Peter Mandelson: Epstein is like dog muck; the smell won’t go away
This Times Magazine interview with Peter Mandelson was published before police began investigations over the leak of government information to Jeffrey Epstein and Mandelson resigned from the House of Lords.
The call that finished off Peter Mandelson as US ambassador came early on a Thursday. Sir Keir Starmer had been saying he had “confidence” in him in spite of the disclosure of emails to Jeffrey Epstein. But new details kept coming: messages showing Lord Mandelson had urged the disgraced financier to “fight for early release” and — crucially — suggested his conviction for soliciting an under-age girl was wrongful and should be challenged. By Thursday morning, and not for the first or last time, Downing Street felt unable to defend its position. The call came on his husband, Reinaldo’s, birthday.
“It was like a 5.30am drive-by shooting,” the 72-year-old Labour politician tells me on January 25, when I meet him at his home in Wiltshire. “I was at the edge of something. Suddenly, I was put at the centre of it — as a result of historical emails of which I have no memory and no record.” The emails also came as a surprise to Downing Street. After receiving the call from No 10, he and Reinaldo were told to be “out of that residence in a week, with everything packed up and removed”.
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“It felt like being killed without actually dying,” he says, looking back at what he describes as a “life-changing crisis”. I reply that I don’t know how that feels. “Well, I can tell you, it’s a unique experience,” he says. “I mean, I’m navigating the experience because I have really good friends who are helping me do so, starting with Reinaldo more than anyone else.”
Mandelson-Epstein latest: ambassador appointment was ‘rational’, says minister
Only five days after our original conversation, it becomes clear that the crisis is far from over. That Friday, the US Department of Justice releases three million files with the Labour politician’s name featured multiple times. The details are excruciating: alleged payments by Jeffrey Epstein to Mandelson’s husband; suggestions that he lobbied a Labour chancellor on tax policy; and a photo showing him wearing white underpants while talking to a woman in a bathrobe.
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By Sunday, a shocked Mandelson (he was not expecting the release) has quit the Labour party, citing a desire to prevent “further embarrassment”. Labour says that disciplinary action was already “under way”. By phone that night, the grandson of the party grandee Herbert Morrison tells me of his decision it “wasn’t easy”, but he feels “better for it as I need to reset”.
The allegations keep coming
Many of his own side say a reset is impossible — concluding the comeback king has finally run out of road. Following Starmer’s statement that Mandelson should not be a member of the House of Lords or use the title, Mandelson announced he would be stepping down from the Lords.
What’s in the Epstein files? The key revelations so far
The day after we speak, it’s announced the cabinet secretary will investigate Mandelson’s actions as business secretary when Labour was last in power. The files include Mandelson appearing to send Epstein a private email to Gordon Brown that contained highly sensitive market information on secret plans to sell off government assets. Keir Starmer described the leak as “shocking”, and the Cabinet Office have now sent the police details about the emails.
Mandelson continues to dispute several of the allegations. He accepts that his husband took money from Epstein — whom he likens to “bubonic plague” — to fund an osteopathy course. Why accept it? “Epstein told Reinaldo that he had an educational foundation which gave bursaries or scholarships and offered one for an osteopathy course. I saw this as kindness, nothing more. It was a great help to Reinaldo and I thanked him.”
And now? “In retrospect, it was clearly a lapse in our collective judgment for Reinaldo to accept this offer. At the time it was not a consequential decision.” There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Reinaldo.
Epstein is asked ‘Are you the devil himself?’ in released video
Only Mandelson was also business secretary, so didn’t this open him up to potential bribery? Epstein was lobbying him to change the banker bonus rules. “There was nonstop discussion from the entire industry about reforming the banks and how to strike the right balance in regulation,” Mandelson recalls. Did he give Epstein’s views on the issue extra weight? “The idea that giving Reinaldo an osteopath bursary is going to sway mine or anyone else’s views about banking policy is risible.”
As for the alleged Epstein payments amounting to $75,000 to accounts linked to the Labour peer between 2003 and 2004, Mandelson insists he has “absolutely no recollection or records of receiving his money and I think I would remember such a large sum”. He’s also struggling to recall anything related to that underpants photo, telling me he has “no idea what I am doing in this photograph or who the woman was. It looks as though she came in and showed me something on an iPad.”
