Peter Mandelson is more dangerous than ever

The fiasco of his downfall could quickly turn to revenge.

Photo by Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing

In the Hamlet by the director Robert Icke at London’s Almeida Theatre, the play ends with a vision of heaven in which all those murdered during the previous three hours – and there are a lot of them: Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and all – gently dance and touch one another in a golden-hazed box, hanging high above the stage.

It says something about the latest and surely final fall of Peter Mandelson. This is not because I, a dour atheist, think he’s going to heaven; but rather that play’s denouement offers a perfect image of Mandelson’s natural environment, the special people above the common herd and the wider problem it poses for democratic politics.

Sticking with Hamlet, the danger now is that Mandelson grabs a sword, leaps back down and tries to start it all over again, in an even bloodier and more dramatic sixth act. His trouble is that he has always seemed to inhabit a gilded, closed-off part of public life where a quasi-aristocratic elite nodded at one another, touched hands and did their special business.

From the wealthy former MP and one-time owner of the New Statesman, Geoffrey Robinson, to the Hinduja brothers (regularly cited as the richest family in Britain) to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian aluminium tycoon, to, yes, the wealthy former sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson has always been drawn to the very, very rich.

The mutual enchantment of money and political power is one of the wobbly foundations of contemporary politics everywhere, and it has dirtied reputations from those of Harold Wilson to JFK. There is nothing new in this. Social democrats, dreaming of a genuine democracy, can rubberneck at the golden, swaying box in which mysterious agreements are closed and shake our heads.

But be assured; nothing ever changes. It is very rare for somebody as rich and well-connected as Epstein to be brought down by a filthy sexual obsession which is particularly loathed by contemporary society. Mandelson has compared his friendship with him as a piece of dirt on the shoe he couldn’t get rid of. It is more like a reputational contagion.

Peter Mandelson has always had a dark but intense charisma. He is one of those people who, in a room of hundreds, everybody somehow wants to make a beeline for. I can’t quite explain the power of the python. It’s a mixture of genuine, teasing wit, and a hypnotic, languid stare. If he decides he wants you to like him, he can raise your blood temperature in seconds; if you have offended him, one look, and your blood turns to ice.

He has been a brilliant strategist. He was genuinely one of the three creators of the New Labour brand, as the King called him when they met for the first time, “the red rose man”. He famously fell out with Gordon Brown in the mid-1990s when he backed Blair for leader. Mandelson thought he had made an enemy for life but by 2008 Brown, as a prime minister drowning in a sea of troubles, brought him back into cabinet as an essential line of defence.

This explains, perhaps, why Keir Starmer, despite Mandelson having had to resign twice over previous scandals, brought him in as US ambassador, needing somebody sinuous, persuasive and endlessly flexible to deal with Donald Trump. As Douglas Alexander, the new Scottish Secretary, put it today: “Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer have all recognised that Peter Mandelson brought high risks and potentially high rewards.” Given the most recent emails, Alexander added, he should not have been appointed, but this was new information which “changed everything” he told LBC.

Indeed, Trump seems to have rather enjoyed the passionately Europhile Mandelson, though he later teased him with the nickname “Sneaky Pete”, which suggests the US president wasn’t entirely convinced. Trump, however, had also liked the former ambassador Karen Pierce, who can take some of the credit for the trade successes and may yet be brought back from the Balkan desk at the Foreign Office where she languishes.

The final decision to sack Mandelson – for he wasn’t prepared to go quietly and resign – was taken by Starmer, with the new Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, who has never been a Mandelson fan, and the new chief whip Jonathan Reynolds, who was speaking for the very many Labour MPs who are foamingly angry.

It is remarkable that the Prime Minister seems not to have known more about the relationship with Epstein, given the public record. He is facing, now, a major parliamentary attack on this subject; the decision was a big gamble which misfired and weakens Starmer at a very dangerous time for him. What now of the whiter-than-white, squeaky-clean promises of a new start after the tawdry Tory years? Starmer’s soft-left opponents are on the warpath as conference looms.

We are likely in for an incredibly turbulent few months in British politics. Whether the Trump visit goes ahead on schedule next week – after the Charlie Kirk murder and the funeral the president will want to visit – is currently unclear. But the president is unlikely to be happy with the way this has been handled, given his own Epstein problems.

Mandelson himself is reported to be furious, hurt and feeling betrayed by Starmer who did not, apparently, even call him directly. All this is of course entirely the fault of the ex-ambassador, and nobody else’s. How could he have brought himself to write such fawning, cringing, sycophantic messages to the disgraced Epstein? I think it’s because, in the golden box of the super-rich and very powerful, there are strands of throbbing personal and emotional loyalty that the rest of us are never supposed to hear about. They are in their weirdo paradise. We are down below.

What happens next? Mandelson’s consultancy firm Global Counsel, which he co-founded in 2010 and which made him rich, has now said it’s cutting its ties with him. He adored the Washington embassy and the job. As recently as Saturday, he was speaking at Ditchley Park near Oxford to defend Starmer’s close relationship with the Trump White House, and cheerfully describing the “perfect word” for his own career as “durable”.

Now he has lost almost everything. He still has former allies and old friends in place throughout the Whitehall machine. Peter Mandelson has always been a dangerous man to have as an enemy. Now, with nothing left to lose, feeling betrayed and angry, he is more dangerous than ever. If I were Keir Starmer right now I’d be doing everything I could privately to soothe Mandelson, although perhaps not by email. Because, unlike Hamlet, this play isn’t over.