The British dimension of the Epstein scandal has to be seen as a set of political, not personal, issues, argues Kevin Crane

The release of the Epstein files so nearly never happened. If Donald Trump’s government had remembered that it is possible to get access to sealed documents for a civil court case, not just the criminal ones they’d blocked, they’d have effectively shut the whole thing down last year. Similarly, if the Democratic Party opposition still had any hope the Clinton dynasty was part of their future, their politicians would have been under too much pressure to force the issue. Fortunately for the cause of justice, neither of those obstacles held, and the resulting revelations are every bit as scandalous as even our most lurid imaginings would have predicted.

Within America, the new information has implicated men right at the top of society, including both former president Bill Clinton and current president Trump himself, as well as billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. The inclusion of all these names is, of course, a shock but not a surprise, since rumours and leaks had been surrounding them and many others for years since the infamous paedophile businessman died in murky circumstances. What America hasn’t yet seen is what, exactly, will happen as a result of any of it.

It’s here in Britain where outcomes are developing much, much faster. The exposure of two British men has caused crises in some of the most crucial institutions of the state, and while we have yet to see just how much damage is going to be done, we do know that it is going to be very difficult for our elites to just carry on as before.

Is it a royal knock-out?

Ex-prince Andrew, now humiliatingly forced to actually use a disguised version of his surname (it’s Battenberg, it was always Battenberg) has likely done more damage to the monarchy in Britain than anyone since the seventeenth century. The strange thing is that he has not done it alone. If either his mother or his brother had realised, six years ago, that he was up to his neck in the filth surrounding Jeffery Epstein and dropped him from public life rapidly, the family could have limited their own contamination. Instead, they prevaricated and protected him for year after year.

Elizabeth damaged her own public image in the last year of her life by forking over an estimated £12 million of taxpayers’ money to the sex trafficking victim Virginia Giuffrey, while Andrew continued to pathetically insist that he’d never even met her. Then, once Charles was on the throne, the new monarch kept insisting that there was no possible way that Andrew could have his absurd string of titles and honours taken away from him… until suddenly the magic power to do so was granted to him. It was notable that this mysterious ability to make the word “prince” disappear followed a disastrous public appearance in which our ailing head of state was heckled about his brother’s appalling life of debauchery.

The monarchy has been shaken to it’s core by this situation because, ultimately, it’s entire purpose and premise rests on the members of the royal family not being ordinary people, subject to the norms and expectations of ordinary people. Elizabeth didn’t want her son to be punished for his offences because, in her ideology, they were no offence at all. If you believe you’ve been specially tasked by God to preside over society, it’s really not much of a mental leap to believe your nearest and dearest are entitled to behave in any way that they like to anyone they like. Charles is clearly less sentimental towards Randy Andy than that, but he too does not like the conclusions that flow from accepting that he’s simply a man who is as much required to obey the law as any other. Once it was demonstrated that taking away his daft feudal-era pomp could be performed by simply declaring it gone, it exposed that any of these titles can actually be done away with. And what Charles fears is that this weakens the aura and glamour required to sustain the nonsense of royalty in the minds of millions of people.

The Andrew scandal isn’t even over, in fact it’s escalated due to his ex-wife having been heavily implicated in dealing with Epstein as well! This has lead to the closure of her nebulous charities, ripping away another key plank of the self-justification of the royals.

There are now widespread calls for Andy to be criminally investigated, but perhaps even more importantly there are serious questions to be asked as to where the thick nonce is living and who’s footing the bill for him to live there. This is where the whole thing becomes a key question for the British left: the opaque world of royal funding is coming under long-overdue scrutiny. In an increasingly unequal and austerity-wracked country, the fact that direct payments from taxes, as well as massive untaxed land and business interests, are still benefitting this family is a glaring injustice. It is one we must campaign upon, both as part of the wider battle over the cost of living and to undermine the undemocratic absurdity of the crown.

