There are some images you just can’t unsee. Last week it was Theresa May undressing beneath a duvet in Beijing, like Harry Houdini escaping from a sack, to avoid China obtaining embarrassing nude pictures which could be used as ‘kompromat’ – compromising material – against her.
In fairness, that was a figment of my own vivid imagination. No such photos existed, at least not that we know about.
The same can’t be said of that picture of Peter Mandelson in his grubby grey T-shirt and white underpants. It put me right off my Full English.
It was taken in the apartment of paedophile ‘financier’ Jeffrey Epstein, alongside a faceless woman in a white bathrobe.
Who is she? Hotel chambermaid, under-age masseuse, hooker, private secretary? Not his type, anyway. What is ‘Petie’ saying to her? ‘Seventy-five grand for me and another ten for Reinaldo’? Your guess is as good as mine.
Was it a hidden camera? Who knows? The latest allegation out of Washington is that Epstein’s Lolita Express, Love Island and hot-and-cold running call girls, were ‘honeytraps’ bankrolled by the KGB to dig the dirt on bankers and politicians alike.
In Mandelson’s case, there was no need to collect ‘kompromat’ on him. He’s always been on offer, prepared to pimp himself out to the highest bidder, foreign despots a speciality.
I’m Mandy, buy me.
And as for the ludicrous ‘Prince of Darkness’ tag, I’ve been telling you for years that it’s Fantasy Island stuff, perpetuated by Mandelson’s self-deluding vanity and the gullible Boys and Girls in the Westminster Bubble, who have built a career taking dictation from him.
There are some images you just can’t unsee, writes Richard Littlejohn. Like this picture of Peter Mandelson in his grubby grey T-shirt and white underpants
When Starmer appointed him as our short-lived ambassador to the US, I warned it would end in tears sooner rather than later, writes Littlejohn
As the old line has it, trotted out again in the movie The Usual Suspects – starring Mandelson’s second-best chum Kevin Spacey: The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist.
Yet, whenever Petie has pulled a malevolent stroke, as the posse rounds the corner there he is in his full glory, trousers marooned round his ankles and smoking gun in his hand. This latest photo is the living roof.
The mystery is how he’s got away with it for so long. When Starmer appointed him as our short-lived ambassador to the US, I warned it would end in tears sooner rather than later.
Mandelson’s career has been a catalogue of car crashes, duplicity, scandal and self-enrichment. He has the survival instincts of a post-apocalypse cockroach and has an unmatched ability to suck up to a succession of credulous benefactors, of whom Starmer was simply the latest dupe. He styles himself as a Machiavellian figure but, as I once described him, he’s more like Shakespeare’s Iago, played by Kenneth Williams.
Yet unlike Carry On star Williams, Mandelson is a far more disreputable character, even though whenever he gets found out, like Williams as Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo, he resorts to: ‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.’
Time after time, he accuses critics like me of ‘homophobia’ to deflect attention from his greed and bad behaviour. It’s cobblers, obviously. I couldn’t care less about his sexuality. I marked him out as a wrong-un 40-odd years ago, when I was a young industrial correspondent and he was the newly appointed, bare-faced liar of a Press Officer to then Labour leader Neil Kinnock. I knew less than nothing about his sexual inclinations.
Most recently he wheeled out the ‘gay’ excuse to pretend that he was blissfully unaware of Epstein’s exploitation of young women. But playing the gay card isn’t going to get him out of jail this time. In fact, there’s a decent argument as to why he should have been in jail years ago.
Mandelson has maintained his proclivity for sucking up to wealthy benefactors, writes Littlejohn
His first fall from grace came after he submitted a fraudulent mortgage application to buy a house he couldn’t afford in fashionable Notting Hill, with the help of a sizeable loan from Labour sugar daddy Geoffrey Robinson. Somehow he slithered away from that, though had it been anyone else they would almost certainly have attracted the attention of the fraud squad. Plus, he kept the £250,000 profits when he had to sell up.
