Epstein’s ‘dog muck’ is a smell that Labour can’t wash off

The reverberations from the Epstein files go further than British politics, but the final fall of the ‘Prince of Darkness’ could take Keir Starmer down too, writes John Rentoul

Peter Mandelson has always cast a spell. That spell would sometimes be broken, but then somehow, he would work the magic again.

When he first started working for the Labour Party in 1985, he was unlike anyone else in politics at the time. Journalists were drawn magnetically to him, for his waspish charisma and because they knew he had the confidence of Neil Kinnock, the leader.

My friend David Aaronovitch, who knew him as a TV producer before he became Labour’s head of communications in 1985, says: “He was the epitome of that saying attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth: ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit next to me.’”

Mandelson was funny, gossipy, and a determined social democrat. What made him attractive to journalists and Labour leaders alike were the qualities that led, repeatedly, to his downfall. He was obsessed with power, who had it and how it worked, and he took risks in trying to obtain it for himself.

During Tony Blair’s leadership campaign in 1994, Blair was dependent on him to know how to conduct himself in interviews – yet Mandelson was already so unpopular with other Labour MPs that he was known, among the inner campaign team, by the codename “Bobby”. The vision that sticks in my mind is from Donald Macintyre’s sympathetic biography of Mandelson, when Blair went round to his secret adviser’s flat to find him sitting on his sofa in his white dressing gown, “tearful” and apparently “inconsolable” because he was being “kept in a box, behind the scenes”.

Mandelson’s closeness to Blair seemed likely to ensure that he would remain in exile when Gordon Brown became prime minister. Although Mandelson had tried not to take sides between Blair and Brown when John Smith died, Brown resented Mandelson’s failure to back him immediately, and saw his subsequent closeness to Blair as confirmation that he had betrayed him.

But then Brown, desperate to reinforce his flailing government, brought Mandelson back, first as business secretary and then with the additional status of first secretary of state – in effect, deputy prime minister. By recruiting a top Blairite and a supremely competent minister, Brown succeeded in fending off a series of leadership challenges.

The Jeffrey Epstein files confirm that Mandelson saw himself as propping up Brown’s premiership. In one email, Mandelson tells Epstein that he “can only get to NY at a time when people feel G [Gordon Brown] won’t have some sort of breakdown”.

But now we know more about how, during that period, he “acted against the interest of the country”, in the words of Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the foreign affairs committee. The apparent leaks of market-sensitive secret information, from a man who was at the time Brown’s most senior cabinet minister, are shocking.

Indeed, the scale of the disclosures in the Epstein files is so great that it is hard to predict what the consequences will be. The damage spreads far beyond British politics – or even, thanks to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson, the British monarchy; in a just world, it ought to bring down Donald Trump, too.

The picture painted of how politics and finance works at the highest level is like an anti-capitalist conspiracy theory come true. At one point, Mandelson, via Epstein, seemed to suggest that Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan, should “mildly threaten” Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer, in order to head off proposed taxes on bankers’ bonuses.

The immediate implications for Mandelson are surely terminal this time, despite his defiant public statements being very much in the spirit of his “fighter, not a quitter” speech in Hartlepool in 2001. In an interview conducted on the day that Mandelson left Labour, and published in The Times today, he described Epstein to the journalist Katy Balls as “muck that you can’t get off your shoe”, remarking that ‘like dog muck, the smell never goes away”.

But the question is whether he takes Keir Starmer down with him.

It was Starmer who brought about his most recent comeback, as ambassador to Washington. It seemed a gamble at the time, because Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein was not a secret. Yet Starmer judged that it was a risk worth taking, because he thought Mandelson’s skill in trade negotiations could deliver the deal with the Trump administration that he desperately wanted. And the magic worked. Britain secured a modestly preferential deal – but at what price?

The prime minister has tried to stay ahead of the wave of outrage by demanding that the House of Lords strip Mandelson of his title – and Mandelson himself has now relinquished the peerage.

It may be that the fireball of indignation will catch up first with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, who is a longstanding friend of Mandelson’s. McSweeney pushed for Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador a year ago, and argued just as strongly against sacking him seven months later.

But I am not sure that offering McSweeney as a sacrifice would help Starmer. It feels too late.

McSweeney and Starmer may be doomed already, but their guilt by association with Mandelson’s semi-treasonous behaviour is hardly likely to prolong their survival in No 10.