These are the humiliating death throes of Starmer’s sordid regime

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 child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. A multi-millionaire financier and networker, he ran a sex-trafficking operation, involving the abuse of hundreds of women, many of them underage; he is believed to have organised orgies for members of the global elite. Epstein owned so-called Paedophile Island and a private jet dubbed the Lolita Express. In 2019, he faced charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy, but died in prison before the trial.arismatic, remorseless psychopath, who returned from his staged death to his life as a black marketeer. When Mandelson’s opus was published after the 2010 elections, his choice of title was seen as a jokey double-entendre by his legion of deluded fans, but today it reads differently, pointing to the darkness in his soul, perhaps even to a modicum of self-awareness of the true scale of his malevolence. Starmer should have taken him more literally. The 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 child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. A multi-millionaire financier and networker, he ran a sex-trafficking operation, involving the abuse of hundreds of women, many of them underage; he is believed to have organised orgies for members of the global elite. Epstein owned so-called Paedophile Island and a private jet dubbed the Lolita Express. In 2019, he faced charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy, but died in prison before the trial. Epstein, it is now clear, was a close and longstanding friend of Mandelson. The emails suggest the paedophile gave money to the Labour grandee in 2004 and to his partner, now husband, in 2009-10, after his conviction, one reason why Starmer is now in terminal trouble. When he was in the Cabinet, Mandelson forwarded numerous, highly privileged government emails to Epstein, some authored by senior officials, including details of a massive bailout and revealing hours before anybody else knew that Gordon Brown would quit. What exactly did Mandelson think Epstein, a trader, would have done with such market-moving gold dust? Sat on it, or cashed in on the insider knowledge to make a killing on the currency and gilts markets? Mandelson was also advising senior bankers via Epstein to “mildly threaten” the then chancellor, and apparently tutoring them in their lobbying against government policies he publicly supported. The files suggest that Mandelson was providing this information to Epstein because he wanted the paedophile to help him build a high-paying career after he left office. Epstein duly obliged. I was the editor of the financial newspaper City AM during those times of fear and loathing. The banking system had collapsed, the world faced a 1930s-style depression and governments and central bankers were locked in endless, top-secret talks. The bailouts and QE were a perversion of real capitalism, a morally catastrophic socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains, and yet here was Labour’s Mandelson turning an obscenity into a profit opportunity. The idea that confidential information was being leaked by a key player – the business secretary and effective deputy prime minister – to a perverted financier with the world’s largest contact book was unfathomable, one that not even the most cynical of critics of that rotten period could have envisaged. Any inkling that a Labour – yes, Labour – apparatchik was helping politically connected elites get even richer as thousands lost their jobs or feared for their savings would have triggered a popular uprising in those febrile days. Why on earth did Starmer end up rehabilitating such a character? Mandelson’s immense duplicity casts doubt about his behaviour before, after and during this period. Did he leak sensitive or secret information to anybody else? What happened during his time as the EU’s trade commissioner? What might emerge next? Who knew? Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, believes Epstein was a Russian spy; if this were ever proved, Mandelson’s betrayal would be even worse. Epstein was certainly a master at the art of accumulating KGB-style kompromat. We shall see where the police investigation into Mandelson leads, but in a serious country any senior Cabinet figure convicted of contemporaneously leaking numerous secret, market-sensitive government documents to a crooked foreign financier would surely end up in jail for life. What is certain is that this scandal is a calamity for a Labour establishment that dismissed his scandals as incidental to his “genius”, or who mythologised his pathologies. It will damage Sir Tony Blair, as he created Mandelson. For all his furious protestations that he was double-crossed, it will further tarnish Gordon Brown: he gave him his peerage and brought him back from the cold. Most importantly of all, it will finish off Sir Keir Starmer, who may not even last until the May electoral bloodbath. His right-hand man Morgan McSweeney may be shown the door first: he was close to Mandelson and championed his ambassadorial appointment, but that would simultaneously cripple Starmer while not satisfying his critics. The PM owns this monumental error of judgment, the ultimate proof of his lack of competence at basic politics. His authority is draining away. He has no answer as to why his so-called vetting missed the scandal of the century. Kemi Badenoch forced Starmer to admit he’d appointed Mandelson even though he knew he was still speaking to Epstein after the child sex conviction, a devastating confession that upends the narrative. Starmer’s last-ditch attempt to cover-up effectively who knew what, when, and why, was defeated by Angela Rayner. Parliament’s intelligence and security committee will decide which documents are released. Ed Miliband, Rayner and the “soft Left” are circling, ready to pounce, prepared to claim that only a drastic shift towards socialism can expunge the failings of New Labour. As to Starmer, he is finished, a lame duck PM destroyed by the broken system that accidentally propelled him to power.