Starmer’s catastrophic misjudgement: the Mandelson scandal

Sir Keir Starmer is facing growing calls to resign as Prime Minister. Starmer has only been in office since July 2024, and MPs in his own Labour Party are demanding that he stand down. He made the fatal mistake in 2025 of appointing Lord Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the USA. Mandelson was a Labour MP and Cabinet Minister in the 1990s and 2000s. Starmer knew that Lord Mandelson was a friend of the late Jeffrey Epstein and had maintained that friendship for years after Epstein was found guilty of a sex crime against a 15-year-old girl. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in New York in 2019 as he faced charges of sex crimes against 14 other females, some of them minors.

It is clear that Starmer has only weeks left to go. Some Labour MPs are demanding that he resign immediately. There are local elections on 7 May. If he resigns now, Labour might not do too badly on 7 May. But if he does not resign now, the ruling Labour Party might not have time to elect a new leader and therefore Prime Minister by 7 May. Being in the midst of a leadership battle during those elections would be cataclysmic.

Starmer is accused of a gross error of judgment. Mandelson was vetted before he was appointed. The former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said that she warned Starmer not to pick Mandelson. Sir Keir Starmer now complains lamely that he was duped by Mandelson, who lied to him. Starmer is known to be circumspect, but for once, he was incautious.

Although Starmer did not know the extent of Mandelson’s financial enmeshment with Jeffrey Epstein, he knew what sort of person Mandelson was. Mandelson has twice been forced to resign from the Cabinet, in 1998 and 2001.

Mandelson is notorious for his brown-nosing. In the United States, he built a rapport with the Trump Administration. That is no easy task, considering how touchy and erratic Trump is. Lord Mandelson has a knack for always saying the right thing. He is a smooth-talking flatterer, and he likes to kowtow to the powerful. But his task in Washington was made even trickier given that the Labour Party is the more left-wing of the two main parties in the UK, and the Republican Party in the USA is the more right-wing of the two parties there.

Some people in the Labour Party did loathe Mandelson, mostly due to envy at the offices he held or his closeness to Tony Blair. He comes across as an oleaginous creep. He was known as the Prince of Darkness. He was the architect of ‘New Labour’ in the 1990s – the rebranding that won the party a stunning victory in 1997. Mandelson was adept at media manipulation and spin. He insisted that Labour MPs stay ‘on message.’ There is no question that Mandelson is clever and cunning.

Peter Mandelson was reviled for being a social climber and sycophant. He was fixated with power and might. One journalist wrote of him, ‘To him, low-status people are invisible.’ Another female journalist recalled meeting him at a party: ‘His eyes scanned the people behind me to see if he could find anyone more important to talk to.’ He was also avaricious and had a net worth of GBP 10 million. As he claims to care about the impecunious, why does he never give a penny of his vast fortune to the poor?

The Epstein scandal has rocked the United States and the UK. In January 2026, the Epstein Files were all released by the US Government. They include communications from Mandelson to Jeffrey Epstein. When Epstein was first convicted in 2010, Mandelson took Epstein’s side and said, ‘This would never have happened in Britain.’ But he was wrong, because what Epstein did was against the law in the UK too. Mandelson wrote after Epstein was found guilty, ‘I am your friend and I love you.’

The Epstein Files proved that when Mandelson was in the Cabinet during the credit crunch of 2008, he leaked market-sensitive information to Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was a major investor. The knowledge that Mandelson provided him about British Government decisions enabled Epstein to buy and sell stocks and shares to maximise his profit. This is insider trading.

Mandelson informed Epstein of government bailouts before they were announced. In one email, Epstein writes, ‘Are you awake?’ Mandelson replied, ‘I am in Cabinet right now.’ It is staggering that when he was supposed to be paying attention and doing his duty to the public, he was spending time giving market-moving secrets to a convicted sex offender.

