Before I get into the meat of things – Mandelson, Epstein, Andrew and all that – a quick literary detour. A week or so ago, worn down by the latest madness in Westminster, I turned in despair to a Robert Harris thriller, Archangel, which I spotted lying on my shelf, untouched. I have no idea when I bought the book, or why, but there it lay, begging to be read – a welcome bit of escapism, I thought, as I clambered into bed.
I don’t read enough thrillers. After whipping through Archangel in a few days, though, I have decided that I must. There is something wonderful about a book which is designed to be devoured quickly and for fun, rather than for some kind of higher purpose. And yet, Harris’s great skill, I realise, is that he finds ways to smuggle genuinely profound insights about human nature and history into his novels, without losing the reader’s attention.
Archangel tells the story of a drunken British historian – obviously based on the real-life figure of Norman Stone – who stumbles upon a state secret left behind by Joseph Stalin. The novel, published in 1998, is set in the post-Soviet chaos of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, at a time of high Western chauvinism and Russian shame. Harris, I remembered as I devoured the book, was at the time close to many of the major figures of New Labour then governing Britain – not only Tony Blair, but, of course, Peter Mandelson.
This was a time when notions of historical inevitability were everywhere – the intrinsic belief of the age. Britain, Blair declared at the Labour conference in 1997, was being dragged into the 21st century, where it would become a “beacon” of progress for the rest of the world to follow. The future was set and it looked a lot like Tony Blair, or at least Blair’s Britain: global, free trading, liberal and at least vaguely socially democratic (though of a “third way” shade). Harris, though, clearly wasn’t convinced.
“This is the great myth… of our age,” Harris’s fictionalised Norman Stone declares, irritably, at one point, “that just because a place has a McDonald’s and MTV and takes American Express it’s exactly the same as everywhere else – it doesn’t have a past any more, it’s Year Zero. But it’s not true.” History matters. “You can’t make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past… end of lecture.”
In this one paragraph, Harris managed to get closer to the real current events than almost any of the leading figures in the New Labour government at the time, convinced as they were that they had discovered the real “end of history”, which conveniently did not force them to challenge anything they held dear. Harris soon fell out with Blair, but remained close to Mandelson, the man at the centre of what Steve Richards describes as one of the UK’s biggest political scandals since the Profumo affair.
The revelations of the past week are certainly scandalous. In fact, “scandalous” doesn’t quite do them justice. A better word, I think, is perhaps shattering in its quite literal sense, in that what has been revealed threatens not simply to end the career of one politician, but to delegitimise an entire governing order – the order which was supposed to have been the final destination of history, as so pithily mocked by Harris almost 30 years ago.
The Epstein files do not just reveal perversion and criminality, but a shadow power structure, operating far beyond the reach of ordinary democratic control. They reveal how rich and powerful men – and they are almost all men – help each other to become even richer and more powerful. They reveal how the wheels of power are greased; how information is traded; how favours are handed out. Suddenly, in fact, in reading the files, it is hard to escape the overwhelming sensation that it is we in the West who are now the Russia of Harris’s Archangel, broken and corrupted, naively clinging to our outdated ideological convictions and assumptions about how the world operates, even as they are disproved. The Epstein papers are inherently radicalising.
As usual, I depart with the wise words of a reader, Professor Colin Richards, of Spark Bridge, Cumbria, who got in touch in response to my ruminations last week in this note on the unfalsifiable but incontrovertible sense many of us now have about the old order we have known all our lives dying before our eyes. “Given the bewildering times we live in,” Colin wrote, “[the note] reminded me of my favourite Russian proverb, which is also unfalsifiable, incontrovertible – but also surprisingly comforting: ‘Life is strange.’” It certainly is.
[Further reading: Peter Mandelson will haunt Labour]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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