Peter Mandelson and the corruption of Britain

He's destroyed the Starmer administration

Mandelson and Starmer [Credit Wiki Commons]

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The UK has one of the few centre-left governments in the West, and it is failing.

We know what the consequences of failure will be. The US Democrats failed in 2024 and Trump returned. His second term may yet destroy America as a great power and endanger democracy in Ukraine and Europe. In the UK, Nigel Farage and the British friends of Musk and Trump are licking their lips at the prospect of doing the same to the UK.

The reasons for Labour’s collapse are necessarily complicated. But if you wanted to distil public disillusion into one human form, you could say that the British government failed when it embraced Peter Mandelson.

The baffling deference Labour politicians show to this brutal and mercenary old man has caused the biggest scandal of Keir Starmer’s premiership.

If Starmer is forced from power later this year, his appointment of Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Trump’s Washington will be a part of the reason why.

In Anne Applebaum’s grimly resonant phrase, “every election is now existential”. Mandelson may have blown the next one for Labour.

Mainstream commentators have concentrated on the disgrace of Starmer sending Mandelson to Washington in 2024, even though he knew about his association with Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer and his advisors did not know the full gory detail about Mandelson’s closeness to the child sex offender. Or about how he had leaked confidential information from Cabinet meetings to Epstein and JP Morgan.

But they knew enough.

The second aspect of the scandal is barely discussed but is equally telling.

Starmer, along with his chief advisor, Morgan McSweeney, and half the cabinet, treated Mandelson as their mentor.

They did not seek guidance from Peter Mandelson in spite of his embrace of corrupt oligarchs but because of it.

They believed the vicious masters he served made him a “player” with a seat at the table in the “room where it happens” rather than a liability.

Everyone now says that the Starmer government did not have a plan for power. Nothing better illustrates the intellectual vacuity and political insecurity of so many of today’s Labour politicians than their belief that Peter Mandelson, of all people, could fill the void by telling them how to govern.

Facing the threat of the far-right, the first centre-left government in a generation turned for political direction to a 72-year-old, whose heyday was in the 1990s, and has spent his twilight years as an obsequious servant of the superrich.

The 1990s could not be less like the 2020s, which is why Tony Blair’s interventions in today’s politics are so anachronistic. We had continuous economic growth then. We have stagnation now. We had no external enemies then. We have Putin now. America was a reliable ally then. We have Trump now.

Seeking the advice of Peter Mandelson is as pointless as seeking the advice of Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Not that it stopped the Labour party.

This morning’s Mail on Sunday has a piece by Glen Owen and Dan Hodges describing how Mandelson used his influence over Morgan McSweeney to reward his favoured candidates– Peter Kyle and Darren Jones. And indeed, they were promoted in the next reshuffle.

Mandelson also accompanied Keir Starmer to a meeting at the Washington offices of Palantir – the data and analytics firm at the centre of half the conspiracy theories on the planet.

On Thursday, Tim Shipman of the Spectator revealed WhatsApp messages between Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, and Mandelson.

They were from September 2025, when the latest revelations in the Epstein Files had forced Starmer to fire Mandelson.

The files showed that Mandelson had comforted Epstein by saying he was “furious” that the billionaire had been convicted for soliciting a child for prostitution. Far from being shocked by Mandelson’s behaviour Darren Jones was sympathy personified. He was, he told Mandelson, “so sorry” that his ambassadorial career was over.

Jones, who looked like one of Labour’s most competent ministers, was so lacking in self-confidence that he treated Mandelson as a political genius and private confidante.

To understand how bizarre his choice was, consider that Jones was 11 when Tony Blair took power in 1997. He was 12 when Peter Mandelson resigned from government in a financial scandal in 1998 – and perhaps that should that have been a warning – and 16 when he resigned from government yet again in another financial scandal in 2001.

Jones was wasting his time on a man out of time.

He was hardly alone in that.

Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, who I have known for years and thought had more common sense, gave Mandelson the killer line in a message that:

“Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.”

Now it’s out in the open, Labour’s opponents are using it with absolute relish and will continue using it for – oh I don’t know – decades to come.

Labour politicians and, to be fair, much of the London media, bought into the myth that Mandelson was the supreme political operator.

If that was ever true, it stopped being true before many readers of this piece were born. Since the early 2000s, Mandelson has not guided the Labour party to victory or advised its sister parties in Europe and Australia, or gone to help Democrats fight Trump in the US.

He has served the global oligarchy. And was amply rewarded for his pains.

The Epstein files showed that he leaked market-sensitive secrets from Gordon Brown’s cabinet for money – the most shocking breach of trust I have seen in British politics. He followed that stunt up by lobbying on behalf of Epstein and JP Morgan to stop Brown and his chancellor, Alistair Darling, taxing bankers’ bonuses. (Mandelson recommended they use of “mild threats” to intimidate his own government.)

He worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and stayed on Deripaska’s superyacht off the coast of Corfu in 2008 when he was EU Trade Commissioner. He was on the board of the Russian conglomerate AFK Sistema, and lobbied Putin.

Meanwhile, as if to ensure that he spread his favours globally without fear or favour, Mandelson also befriended the Chinese finance minister Lan Fo’an.

It wasn’t just the money that appealed. You can make money without grovelling to Epstein and Russia. It is perfectly clear from his messages that Mandelson is a power worshiper of the most brutish kind.

Look at the way he talked about Wes Streeting. The then health secretary was appalled by the destruction of Gaza and the terror attacks on Palestinians living in the West Bank.

He told Mandelson that Israel is “committing war crimes before our eyes.”

Mandelson treated him as a virtue-signalling bleeding heart.

“It is pathetic. I think Wes is experiencing an early mid-life crisis,” he told Pat McFadden.

This isn’t the voice of a mere money grubber. It is the authentic snarl of the power worshipper who revels in the supposed necessity of slaughter and turns, not on the war criminals, but on anyone who raises the smallest humanitarian concern.

Mandelson was not an operator in the world of democratic politics, as his sneers about Streeting proved.

He belonged in the world of autocracy and plutocracy. By embracing Mandelson, and for God’s sake, by trusting him, it was as if Labour ministers were living up to every cliché about the naivety of centre-left politicians, who know only academia and campaign groups, and nothing about the hard business of government.

For what good has Mandelson done the Labour party?

While ministers and advisors treated him as if he were a sage rather than a grifter, the party’s opinion poll rating collapsed to the lowest level in its history.

So much for the acumen of the “supreme political strategist”.

Meanwhile, the public could look at this government and despise it for promising “change” while promoting the friends of the Epstein class and the Russian oligarchy.

I normally dismiss conspiracy theorists. But the worst thing you can say about the dismal story of Peter Mandelson and the Starmer administration is that it justifies every last one of them.

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As a taste, here are some of my favourite pieces from the archives.

The first is on how Brexit drove England’s greatest novelist on her country

The second is one I hugely enjoyed researching and which remains all-too topical: How today’s right is imitating yesterday’s left by betraying their country

Finally for a bit of fun here is a piece on why language policing never works