That whole period, he says, was a blur. “[Epstein] told me he had been framed in his indictment in 2008 and I feel really bad about continuing my association with him afterwards. That’s why I wanted to apologise unequivocally for doing so, to the women and girls who suffered.”
‘Epstein was a master manipulator. I can see that now’
The Epstein we now know, he says, is not the same figure as people thought they knew when he was alive. “It’s difficult for people to make that distinction because in most people’s minds there’s one Epstein, one flow of information. They didn’t know him. But like everyone else, I learnt the truth about him after his [2019] death, not in the early Noughties. He was a master manipulator. I can see that now. But the point is that his victims certainly did know what he was doing.”
But as the latest emails suggest, Mandelson’s relationship to Epstein was not “like everyone else’s”. They spoke frequently; he once referred to the financier as his “best pal”.
“I don’t know what his motives were — probably mixed — but he provided guidance to help me navigate out of the world of politics and into the world of commerce and finance,” Mandelson says. “Perhaps he wanted to be a mentor and I was naive in regarding him as a good-faith actor. There was no reason to shun his advice, but I was too trusting. He was always very free and forthright with his views and always presented them as in my best interests.”
Of course, this isn’t the first time Mandelson has found himself turfed out over bad judgment involving the rich and powerful. In fact, it’s been a common thread of his career, from an undeclared loan from a millionaire colleague to a row over a passport application for a billionaire (he was later cleared). Is this the one scandal he can’t find a way back from? His old friend, Sky’s Trevor Phillips, said he had been “at best, naive and foolish” and “at worst, greedy and duplicitous”.
“I’ve had a lot of bad luck, no doubt some of it of my own making,” he tells me during our meeting in Wiltshire.
Does he have a lapse of judgment when it comes to himself? “It’s an easy thing to say,” he says. With the rich and powerful? “That is a bit of an occupational hazard for a leading politician or a European commissioner, as I was. I don’t think I am drawn towards rich people so much as rich people have big personalities, a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience to share. I hoover that up, but not because they’re wealthy. It’s because of what they do and what they’ve learnt and the responsibilities they’ve exercised, not the size of their bank accounts.”
If it wasn’t money, what drew him to Epstein? “He was a classic sociopath. Outwardly, completely charming and engaging. He was very clever.”
He also threw good dinner parties. “I remember one of the two dinner parties of his I went to. I sat next to someone in charge of brain research at Harvard. I was sitting opposite the founders of Google. At the other end of the table was Bill Gates. I think I also brushed past Noam Chomsky on a later date, but he wasn’t having much to do with me given that he was a Marxist philosopher and I was a Blairite.” (No suggestion is made of wrongdoing by any of them.) The photos documenting these meetings were largely the work of Ghislaine Maxwell (now in prison), he adds.
‘Hiding under a rock would be a disproportionate response’
But those days seem quite far away. After his sacking, last November he went to dinner with George Osborne in Notting Hill and was later photographed outside the £10 million house urinating on a neighbour’s wall. How did it feel to be exposed in this way? “People said it was very humanising,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. “I didn’t quite feel that myself. I just blame Uber. I had two cars, both of which cancelled on me, and after half an hour I was bursting for a pee. I could have gone back and woken them all up, but they did have three children [there]. The real question is, how on earth was there a photographer who got me as I was arriving, and was still there at 11 o’clock at night?” Even now, it seems, photographers seem to think it worth tailing him.
What does he say to those who say it’s time that the Prince of Darkness finally retired — and hid under a rock? He won’t hear of it. “Hiding under a rock would be a disproportionate response to a handful of misguided historical emails, which I deeply regret sending. If it hadn’t been for the emails, I’d still be in Washington. Emails sent all those years ago didn’t change the relationship that I had with this monster.
“I feel the same about the recent download of Epstein files, none of which indicate wrongdoing or misdemeanour on my part,” he says on the Sunday.