Mandelson: the Labour Party in human form

Right now, of course, the tentacles of this scandal that reach into the elected part of the political establishment are those that are dominating the headlines. Specifically, it is the genuinely spectacular end of the political career of Peter Mandelson, and the very real possibility that he may bring down a chunk of the political establishment with him.

Mandelson’s political life has been one of unlikely, and definitely very unwelcome, comebacks. He reached prominence as a firmly right-wing Labour MP in the 1990s, who masterminded Tony Blair’s rise to the party leadership in 1994. Even in those early days, his creepy demeanour, utter sycophancy towards wealth and power, and apparent eagerness to get his snout in as many troughs as possible made him very controversial. Even other hard rightists in Labour knew he wasn’t popular and Tony Blair was advised to address him only by codename during the 1997 general election, as he was too tough a sell to the electorate. Once in office, Blair expressed a desire to “make the public love Peter Mandelson”.

This was never to be. In fact, Mandelson didn’t last as a cabinet minister even to the end of Blair’s first term as prime minister, as a cloud of scandals surrounding his finances, property dealings and other serious controversies forced him to resign in disgrace not once, but twice. For any normal politician, this would have been enough to get them locked out of public life multiple times over.

Not being a normal politician, Mandelson instead left parliament sideways to become one of Britain’s trade commissioners to the EU. Now, theoretically, this was a state appointment that should have kept him well clear of the internal business of the Labour Party. But Peter was hardly ever likely to stop little things like conflicts of interest keep him buttoned up. He consequently spent much of his time engaging in the power-struggle that was going on inside Westminster, as Tony Blair’s popularity was tanking over the Iraq War and hiking up university student fees. Blair was desperate to cling to power while more moderate forces in the Labour Party wanted to promote the chancellor, Gordon Brown, into the top job. Brown and Mandelson had, once upon a time, actually been quite friendly, but Brown had been one of the key people pushing for Mandelson to resign over his previous antics, and the two were firmly in opposing camps throughout the second Labour term.

Blair finally stepped down in 2007, personally now very damaged by the War On Terror, and likely also tipped off about the looming crisis of the banking system. Gordon Brown therefore came into office and enjoyed a very short honeymoon before the economic crisis discombobulated his government entirely. Brown went from being seen as an impassive iron chancellor to a panicked, punch-drunk prime minister, and resorted to some genuinely desperate moves to try and regain the initiative. One of the most desperate of these was to bring back Peter Mandelson!

Lording it up

Brown made Mandelson a Baron, stuck him into the House of Lords, and instantly gave him a cabinet position in the government. Even at the time, this was widely viewed as absolutely bonkers: as stated before no one should have been able to survive the previous rounds of scandals that the new Baron Hartlepool had done. The logic, in so far as there was any,  was that Brown was exhausted from having to fight the ultra-Blair-loyal right wing of his own party, so he brought Mandelson on board to try to appease them. Probably Brown also bought into to a large part of the myth of the man as a strategic genius.

It’s at this point, though, that the real meat of the Epstein revelations becomes relevant to the story. What we have had revealed to us is that while Mandelson was delighted to be back at the top of the political system, never at any point was he actually working for Gordon Brown’s government.

The year 2008 is generally a big one for the Epstein scandal: this is when Jeffrey Epstein entered his guilty plea to child sex offenses. Post-2008, it was not really credible for prominent people to claim that they never suspected anything about him while partying and doing deals with him. We’ve known for many years that Peter Mandelson was one of those people. What we didn’t know is that there were emails exchanged in which Mandelson appears to have been working with Epstein to prevent Brown’s government from reining in the banking sector as response to the economic crisis they caused!

Brown’s failure to contain the banking crash was the key issue that lead to Labour losing the 2010 general election, and the subsequent decade and a half of austerity that followed that. Mandelson’s role, both covert and overt, prior to that election, were an outsized contribution to all that happening. But he was far from done with politics.

Like all members of the Lords, Mandelson was now able to do politics without democratic restraint or scrutiny. He acted as a key strategist for the hard right of the party, pushing for the Ed Miliband-era front-bench to fail to oppose austerity, which in turn led to a disastrous result at the 2015 election. That result, of course, unintentionally gave rise to Jeremy Corbyn’s shock winning of the Labour leadership, a situation that pushed Mandelson into full-blown factional warfare.