He’s maintained his proclivity for sucking up to wealthy benefactors. After being forced to resign from Cabinet for a second time – over fixing British passports for foreign donors – Blair sent him to the EU as a trade commissioner, where he accepted private flights and freebie holidays from a Russian aluminium baron before, purely coincidentally, lowering import tariffs on Russian aluminium.
After luxuriating on a yacht owned by financier Nat Rothschild, he leapt to the defence of hedge funds. After immersing himself up to his scrawny neck in the hospitality of Tinseltown movie tycoon David Geffen, he announced a clampdown on internet video piracy.
As I wrote here in 2009, when Gordon Brown, a fundamentally decent man, was panicked into bringing him back into Cabinet and elevating him to the peerage: ‘Screaming Lord Mandelson represents everything rotten about our so-called democracy – arrogance, cynical contempt for the paying public, institutionalised dishonesty, an exaggerated sense of entitlement and the complete absence of shame.’
Where the hell he got £8 million to buy a house in Regent’s Park – now estimated to be worth 20-mill plus – is one of the enduring mysteries of our time. But the truth will out.
The latest document dump from the Epstein files alleges that while acting as Gordon’s effective deputy PM, Mandelson was leaking classified, sensitive Government information to American bankers.
He was advising the boss of finance giant JP Morgan (JPM) to ‘threaten’ then UK Chancellor Alistair Darling over plans to impose hefty tax rises on bankers’ bonuses. Simultaneously, he was also ‘advising’ another financial company, Lazard, in exchange for a reported £1 million a year.
He also leaked a sensitive UK Government document to Epstein while he was Business Secretary, that proposed £20 billion of asset sales and revealed Labour’s tax policy plans. An email, sent in May 2010, shows Mandelson tipping Epstein off that there was about to be a major financial announcement, with European governments set to approve a €500 billion deal to save the euro.
Clearly, Mandelson was leveraging his political position to fill his boots. He apparently admitted as such in an email to Epstein on Christmas Day 2010:
‘I do not want to live by salary alone. That’s why I need to do as much as possible to build with JPM.’
Even so, and despite dropping £8million on the mansion in Regent’s Park, at the same time his then Brazilian boyfriend (now husband) Reinaldo was begging for 10 grand from Epstein to pay for an osteopathy course. Go figure, as our American cousins say.
For the past 40 years, Mandelson has been hiding in plain sight. His faults and rapacious appetite for other people’s money have been apparent for anyone with half a brain to observe. Yet, for goodness knows what reasons, powerful men have continued to indulge him.
Starmer must now regret sending him to Washington – but, then again, he also made Nonce Finder General Tom Watson a life peer, so that tells you all you need to know about the PM’s judgment.
Now, maybe, the wheels have come off Mandelson for good. He’s out of the Labour Party and with any luck will be stripped of the peerage he didn’t deserve.
His lame excuses won’t wash any more. How can he claim that he had ‘no recollection’ of receiving 75 grand from Epstein? It’s as risible as another noble Labour peer, ‘Lord’ Hermer, pretending he can’t remember how much he was paid to represent Gerry Adams.
He may have swerved the fraud squad over his bent mortgage application all those years ago. But if the allegations that Mandelson was leaking classified, sensitive Government information to American bankers while in Government turn out to be true, the authorities may not be so forgiving this time. We’re talking possible insider trading here.
An SNP MP has already reported him to the police. Gordon Brown is incandescent with rage at news of Mandelson’s betrayal.
He’s also wanted for questioning by the US Senate, which tends to be a little more rigorous in its interrogations than a bought-and-paid-for sympathetic Commons committee, and may well pursue criminal charges.
You never know, this time next year, Rodney, multi-millionaire Mandelson’s white Y-fronts may be concealed by an orange jumpsuit in a Supermax prison in Omaha, somewhere in Middle America.
That’s an image I’d be delighted not to unsee.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer man.