Initially he suggested he told No 10 everything, but can he now admit they had reason to feel caught out? “Downing Street did not know what I had long since forgotten. It was a distant chapter from which I have very little recall and have no access at all to records or a diary,” he says. “I understand being surprised by what they learnt, but quite honestly I too am amazed by some of the conversations I had and areas of my life where I was seeking advice from Epstein.”
Mandelson speaks slowly and often pauses, thinking carefully as he speaks. “It has been a life-changing crisis. I’m not pretending otherwise. But you have to set about getting your life back into shape and that’s what I’m doing.”
Does he regret taking the ambassador job given all that happened? “Oh, I loved the job… I just hope people will judge me by the job I did and what we achieved.”
From Washington to Wiltshire
Five months after leaving Washington, Mandelson and his husband are back in a rented farmhouse in the Pewsey Vale, trading the power capital of the world for the isolated Wiltshire countryside. His nearest neighbour is a shepherd. He is unemployed (his advisory firm Global Counsel also dispensed with his services) and wondering what to do for the next three years he had planned to be in DC — and after that.
“Does everyone like spicy food?” calls out Reinaldo from the kitchen to me and the photographer. “I’m a Brazilian. I have to check,” he adds with a smile. Mandelson, meanwhile, is checking the photos he just sat for. “Too posed,” he remarks to the photographer.
“A friend has said to me, ‘Remember, tough times don’t last. Tough people do,’ ” he tells me. “That’s the belief I held on to. Someone else said, ‘Remember, you are the same person with the same knowledge and the same skills you had before this crisis hit you. This crisis has not taken any of those things away from you.’ ”
He has experience in both political death and reincarnation. He has been at the centre of UK politics across four decades. The original spin doctor for Neil Kinnock, he blended power and communications in a way no one else had. He became central to the Blair project — which also made him a lightning rod. He was forced to resign as trade secretary in 1998 and as Northern Ireland secretary in 2001, only to re-emerge as a European trade commissioner in 2004, then ennobled by Gordon Brown to become business secretary in 2008.
Now, after quitting the Labour party, he’s going it alone. He’s on leave from the Lords and has no plans to change that. “I am a New Labour person and always will be, wherever the party situates itself,” he tells me on Sunday night. “But I think I want a sea change. I want to be more of an outsider looking in rather than the other way round. I want to contribute ideas that enable Britain to strengthen and to work for all, in every part of the country.”
Some independence might suit him. He says British politics is “ripe for disruption” — and Reform. “Farage is not an attractive proposition for a centrist politician like me, but both Labour and the Tories assume that they are the only parties licensed to supply Britain with prime ministers, as if we have some God-given right, and that Reform is simply a usurper waiting to fall by the wayside when the time comes.”
What of the present government? “It is very difficult to see how you can get any change without economic growth and the government began the year by de-prioritising growth, which I think is strange.” But he says the problem goes beyond the economy. It comes down to leadership. “The U-turns are becoming a really bad look, and if the prime minister picks a fight or shows leadership on something, he has to follow through and win the argument.”
‘Andy Burnham has a lot of potential’
As for other potential leaders, he says of the Greater Manchester mayor who was recently blocked from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election, “I remember Andy Burnham 25 years ago as a good Blairite, therefore I still think he has a lot of potential.”
Starmer faced a backlash when he warned the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers”, but Mandelson says “he was making a valid point and, as prime minister, I think he was right to talk about these things rather than be silenced”.
Once, Mandelson was an arch-Remainer who said that Britain’s strongest future is as a member of the European Union. “I know some people think that we should turn our backs on America, but I don’t think it’s a simple choice for us between Europe and America,” he says. “As things stand, the EU will only have us back as supplicants. The price will be huge, the terms will be onerous. They will impose very tough terms: we would be forced to become a regulatory satellite of the EU.”
Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently wowed Davos with a speech declaring a “rupture” with America and the rules-based order. Mandelson was unimpressed.
“Where were the clear rules?” he asks. “The global rules we once had have long since been overtaken by American rules, by Chinese rules.” It’s bunkum, he says, to believe in a Camelot that Trump has somehow defiled. “A liberal world order where peace ruled supreme? It didn’t. Understand that hard power — and occasionally lethal force — is needed to keep us safe. Not dream rules.
