Could the Epstein files bring down the British prime minister? Until days ago, the question would have seemed preposterous. Sir Keir Starmer has no personal connection to the financier and convicted pedophile. Yet today his potential departure leads every news bulletin. In the United States, the Epstein scandal implicates powerful men in the sexual exploitation of women and girls. In Britain, outrage at that abuse now overlaps with a political crisis centered on the trafficking of knowledge, power, and money. With each new revelation, decades-old political certainties are being swept away.
At the end of 2024, Keir Starmer faced a decision. President Trump’s second inauguration was set to take place, yet the role of British ambassador to the U.S. had still to be confirmed. The incumbent, Dame Karen Pierce, was widely considered to have performed well in the role, but her time in office was ending, and Starmer wanted to put his own stamp on trans-Atlantic relations. The man he chose was former Labour minister, then Lord, Peter Mandelson.
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The appointment was never uncontroversial. Mandelson had twice been forced to resign as a Labour minister. Back in 1998, with New Labour riding high under Tony Blair’s leadership, it was revealed that Mandelson had received a secret loan of £373,000 from a ministerial colleague, making his position untenable. Back in government just a year later, he was ousted again, in 2001, over allegations that he approved British passports for the Hinduja brothers, wealthy donors to a Labour project.
Far from seeing his political career ended, Mandelson was appointed EU trade commissioner in 2004, a post he held for four years. But controversy was never far away. He was accused of enjoying yacht trips, courtesy of an Italian businessman who allegedly benefited from tariffs on Chinese shoes; of using the private jet of tycoon Nat Rothschild; and of holidaying on the yacht of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, said to have gained from an EU cut in aluminum tariffs introduced under Mandelson’s watch. Despite this record, Mandelson returned to government in 2008, when Prime Minister Gordon Brown recalled him from Brussels, elevated him to the House of Lords, and appointed him business secretary.
Alongside his political career, Mandelson became increasingly entangled with Jeffrey Epstein. In 2003, he described himself as the financier’s “best pal” in Epstein’s 50th-birthday book—a favor repaid weeks later with the purchase of flights. The friendship continued even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, a fact publicly known when Starmer appointed Mandelson U.S. ambassador in 2024.
Mandelson lasted less than nine months in Washington before being fired after fresh allegations emerged about his ties to Epstein. Particularly damaging were an email in which he suggested that Epstein was wrongfully convicted and a photograph showing the two chatting while Mandelson lounged in a bathrobe. Yet however distasteful, none of this was illegal. As Mandelson explains: “because I was a gay man, in [Epstein’s] circle I was kept separate from what he was doing in the sexual side of his life.”
Had that been the end of it, Starmer might have survived both the appointment and the subsequent removal of Mandelson. But the latest Department of Justice file releases suggest that the Mandelson–Epstein relationship went beyond misplaced loyalty. Emails indicate that, while serving as business secretary in 2009, Mandelson seems to have passed confidential, market-sensitive information to Epstein, including details about the internal workings of the British government and Britain’s relationship with the EU. That same year, emails show Epstein sent £10,000 to Lord Mandelson’s partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, though there is no suggestion that Da Silva was involved in any wrongdoing.
Mandelson has now resigned from the House of Lords and is currently the subject of a police investigation into allegations of misconduct in public office. He insists that he acted neither criminally nor for financial gain. Even so, the latest revelations have raised grave questions about Starmer’s political judgment—and about why he appointed such a controversial figure to represent the United Kingdom.
In the process, the prime minister’s authority has steadily ebbed. Over the past two days, both his closest adviser, Morgan McSweeney, and his press chief, Tim Allan, have resigned. Starmer’s leadership now appears increasingly untenable.
Why, then, did Starmer promote Mandelson, fully aware of the scandals surrounding him and much about his continuing association with Epstein? The answer lies in Mandelson’s central place in Labour’s modern history, and even earlier. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was a Labour cabinet minister in the Second World War coalition and the chief architect of the party’s landslide victory in 1945. As Clement Attlee’s deputy from 1945 to 1951, Morrison oversaw Labour’s program of nationalization and became a near-mythic figure within the party. Three decades later, his grandson would wield comparable influence.
Mandelson emerged as a force in the 1980s. After Labour’s crushing defeat in 1983, party leader Neil Kinnock appointed the media-savvy 31-year-old director of campaigns and communications, tasking him with making Labour Britain’s “natural party of government.” His ruthlessness as a strategist earned him the nickname “Prince of Darkness.” Alongside Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Mandelson helped remake Labour from a union-dominated, working-class party into a polished, middle-class one—friendly to business and comfortable with the European Union. For much of Britain’s political and cultural establishment, Blair’s New Labour years remain a golden age: the triumph of image over ideology, technocratic management over class conflict.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that in looking to reinvent Labour for reelection in 2024 by distancing the party from the internal conflict, anti-Semitism, and incompetence associated with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Starmer turned to Mandelson’s protege, Morgan McSweeney, to serve as his chief of staff. In turn, McSweeney delivered Starmer a huge parliamentary majority, though, significantly, this “loveless landslide” was won on a lower vote share than that of any party since World War II. And it is perhaps not surprising that, in the search for a shrewd U.S. ambassador, McSweeney turned to his former mentor.
On the surface, it seems absurd that a prime minister might fall not because he was connected to Epstein but because his U.S. ambassador was connected to Epstein. Yet in Britain today, that outcome now looks entirely plausible.
Matters might have been different had everything else been going well. A booming economy, controlled immigration, shrinking hospital waiting lists, or rising employment might have allowed Starmer to weather the storm. Instead, the country is stagnating, and the government has no evident plan to reverse course. No vision is offered of what Britain is meant to become. Labour was elected largely because it was not the Conservative Party, and its chief appeal was moral. Starmer, voters were assured, was virtuous. Unlike its predecessors, a Labour government would be competent and free of scandal.
That promise barely survived Labour’s first week in office. From free glasses and concert tickets to allegations of tax avoidance, ministers were soon accused of a range of immoral, and sometimes legally dubious, conduct. More troubling still, Starmer himself has appeared morally rudderless. He initially dismissed calls for a national inquiry into Britain’s rape-gang scandal as a “far-right” bandwagon—yet while he has apologized to Epstein’s victims, he has conspicuously failed to offer the same condolences to women and girls raped by illegal migrants.
Starmer will likely fall because, under his leadership, Labour stood for little beyond claims of moral superiority. With those claims now in ruins, it is not only Starmer’s career that appears finished but also Labour’s governing rationale. Its supposed virtues of probity and competence have been exposed as hollow.
The Epstein revelations did not create Starmer’s lack of personal authority, nor did they cause the moral collapse of Labour’s government. But they have made both impossible to ignore. We are living not merely through the final days of a prime minister, or even of a government, but through the end of the Mandelson-inspired New Labour project that so decisively shaped British politics in the early years of this century. More than that, we are witnessing the death throes of centrism and technocracy themselves. With the curtain raised as never before on how many in the political elite operate off camera, their claims to moral superiority can no longer command the popular will.
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