Now we know why Epstein considered this work worth GBP 4,000 a month. Mandelson told Epstein what was happening with Prime Minister Gordon Brown the day before Brown resigned. When the UK Government was considering a new tax on bankers’ bonuses, Mandelson leaked this to banks. His emails told them how to lobby against it and to ‘mildly threaten’.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister), Alistair Darling, received countless phone calls from high-level bankers, and they all knew what line to take to browbeat him. He was mystified. He never found out that Mandelson was masterminding it. This is insider trading. It is also misconduct in a public office.

In the United Kingdom, ‘misconduct in a public office’ is a tripartite crime. It requires that a person hold a public office — this can be a police officer, judge, civil servant, MP, etc. He or she must misconduct himself or herself in such a manner as to undermine public confidence in the state, and the misconduct must be more than trivial. Here, Mandelson was leaking government decisions to enable his crony to enrich himself in return for payments. It is also corruption.

The Epstein Files dump reveals that Jeffrey Epstein helped Mandelson find a job in banking in 2010. One offer was for a salary of at least GBP 4 million per annum. Mandelson turned it down as paltry.

To be fair to PM Starmer, he did not know what was in the Epstein Files until the public did in January 2026. But he knew that Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein had lasted beyond Epstein’s conviction.

The Western world is fixated on paedophilia. Those who engage in sexual liaisons with minors are branded as the worst people in the world. Therefore, if someone is found guilty of such an offence, he is ostracised.

Mandelson’s roots in the Labour Party go back a century. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was Leader of the London County Council in the 1920s. Morrison was a Labour MP and held Cabinet posts in the 1940s, including Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Many thought that Morrison should become Prime Minister.

Herbert Morrison’s honourable life of disinterested public service stands in stark contrast to that of his grandson, Peter Mandelson. Morrison was known for his social conscience and incorruptibility.

Morrison’s only daughter, Mary, married a Jewish man of Polish extraction named George Mandelson, the father of Peter Mandelson. Peter Mandelson was born in 1953 in London. He grew up in the middle-class suburb of Hampstead. Despite being a fairly upscale area, Hampstead was very Labour-supporting. Peter Mandelson does not regard himself as Jewish because Jewishness is matrilineal. His father was the advertising manager of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper.

Mandelson attended Oxford University. He was later Chair of the British Youth Council. In the 1980s, he was a television producer. He became Director of Communications for the Labour Party in the 1980s. He was elected to Parliament in 1992.

Mandelson was twice obliged to resign from the Cabinet in disgrace. In 1998, he did not declare a GBP 383,000 loan from another Labour Cabinet minister, Geoffrey Robinson, when Robinson was under investigation by Mandelson’s department. It was a flagrant conflict of interest. In 2001, he was forced to resign as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when he urged the Home Office to fast-track a visa for the nanny of the Hinduja brothers because the Hindujas were donating to Mandelson’s Millennium Dome. With Epstein, it was the same issue. He was breaking the rules in favour of a very rich person.

Peter Mandelson, in his autobiography ‘The Third Man’, went so far as to say he was the third most powerful person in the UK from 1997 to 2007. That may well be true. Tony Blair was the Prime Minister. Gordon Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e. Finance Minister), and Mandelson held various lower-level Cabinet jobs but was the brains behind New Labour.

Mandelson was Trade Commissioner for the European Union (EU) in 2006. At that stage, the United Kingdom was in the EU. He has long been a fanatical Europhile. He was fairly effective as Trade Commissioner. ‘Commissioner’ is the equivalent of a Cabinet Minister at the EU level. In this role, he continually reduced import tax on aluminium. This made a Russian aluminium mogul, Oleg Deripaska, an extra EUR 500 million in one year. Mandelson was then a guest on Deripaska’s superyacht.

Part of the argument for making Mandelson the Ambassador to the US was his experience as Trade Commissioner. The United Kingdom was in the throes of negotiating a trade deal with the United States. This was his field of expertise. In this, he was effective. He is diligent and successful.

There are moves to strip Peter Mandelson of the title ‘Lord’, which he himself has agreed not to use. He has resigned from the Labour Party, of which he was a member for 50 years. He is under police investigation. They have seized evidence from his house in London and his farm in Gloucestershire. Mandelson is publicly shamed. Of one thing we can be sure: he will never hold public office again. It is likely that prison awaits him.