Mandelson, Epstein and the death of shame

Why did Britain's ambassador to the US continue his friendship with a convicted child molester?

Is your best pal a convicted paedophile? No? Oh, don’t be like that. If His Excellency The Right Honourable The Lord Peter Mandelson, His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States of America no less, can be best buddies with a known kiddy-fiddler, then so can you. There’s no shame, not anymore.

It’s easy, isn’t it, sometimes to wonder if the people who rule us actively hate us, or at least hold the most profound contempt for our petty worldview and our bourgeois sense of decency. Certainly, the Jeffrey Epstein saga – in which information about what exactly the rich and powerful got up to on the dead financier’s Little Saint James private island, or in any of his myriad ultra-luxurious properties – is ceaselessly promised and then withheld, makes this contempt seem obvious.

In May, Sky News asked Lord Mandelson if it was true he’d stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in June 2009, after the financier had in 2008 been given a weirdly lenient thirteen-month work-release sentence - rather than the maximum 45 year jail sentence - for the crime of raping girls as young as 14.

His lordship replied flatly that he refused to answer any questions about Epstein. ‘I wish I’d never met him in the first place,’ was all he would say on the subject.

Now, however, he has changed his tune, on Wednesday admitting to The Sun: ‘I regret very, very deeply indeed carrying on that association with him for far longer than I should have done… I fell and accepted assurances that he had given me about his indictment, his original criminal case in Florida. Like many people, I took at face value what he said.’

Oh dear.

Is it likely his lordship would have made this admission had a 2003 book made for Epstein to celebrate his 50^thbirthday - containing notes from illustrious friends - not this week been released thanks to the efforts of Congressional Democratic House Oversight Committee?

In the book we see all too clearly the adoration and praise Mandelson lavished on Epstein when the child molester was alive. ‘Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!’ Mandelson gushed. He even illustrated his note with a photo of himself wearing only a bathrobe in conversation with Epstein, who is fully dressed.

‘Happy birthday, Jeffrey. We love you!!’ his note concludes.

There is so much about the Epstein scandal that stinks to high heaven, no matter how grimly President Trump – who once described Epstein as ‘a terrific guy’ and ‘a lot of fun to be with’ – tells us the whole thing is a hoax.

To recap: are we really expected to believe Epstein topped himself in a maximum security jail at the precise moment his guards had fallen asleep and the security cameras on his cell door were apparently on the blink? And just before he went on trial to answer questions about what he and his influential buddies had been doing? It seems awfully convenient.

Then there’s the question of how Epstein, a failed school teacher, became so obscenely rich. From whom, or where, was the money coming? Also, why did modelling agent and frequent Epstein companion Jean-Luc Brunel, who like Epstein stood accused of raping and trafficking children, also apparently commit suicide while in prison in Paris in 2022 – also by hanging?

Jean Luc Brunel on Little Saint James wearing a cap

Add to that the recent transfer of Esptein’s close companion Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison, apparently in contravention of Federal Bureau of Prisons regulations relating to the confinement of convicted sex offenders. The transfer was made just days after she had told Department of Justice officials she had never seen President Trump doing anything nefarious with Epstein. ‘They’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut,’ DOJ Acting Deputy Chief Joseph Schnitt told an undercover reporter shortly afterward.

It's worth pointing out that Maxwell’s testimony at her 2021 trial for crimes including human trafficking was considered sufficiently ‘sensational and impure’ by judge Alison J Nathan that to this day it is withheld from public consumption. Oh well.

The belief many people hold - too many, surely, to any longer be dismissed as the fanciful imaginings of conspiracy theorists – is that charismatic Epstein was running an industrial-scale honey trap operation on behalf of a foreign or domestic intelligence agency for the purpose of secretly filming highly influential people indulging whatever their particular perversion was in order later to exert control over them through the time-honoured means of blackmail.

‘Thinking of voting against sending more arms to eg Israel, senator? Fine, then presumably you also won’t mind your wife and constituents seeing this footage of you ecstatic in a gimp outfit/having acrobatic sex with an underage girl…” is the gist. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why shadowy intelligence agencies might like to operate in this way. It’s relatively cheap, for one thing, and presumably highly effective.

The alternative - and the version of events we are now asked by the likes of FBI director Kash Patel to believe - is that Epstein was simply both history’s wealthiest and most prolific paedophile – indeed, that he, and he alone, molested ‘over one thousand young women’, according to the official FBI report – but that when he wasn’t indulging in this depravity he liked nothing more than to throw really swell parties for the rich and famous.

Which do you think is more likely?

Whatever the reality, it seems increasingly likely we will never be told. Ultimately, perhaps that’s all the answer we need. You’ll remember Prince Andrew stayed with Epstein in Manhattan in December, 2010. If it was good enough for royalty, then surely it was good enough for a mere lord. As I say, there’s no shame anymore.