“The fact is that Europe is providing neither the means nor the will to protect people through strength. That is why we have to look to the Americans to do so. I mean, if Britain split from the United States, do we really think that Europe could protect us? With the same intelligence function or the other half of our nuclear deterrent in the way that America does at present? No.”
He goes on. “Let’s be honest, 3 per cent of UK GDP on defence isn’t going to happen unless things are substantially cut elsewhere. This is a Treasury reality and they know it.”
So the prime minister’s former ambassador is saying that the UK’s main defence spending pledge is a fiction and that this country is in no position to pick a fight with America.
Mandelson says Greenland — “A frozen land mass in the far north” — is a distraction: the focus should be on Beijing. “When people say to me there’s too much risk attached to the United States, I say, well, what about the risk attached to China? It dominates many global supply chains and has a near-monopoly on critical minerals. If China wins the AI race, it will affect every facet of our lives. Is that safe for us? China totally dominates the industrial base of the renewable energy system we are adopting. Does that give us energy security?”
His language is striking for a man who only a few years ago was regarded as a chief Europhile and pro-China. What changed? He puts it down to a mix of seeing up close the “depth and the scale of the UK-US relationship in defence [and] security intelligence terms” and adjusting to Xi Jinping’s China.
‘A serious wobble’ over the Chagos Islands deal
One of Mandelson’s tasks as US ambassador was trying to get the administration onside over the Chagos Islands deal, which last month Trump denounced on social media and the UK government is trying to salvage. Mandelson was “mildly horrified” to see his work undone so spectacularly.
He worked hard to secure Republican backing for the deal. But just as it was coming together in the spring of 2025, he “became aware of a serious wobble in London over the agreement and its sellability to the British public.
“That was to do with the price tag and whether we had the total legal obligation to enter the deal and whether the original legal case made for the agreement in Whitehall was as watertight as was claimed. So on the one hand I faced a sceptical US administration and then at another point a wobbly government of my own behind me.”
It’s not the only US plan to become shaky. His main projects were the UK/US trade deal, the technology partnership and Chagos. “So of the three things that I’m associated with, six months on, one is left standing,” he says. What does that speak to? “Well, if they had to fire me, and I wish they hadn’t, it might have been better to replace me more quickly,” he replies, gesticulating. His successor, Sir Christian Turner, arrived in DC this month.
Did they not need to take their time given what had happened with his own appointment? “They had undertaken the fullest due diligence over me… No, I think there was a disagreement between No 10 and the Foreign Office over whether a classic diplomatic appointment should be made or a more political replacement. The Foreign Office won out, but you just have to remember this administration is a very political one. And getting on their political wavelength, talking turkey to them politically and influencing their political judgment, not only in their own but in our interests too, is what the ambassador has to do.”
On returning to British politics after 15 years, he was struck by how the government seemed “less able to drive change”.
“I’m not just talking about the Foreign Office. I’m talking about the government as a whole. You know, you may not like all of Trump’s decisions, but at least he is decisive.”
The newly independent Mandelson has plenty of praise for the US president, even if Trump claimed not to know who he was during the state visit press conference. Was he offended? “He’s so clever,” Mandelson replies breezily. “I mean, if he had defended me, that would have been embarrassing to the prime minister. If he had attacked me, it would have been hurtful to me.”
What next for the man who faces a tide of public anger? There are some calls for him to attend Congress and speak to the committee investigating Epstein. He’s unconvinced. “There is nothing I can tell Congress about Epstein they don’t already know,” he says. “I had no exposure to the criminal aspects of his life. For so many years the voices of his victims were not heard and now Congress has rightly opened everything up.”
But he does want something to do. “The problem for me now is that work has always defined me. Everything else has always been an add-on. So I will find things to do.”
He’s familiar with the burial process — being fired, written off — and has returned each time. Only this time it’s harder. On the day he leaves Labour and we speak by phone, he describes Epstein as “muck that you can’t get off your shoe… Like dog muck, the smell never goes away.”
Mandelson may want to look to the future but, like many of the names in the Epstein files, he may never escape the past.