Former UK ambassador to the US Lord Peter Mandelson. Photo / Getty Images
More than six years have passed since United States financier Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in his Manhattan prison cell.
Epstein knew plenty of powerful people, many of them household names.
Of these A-listers, only three have paid a truly significant price for their association with a convicted sex offender.
Ghislaine Maxwell went to prison. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor lost his title and his house, Lord Peter Mandelson his job. One striking link connects them all: they are all British.
American heavyweights, by contrast, have suffered no such consequences.
Donald Trump remains President of the US. Former President Bill Clinton has not faced serious social ostracism. Businessman Bill Gates continues to run his philanthropic foundation. All deny any impropriety in their dealings with Epstein.
Some reasons for this discrepancy in standards are obvious.
Andrew and Mandelson held public office or quasi-public positions, so defenestrating them was easier.
Many Americans linked to Epstein are private actors, insulated by wealth, contracts and distance from office.
But there are also cultural reasons.
Britain does shame differently.
Many Britons relish a scandal; there is particular glee when the rich and powerful get their comeuppance – and the greater the spectacle, the better.
Like Voltaire’s Lisbon mob, British people appreciate a good auto-da-fé.
Perhaps shaped by such expectations, the British establishment responds to scandal differently, too.
Operating under a Burkean logic, British institutions – the monarchy in Andrew’s case, the political establishment in Mandelson’s – will sacrifice toxic individuals with theatrical finality to preserve themselves.
In the US, by contrast, elite networks instinctively protect their own.
Americans close ranks; Britons feed their Jonahs to the fishes.
That is not to say Epstein’s American acquaintances have gone entirely unscathed.
Some have paid a price – though, in terms of name recognition, at least outside the US, none are in the first rank. Even here, however, the differences remain revealing.
Jes Staley, Epstein’s former banker, was forced to quit as chief executive of Barclays in 2021 – but only after being pushed out of a British bank by British regulators, who concluded that he had misled them about the extent of his relationship with Epstein.
In other words, he fell foul of British standards of probity. Had he been running an American bank, Staley might still have his job.
Alexander Acosta, the Florida prosecutor who granted Epstein a plea deal that allowed him to serve just 13 months of day-release incarceration following a child-prostitution conviction, resigned from Trump’s cabinet in 2019. But rather than forcing him out, Trump reportedly tried to persuade him to stay. Acosta, like Staley, denies wrongdoing.
Others have relinquished positions, too. But unlike in Britain, most have lost a role rather than their standing.
This may yet change.
In January, the House oversight committee voted to hold Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress after he declined to comply with subpoenas seeking further detail about his association with Epstein, including his travel on Epstein’s plane.
The Democratic Party has quietly distanced itself from the former President. Yet even when it comes to social ostracism, Americans do things differently.
Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer who once represented Epstein, has written of being treated like a pariah at parties after Virginia Giuffre’s later-withdrawn claim that she was trafficked to him as a minor – but, tellingly, he was still being invited to them. One imagines that Andrew’s mantlepiece is barer.
Perhaps the lesson of the Epstein affair is that Britain still wields a mechanism of disgrace – sometimes effective, occasionally arbitrary – while in the US there are suspicions it may be rusting away.
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