Britain's ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, speaks during a welcome reception for British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, at the ambassador's residence on February 26. Photo / Getty Images
If it wasn’t so serious, the inevitability of Peter Mandelson’s departure as Britain’s ambassador to Washington over his association with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein would be amusing.
It isn’t just that the Labour peer and perennial political wheeler-dealer long displayed a weakness for fraternising with rich men no matter how questionable.
It’s that his undoubted talents have always been undermined by poor judgment.
His nickname - the “prince of darkness” - bestowed during his time spinning for former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, should have been a clue to current office holder Keir Starmer not to place him in this key role.
So too his earlier spectacular falls from grace: Sacked from the Cabinet twice, in 1998 and 2001, both times for a blindness to impropriety related to his closeness to wealthy friends.
These were some of the reasons so many officials, including veterans of the Foreign Office, warned Starmer not to break with custom by removing a career diplomat - the popular Karen Pierce - from the ambassador’s residence at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue NW in January and replacing her with a political appointee in the form of Mandelson.
Now, inexorably, it’s gone horribly wrong.
Mandelson appeared prominently in the cache of material relating to Epstein released by the United States Congress this week.
Bloomberg revealed the existence of a note written by Mandelson urging Epstein to “fight for early release”, sent - astonishingly - on the eve of the financier’s first imprisonment in 2008 for soliciting sex with a minor.
“I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened,” he wrote, concluding: “Your friends stay with you and love you”.
Ridiculously, Mandelson sought to excuse himself by suggesting he had been misled by Epstein’s legal team about the extent of his guilt. He expressed regret at having believed his former friend’s lies.
In appointing Mandelson, Starmer took a chance that the former European Union commissioner’s talents as a schmoozer par excellence would outweigh the risks.
Until the revelations, it appeared as if the gamble had paid off.
Mandelson drew close to the White House, helping to secure a more favourable tariff deal than most other nations, along with a prized second state visit by US President Donald Trump, including a banquet with King Charles, due to take place next week.
The benefits became less clear after the notes were made public.
As the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey pointed out in the House of Commons: Who knows what more Epstein kompromat the Trump Administration had on Mandelson?
How could he hope to clearly represent Britain’s interests in tricky negotiations due to take place on future trade arrangements at the prime minister’s country residence of Chequers under these circumstances?
Scrambling to answer a devastating barrage of questions from Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch as well as Davey during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Starmer said: “Let me start by saying that the victims of Epstein are at the forefront of our minds”.
It didn’t seem that way to most of those watching.
I have interviewed one of Epstein’s victims, Maria Farmer, who described to me her despair at what she – rightly – saw as the establishment, on both sides of the Atlantic, covering up for him.
There was a sense, she told me, that girls and women like her didn’t matter compared to the desires and power-plays of rich and important men.
Several of Epstein’s victims had called for Mandelson’s departure before his resignation, as did campaigner Gloria Allred and several Labour MPs.
He had to go.
Revulsion at Epstein’s crimes is as potent in America, where it forms the only crack in Maga-world’s adulation for Trump, as it is in the United Kingdom, where Prince Andrew’s revolting relationship with the billionaire and his consort Ghislaine Maxwell brought sorrow to Queen Elizabeth II’s final years.
Shamefully for all concerned, in 2022 the monarch paid out a huge sum, thought to be £12 million ($27m), to silence his accuser, the late Virginia Giuffre.
Andrew was forced to retire from public life in the wake of a disastrous 2019 interview in which he denied having sex with Guiffre but offered no sympathy for Epstein’s victims.
Having witnessed that, No. 10 should have thought more carefully about appointing Mandelson.
The Labour peer was well known in political circles as a pal of the paedophile, and their friendship would have been well covered as part of the vetting process.
Instead of heeding the red flags, Starmer expended his own political capital defending the indefensible.
Now he is seeing it drain away as the person he unwisely backed bowed to the inevitable.
It comes within days of Angela Rayner standing down as deputy prime minister for failing to pay full taxes on a property transaction.
The Prime Minister’s judgment must be called into question.
Starmer either knew and didn’t care about the extent of Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein, or he didn’t want to know.
He shouldn’t have touched him with a barge pole.
Rosa Prince is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering UK politics and policy. She was formerly an editor and writer at Politico and the Daily Telegraph, and is the author of Comrade Corbyn and Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister.
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