Quitting Labour isn’t enough – of course Peter Mandelson deserves to be thrown out of the Lords

What was a sitting lawmaker doing, allegedly passing on sensitive financial information to an American financier who had already been convicted of child sex offences and served time in jail, asks Sean O’Grady

Well, I didn’t have “seeing a picture of Peter Mandelson in his underpants” on my bingo card for 2026. According to a Mandelson spokesperson: “No one can say who or where the photo was taken. Lord Mandelson has absolutely no idea, or indeed whether it has any connection to Epstein at all.”

So that at least is a possible confirmation that the photograph is not some ChatGPT-generated hallucination, and that means that Mandelson, even in the company of someone he may not know well – the unnamed woman in a dressing gown – may have been wearing what can only be described as a posing pouch.

The seediness of the image, fake or real, is a danger signal in more ways than one. It is symbolic of what might have been a similarly suspect attitude to more important matters.

It cannot be right that, if the documents released by the US justice department are true, Epstein sent Mandelson some $75,000, of which $25,000 was for the benefit of his partner, and now husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva.

Mandelson says he has no recollection or record of such monies, and he is now investigating that. But the fact that Keir Starmer has ordered an “urgent" investigation into Mandelson’s contact with Epstein while the peer was a government minister and believes that [he] “should not be a member of the House of Lords”, speaks volumes. At any rate, Mandelson was then an MP and, allegedly, any payment of money was not declared in the usual way.

A picture from the ‘Epstein Files’ which appears to show Lord Mandelson in his underwear speaking to an unknown person wearing a bathrobe (US Department of Justice)

Lord Mandelson is alleged to have sent the paedophile financier a private email from an adviser to Gordon Brown, the then prime minister, that contained highly sensitive market information on secret plans to sell off government assets, files disclosed by the US Department of Justice suggest.

At the time, Epstein had already been convicted of child sex offences and served time in jail. He made his money helping rich clients with investments and had close links with senior bankers for whom confidential information of potential government asset sales would have been valuable.

The emails suggest that Mandelson was sending Epstein internal and privileged information about sensitive government discussions while serving in the cabinet. If true, that would be an egregious breach for a sitting lawmaker.

Another mystery is the £10,000 which was, seemingly, sent by Epstein to da Silva, much later, in 2009, to help pay for a course in osteopathy. Why Mandelson, who was and is not without means, couldn’t have helped out his own partner with his fees is a question that immediately comes to mind. A more important one is why Mandelson was making himself so potentially vulnerable to conflicts of interest at this time by acting in this way.

The same goes for him, in effect, working against the policy of his own government by seemingly advising JPMorgan (via Epstein) to “mildly threaten” the then chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling. Mandelson says he was only saying what the banks were saying in public, but it’s the claims of undeclared lobbying that is the point.

We also now have even more allegations about minutes of UK Treasury discussions being forwarded by Mandelson to Epstein. We’ve not yet had Mandelson’s answer to those stories, published by Tax Policy Associates.

If his funny “budgie smugglers” were Mandelson’s only problem, then that might be one thing – and in our world of short attention spans he might even be able to rehabilitate himself, yet again.

But of course, Mandelson is much more culpable than that in terms of simply having had a friendly “yum, yum” association with Epstein, and even after Epstein’s procurement conviction, a relationship which Mandelson himself says he deeply regrets. I bet he does. Somehow, Mandelson will need to give a better account of himself than he did to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg a few weeks ago.

The right thing to do would be for Mandelson to find a way to renounce his life peerage, now useless, cooperate with any investigations into his conduct, and offer to go to America to give whatever evidence he has about Epstein’s activities to whoever wants to hear it.