How the
Epstein scandal has shaken the British government to its core
Anger at
former US ambassador Peter Mandelson’s relations with the child sex offender
threatens to topple the prime minister
Oliver
Holmes and Chris Michael in London
Thu 5 Feb
2026 20.33 CET
It was
the one scandal that Donald Trump seemed unable to shake. No matter his best
efforts to convince his supporter base that there was nothing to see here, the
demands for the administration to release every document it had on the child
sex offender Jeffrey Epstein only grew.
Yet even
after the most shocking revelations in the latest drop about Trump’s inner
circle – involving everyone from Elon Musk to the Maga honcho Steve Bannon to
the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, not to mention Trump himself – so far,
it seems, the administration has escaped largely unscathed. Nobody has
resigned, nobody has been fired, and certainly there is no sign that the US
president is going anywhere.
There is,
however, one political establishment that the Epstein scandal has shaken to its
core – in the UK, where revelations in the files have sent a shock wave through
the governing party that threatens to topple it entirely.
Although
the former Prince Andrew, the brother of King Charles, is the best known Briton
to entangle himself in Epstein’s web, there is another figure who has brought
the scandal back home with him.
Peter
Mandelson is another man with “prince” in his title, though his “Prince of
Darkness” nickname was coined to reflect his reputation for being a master of
the political dark arts. Few people in British politics have had careers as
colourful and turbulent as his. Few people have managed to return from the
political wilderness in the way he has.
There may
be no coming back from this latest scandal.
Police in
London launched a criminal investigation this week into allegations that
Mandelson – who most recently was the British ambassador to the US, but whose
history at the heart of British politics is long and laden with scandal –
shared sensitive information with Epstein while serving as the government
minister for business in 2009.
Mandelson,
72, is accused of leaking government emails and market-sensitive information in
the aftermath of the financial crash – including alerting Epstein that the
British government would soon act to prop up the flagging euro. Separately,
Mandelson and his now-husband apparently received several payments totalling at
least $75,000. The whiff of selling government secrets is acrid.
He has
now quit the ruling Labour party, but the bleeding may not stop there: Keir
Starmer, the prime minister, faces serious questions about why someone as
clearly risky as Mandelson was ever allowed back into the fold.
To many
in the UK, Mandelson is the long-running embodiment of the New Labour movement,
having held high-profile roles in the Labour party over four decades, from
strategist to government minister. Perhaps most crucially, he is perceived as a
key figure during the remarkable run of electoral success under Tony Blair’s
centrist turn in the 1990s that helped bring Labour back in from the cold of
the Conservative party’s 18-year grip on power.
In an
attempt to distance himself – and explain why he hired Mandelson despite having
some knowledge of his links to Epstein – Starmer told parliament in London on
Wednesday that the politician had “betrayed our country”.
“He lied
repeatedly to my team, when asked about his relationship with Epstein before
and during his tenure as ambassador,” the British leader said. “I regret
appointing him. If I knew then what I know now, he would never have been
anywhere near government.”
Yet
Mandelson had already been forced out of government twice before: in 1998, when
he resigned as trade and industry secretary after failing to disclose that he
secretly received £375,000 to buy a house in London from a colleague who was
being investigated over his business dealings; and in 2001, when he stepped
down as Northern Ireland secretary after being accused of pulling strings to
get a British passport for an Indian billionaire who had pledged £1m towards
the Millennium Dome project that Mandelson was heading.
Starmer
brought him back to advise on how to win the 2024 election anyway, and after
Labour’s landslide victory the prime minister chose Mandelson to head the
British embassy in Washington. Within a year, Mandelson was fired after emails
were published showing he maintained a friendship with Epstein. The latest
cache of Epstein documents released by the US Department of Justice makes the
previous allegations seem almost quaint by comparison.
Still,
with Mandelson being such a long-running presence in the Labour party, the
impact of his fall from grace has been widely and deeply felt. Wes Streeting,
the health secretary, who has made public his own designs on the leadership,
said on Wednesday that he felt personally shaken by the revelations about
Mandelson, who had mentored and backed him as a rising parliamentarian.
“I cannot
state strongly enough how bitterly that betrayal feels for those of us in the
Labour party,” he said, “who feel very personally let down and also feel that
he, as well as betraying two prime ministers, betraying our country and
betraying Epstein’s victims, has fundamentally betrayed our values and the
things that motivate us and the things that brought us into politics, which is
public service and national interest, not self-service and self-interest.”
Even his
own MPs have warned that Starmer’s days as prime minister are numbered,
particularly after he admitted in parliament that he knew about Mandelson’s
friendship with Epstein before his appointment. “The most terminal mood is
among the super-loyal,” said one MP, while another said of Starmer’s admission:
“You could feel the atmosphere change; it was dark.”
But while
calling Starmer’s judgment into question, the scandal also appears to have set
alight a more fundamental anger at his leadership. His internal critics accuse
him of lacking a political and intellectual core, enabling others to manipulate
him to their own ends. The tale of how Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief
adviser, persuaded him to appoint an already compromised character to one of
the most sensitive jobs in government, only to see that decision go
spectacularly but foreseeably wrong, is held up as another piece of evidence
against him.
All this
discontent plays out as Nigel Farage, the Trump supporter whose hard-right
Reform party has led polls for months, looms in the wings.
The main
message that permeates to voters not following the intrigue in Westminster
could be simply that the rot in the British establishment runs deep.
Epstein
killed himself in a jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on US federal
sex-trafficking charges, but his death has done nothing to quell the questions
about the high-profile and rich elite he mingled with on both sides of the
Atlantic. Richard Branson referred in an email to Epstein’s “harem”. Andrew
Mountbatten-Windsor had already been stripped of his titles last year after the
posthumous publication of a book by Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein accuser who
died last April, but the latest photos, showing him smiling and kneeling on all
fours over an unidentified woman on the floor, are a further blow to the
British monarchy’s respectability. (Mandelson himself served in a royal
position until just recently, on the privy council, a largely ceremonial committee
of senior officials that advises the king.)
In the
US, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general (and Trump’s former personal
lawyer), has declared that last Friday’s dump of roughly 3.5m files – out of an
estimated 6m total – means prosecutors’ review into the Epstein case “is over”,
though survivors beg to disagree. In the UK, the fallout may have just begun.
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