The Mandelson files starkly expose how little he mattered to Trump
Everybody has been waiting to see what scandalous revelations might appear in the latest tranche of government papers relating to Lord Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to Washington, but so far the papers have provided only thin gruel.
The more interesting story is how the British Government and its security apparatus managed either to ignore or not notice damning information about Mandelson’s relations with the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, which had long been on the public record.
Did those supposedly expert security types vetting Mandelson for the job ask him about disclosures concerning his relationship with Epstein appearing in Private Eye in 2009, a Channel Four Dispatches documentary about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein in 2019, and in the Financial Times in 2023, citing a JP Morgan report?
So much is already known about Mandelson, his relationship with Epstein and the circumstances of his appointment that there may be little new left to be revealed.
Many references in the papers, which are only beginning to be examined at the time of writing, are a little embarrassing, but in most cases, this is only in retrospect. For instance, in a glad-handing letter to the then foreign secretary David Lammy in November 2024, Mandelson says: “If you were minded to appoint me, I would make sure you never regret it.” This sounds ironic – given what subsequently happened – but it is the sort of polite throw-away remark common enough in thank you letters. There is no smoking gun here.
A senior UK Security Vetting official wants reassurance that the interview with Mandelson “went well”. This is scarcely surprising since the Government was trying to rush through the appointment before Donald Trump took office in 2025.
Mandelson says he has “gone tonto” over the “saga” of acquiring a British ministerial red box as a gift for Trump, something that suggests that the new British ambassador was not a big player in Washington. The state of Qatar promised to give Trump a $400m (£297m) presidential plane – and still got bombed by US ally Israel.
The British establishment has always spent an inordinate amount of time trying to suck up to the US over the last century. This has often been in the mistaken belief that the Americans take small blandishments, like a red ministerial box, or big ones, like King Charles’s visit, very seriously. On top of this, British politicians often imagine that professional diplomacy is easier than it really is, while civil servants – Sir Keir Starmer, a former Crown Prosecution Service chief, is an excellent example of this – sometimes make the same mistake about politics.
What do the Mandelson files tell us about Britain’s relationship with the US? Very little, as Mandelson was not in Washington very long, but he appears to have remained an outsider. Evidently, the White House was happy with his predecessor as ambassador and may have had doubts about Mandelson as a former associate of Epstein because Trump has always been trying to distance himself from Epstein, from whom the US President says he definitively broke 20 years ago.
As for the bad mouthing of Starmer and his Government by Mandelson and his correspondents, this is only slightly malicious. Mandelson says No 10 was “beleaguered and bereft” to Pat McFadden, then Cabinet Office secretary, adding in a conversation in July 2025 that the team around Starmer “are not led and none of them really know what Keir thinks or wants. In fact, most of them don’t think Keir knows what he wants”. Very true, no doubt, but also conventional wisdom at the time it was said. Politicians and diplomats are always making catty remarks like this.
The appointment of Mandelson looks foolish, but this is mostly in retrospect. Starmer and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, tended to appoint people from their right-wing faction in the Labour Party and Mandelson had been very much in their corner when they purged Labour of its more left-wing members – leading a large chunk of Labour voters who are more to the left to defect en masse to the Greens in the local elections on 7 May.
What is striking is the trouble Starmer and his chief advisors took to appoint Mandelson in the first place. Aside from his Epstein connections, they must have known he was trouble, and it was naïve for them to imagine that he could wave a magic wand and use his skills as courtier and intriguer to butter up Trump and his weird crew in the White House.
Starmer will carry the blame for an appointment which is now denounced, somewhat hypocritically, by the whole British political class as a colossal and avoidable blunder, though few of those who say this now said so at the time.
A good British diplomat in Washington prior to the appointment might have warned the Government in London to steer clear of anybody with the slightest connection to the Epstein scandal – but that is the sort of professional diplomatic advice that a culpably amateur Downing Street did not think it needed.
المصدر: iNews
