience”, he told the paper, something that is, in his case, definitely not true.
Does he get into so much trouble because he likes being around very rich people? Far from it! “I don’t think I am drawn towards rich people,” he mused to the paper, “so much as rich people have big personalities, a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience to share.” He will holiday with anyone who has knowledge and experience to share, and a private island on which to share it.
Epstein, Mandelson complained to The Times, was “like muck that you can’t get off your shoe”. As it turns out, this is also very much how Mandelson’s former colleagues feel about him.
Still, at least one of the political mysteries of the week was solved. The Mandelson scandal should have been a perfect target for Nigel Farage, combining as it did a New Labour eurocrat, a paedophile financier, and corruption from people who aren’t yet members of Reform. But for some reason we hadn’t heard from him. Now we know the reason. “By the way,” he told a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, “my name was mentioned in the files 37 times.” Was it now? “But just to repeat, I never met Epstein and I never went to the island.” And let that be an end to the matter!
What did he think about stripping the Mandy peerage? The last time it had happened, Farage pointed out, was during the First World War, “when there were some supporting the other side”. You can imagine the Reform leader would be nervous about building on that particular precedent, but he said his party would probably support a bill. Meanwhile the Tories were reported to be more cautious. If you start chucking people out of the Lords just because they had criminal friends and made money in dodgy ways, where would it end?
It is probably worth pointing out here that a seat in the House of Lords is not a human right, whatever Nadhim Zahawi thinks. There is no due process to putting people in there, as Boris Johnson so ably demonstrated, so why should we have reservations about chucking people out?
And then, before teatime, Mandelson’s retirement from the Lords was announced. Some may feel that is enough, but he should still be stripped of his title, and chucked out of the privy council — a body whose entire being is based upon the notion that its members keep official secrets.
Will Mandelson be back? You honestly wouldn’t bet against it. And even if this was the final blow, we must stand in awe at his record. Who else will ever be able to say they were so closely involved in general election defeats 42 years apart?
