By Saturday, 20 September 2025, 2:35 Pm Opinion: Binoy Kampmark

Copyright scoop

It was so startlingly obvious it seemed to snuff out any
comment. Lord Peter Mandelson, otherwise known as the
sinister Mr Fixit of New Labour from the Blair years, was an
intimate of the late convicted paedophile and socially
connected financier Jeffrey Epstein. If it was intended as a
humorous appointment – Britain’s Epstein familiar
ambassadorial representative to Washington attending the
court of an administration with another Epstein familiar,
President Donald Trump – it was not one to last.

began at the end of last year, when Mandelson, who seemed to
specialise in the art of being sacked, was called upon to
take up one of British diplomacy’s most important offices:
the ambassadorship to the United States. As a result, he was
glowing, brightly telling
all that President George W. Bush had dubbed him
“Silvertongue”. This same tongue had
called Trump, in 2019, a “danger to the world” and
“little short of a white nationalist and racist”. Chris
LaCivita, who co-campaigned the President’s election bid,

Mandelson “an absolute moron” – high praise

Mandelson took it all in his stride. He promised
the administration that they would “discover I’m not
uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and
I’m pro-market and pro-business.” His remit: to keep
Trump onside in staying in Europe for reasons of security,
forge commercial ties, and limit tariffs on UK

Then came those emails, as
reported by Bloomberg. They revealed the extent of
Mandelson’s association with Epstein. The Dark Lord was
found encouraging Epstein to “fight for early release”
shortly after his sentencing to 18 months in prison. He
showed signs of infatuation, saying “I think the world of
you” a day before the sentence for soliciting prostitution
from a minor in June 2008 commenced.

More material
surfaced. From the US House Oversight Committee came
the disclosure of a scrapbook made to celebrate the
financier’s fiftieth birthday, with the Mandelson effusion
“best pal”. (Trump can also count himself a fellow
Epstein enthusiast in the collection.)

scene was set for yet another sacking. The embarrassed
British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was again shown up
for his faulty judgment. He had already known of
Mandelson’s soiled ties yet remained unmoved. In June
2023, for instance, the Financial Times obtained
an internal JPMorgan report showing the extent of the
association even after Epstein’s imprisonment. In January

asked at a press conference about Mandelson’s stays at
the home of a convicted sex offender in Manhattan, the
Labour leader proved implausibly unaware: “I don’t know
any more than you and there’s not really much I can add to
what is already out there I’m

The new correspondence,
however, was seen as “materially different” to
information available when the new ambassador made his way
to Washington. “Had I known then what I know now,”
Starmer stated
emphatically, “I’d never have appointed him.” Then
came that churning feeling of dissatisfaction from
Starmer’s own Labour MPs, whose views he
occasionally respects. One of them, Andy McDonald, noted
“widespread revulsion that we, by association, being in
the same party, are being brought under the microscope for
something that [Mandelson] has done.”

Mandelson, for
his part, expressed
a feeling of “tremendous” regret regarding his
friendship with Epstein, and a “tremendous sense of
sympathy” for the victims but insisted that he never
witnessed or was aware about any wrongdoing when spending
time with him. As he told the BBC: “I relied on assurances
of [Epstein’s] innocence that turned out later to be
horrendously false.” Lawyers representing his best pal
“claimed that it was a shake down of him, a criminal
conspiracy. I foolishly relied on their word which I regret
to this day.” What fabulous, mountainous

Some tried to explain the appointment as a
symptom of establishment blindness and insularity. In the
Spectator, there was a rather
apt observation that Mandelson, at least in Britain,
“was part of the furniture – the man you loved to hate.
It was everywhere implied that this amoral figure, relic of
a subtler age, would be able to ‘run rings’ around the
various oik populists – chief among them the 47th
president.” A less likely, though equally apposite
reading, is that Mandelson’s spotty record was exactly
what was needed in a Washington distinctly unmoored from any
moral compass. The Trump administration, with its venality,
its solipsistic universe, its tendency to muddy and
contaminate institutions, would have suited “Petie”, as
Epstein liked to call him.

The greatest insult of all,
and one that Trump inspires on most occasions, is the
feigned (or genuine) ignorance of a person he has known or
had an acquaintance with. Trump has selective amnesia for
those he professes fondness for; he has an elephantine
memory for those he hates. As both the President and Starmer
were drooling and slobbering over the Anglo-American
“special” alliance in a press conference during the
President’s UK visit, Mandelson’s name did come up.
Trump claimed
to have never known the fellow, suggesting that Starmer was
better placed to answer. Starmer, exploiting the situation,
walked it on with his now conditioned response: Mandelson
was sacked once new information surfaced about the Epstein
link. Mr Fixit was, at least in the metaphorical sense, dead
and buried.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth
Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures
at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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