Daily Telegraph 06/02/26 Is it all over for Keir Starmer, one of Britain’s least popular Prime Ministers? His only hope may be that as Lord Mandelson’s egregious conduct becomes a police matter, it might buy Two-Tier a little time. If investigators don’t begin interviews until next week, he could limp through the weekend and vanish into recess, possibly on another of his foreign trips. After which the PLP will struggle to ditch him before May – even if Labour loses Gorton and Denton, as seems more than possible since blocking Andy Burnham’s attempt to stand as an MP. Today’s car crash press conference should have been a moment, finally, for at least a show of contrition. Instead, it was an exercise in misplaced indignation, Gollum-like self-pity, and the all-too-familiar lawyerly attempt to downplay the nature of Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, even though far too much evidence of their friendship has long been in the public domain. In perhaps the worst display of bu...
The grotesque Mandelson scandal is an epoch-defining indictment of the Labour establishment Daily Telegraph 05/02/26 He is a pathological liar who sold out his country to a foreign paedophile, a sordid, venal Machiavelli who personifies the Dark Tetrad of psychological traits, the reason why Sir Keir Starmer is about to be booted out of Downing Street, but might Peter Mandelson have actually once told the truth? “Petey”, as his mentor Jeffrey Epstein nicknamed him, titled his autobiography The Third Man, perhaps alluding not just to his central role, alongside Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in building New Labour, including its culture of spin and bullying, but also to the 1949 film noir of the same name, set in Allied-occupied Vienna. The film’s anti-hero, the “third man” in question, played by Orson Welles, was a chThe US Department of Justice emails implicate Mandelson in Britain’s greatest political scandal since the Profumo affair. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of procuring a c...