‘I work every single day to bring forward the end of his tenure in office.’ Mandelson once bragged. In theory, this should have been a shocking statement, since electoral parties are supposed to put their difference aside and work to form governments. The truth, that Mandelson and his allies had thought centrists like Gordon Brown were too leftwing to compromise with, was widely enough known. Although it took them nearly five years, Mandelson and his cadre of dedicated anti-socialist party bureaucrats (including the now-infamous strategist Morgan McSweeny) did indeed oust Corbyn and entirely eradicate his project.

A shadow over Starmer

Keir Starmer’s prime ministership is explicitly the result of Mandelson’s plotting, and Mandelson has been utterly central to it as a project. The political weakness of Starmer, and most of the rest of his front bench team, meant that Mandelson frequently had to go front and centre to speak on their behalf. This was particularly notable in the wake of Starmer’s first electoral test in 2021, when Labour limped through a set of local elections and suffered a shock by-election defeat. The then-opposition leader had had something like a breakdown during a television interview the following day, so he was shuttered into his office and Mandelson handled the media operation. He placed the blame, of course, entirely on Corbyn and the left.

Once Labour got into office as a result of the Tory implosion of 2024, Starmer rewarded Mandelson handsomely with the job of ambassador to the USA. This was very obviously a prize for personal services rendered, as the previous ambassador was not due to move on or retire and had to be explicitly sacked in order to free up the post. It was yet another gobsmacking return to glory by one of the most scandal-ridden men in modern British political history, but quite simply he and all his cronies felt invincible in that moment. Ironically, however, it was probably the single most inopportune plum job he could possibly have received.

Barely a year went by before US lawmakers managed to crack open the first Epstein files, and one of the very first things to emerge was a cringe-inducing letter of sympathy from Peter Mandelson regarding the child sexual abuses charges finally catching up to him. This confirmed not only that they had remained close friends after his guilty plea, but that Mandelson wanted to help Epstein escape justice entirely. That news blew up instantly, and resulted in Mandelson receiving his umpteenth, and very likely last ever, sacking from a job over a scandal. It was also a disaster for Starmer, who was utterly unable to explain how basic diplomatic vetting hadn’t identified such a damaging, and long rumoured, relationship.

The further revelations from 2008, however, are an emergency of an even higher order. Mandelson’s strategy has been trying to cast himself as an innocent dupe, but the act is literally fooling no one any more. He is now being formally investigated for some of the most serious crimes one can commit in public life. It is alleged that he was conspiring against his own government and giving confidential information to hostile actors both for political intrigue and financial gain. After a lifetime of escape artistry, Mandelson may finally be looking into the jaws of a trap he isn’t going to slip.

But it won’t be enough for Mandelson to be held accountable in isolation. Not for the victims of Epstein and his fellow abusers, but also not for the people of Britain. This is a man who was able to do the things he did because he was enabled by the machinery of the Labour Party and powerful networks in the British state. Starmer should resign, just for starters, and it now seems likely that he may have to do just that.

Beyond this, though, it really is time to raise serious questions about the Labour Party itself. Peter Mandelson was a leading figure with the party almost continuously, despite repeated scandals, for forty years. Keir Starmer can feign shock at his betrayal of the party and the country, as can his would-be successor Wes Streeting, but their attempts to get ahead of this calamity can really only go so far. Labour has consistently acted to use its disciplinary measures against the left, with significant figures like Corbyn, Ken Livingston and Diane Abbott ruthlessly pushed out on a range of spurious bases, because it suited the dominant right-wing faction’s interests to do so. What actually is the Labour Party, and what is it there to do? What have establishment Labour figures actually been doing for a third of a century, enthusiastically acting under the direction of a man they now label a traitor? What has been exposed, quite accidentally, from the Epstein files is a deep rottenness that has been systematically protected inside that party, in service of a politics that is fundamentally anti-socialist, anti-democratic and unjust.