Before the revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, there were perhaps three things about Peter Mandelson that had seeped into casual public consciousness. The apocryphal tale of him asking for “guacamole” when presented with mushy peas at a chippy in Hartlepool. His Machiavellian nickname the “Prince of Darkness” (promoted, once he was ennobled, to “the Dark Lord”). And his declaration during a trip as trade and industry secretary to Silicon Valley in 1998 that: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich. As long as they pay their taxes.”
These details have come to symbolise the dark triad of New Labour’s Third Way: a distant political class; rule by political spin; amoral liberal pragmatism. All three resonate today, as the Epstein files expose the depth and nature of the Labour peer’s relationship with the paedophile financier.
One email suggests Mandelson, when he was business secretary, forwarded highly sensitive UK government tax plans addressed to the then prime minister Gordon Brown to Epstein. There is also evidence suggesting he advised Epstein on how the head of the investment bank JP Morgan might “mildly threaten” the British Chancellor to water down plans for a super-tax on bankers’ bonuses.
In a later message to Epstein, sent on Christmas Day, Mandelson appears to angle for work with the bank for his advisory firm, Global Counsel: “I do not want to live by salary alone.”
It is also alleged that he and his partner received thousands in payments from Epstein. Mandelson admitted on Tuesday that his partner received money from Epstein, but not that he himself did. But when asked about his advice to Epstein about the bankers’ tax by the Financial Times, his response to the paper was revealing: “Every UK and international bank was making the same argument about the impact on UK financial services. My conversations in government at the time reflected the views of the sector as a whole, not a single individual.”
Why did this former government minister and architect of the New Labour project so willingly tangle himself in this web, even after Epstein was first convicted of soliciting sex from a child in 2008? Was there something about that political age that opened up a vacuum of morality? Perhaps, to him, it seemed level-headed to put political (and literal) capital above pesky questions of moral depravity. If money makes the world go round, as the stoic old proverb goes, financial liberalisation keeps globalisation spinning.
These revelations expose the rotten result of that supposedly post-ideological world. One that is “intensely relaxed” at the expense of others’ discomfort. One that says “every UK and international bank was making the same argument” so I did too. One that uses that old Blairite mantra for evidence-based policy as an excuse to break moral codes: “What counts is what works.”
Speak to Labour apparatchiks and roam around Whitehall today, and you can still mist up the tired eyes of aides with talk of “pragmatism” and “hard choices”. Labour’s “reset” of the relationship between the UK and European Union is one of “ruthless pragmatism”. Keir Starmer – who insists “there is no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be!” – has been described by a former chief of staff as a “ruthless pragmatist”.
There is a reason why Mandelson, once a close ally of the current No 10 chief of staff and realpolitiko Morgan McSweeney, gave Starmer the “blessing of the Blairites” as Labour leader. Here was a man, unfettered by ideological red tape, they could do business with.
We no longer live under New Labour, and Starmer’s cabinet is very different from those in Mandelson’s day. But that impulse for pragmatism – voiced by many suffering nostalgia for the Blair years – still pulses through the political ether. A favourite truism of political insiders is one that patronisingly asserts: “We must see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be” – as if wishing to see the world differently isn’t central to the job of changing it.
This is a common view, and one that echoes Mandelson’s own conclusion that the shifting loyalties of British voters is evidence, to him, that politicians need more cool detachment in how they campaign and govern, not less of it. When I interviewed him in 2021 after Labour lost a by-election in his old constituency of Hartlepool – a defeat that nearly led to Starmer’s resignation as leader of the opposition – I was struck by what he told me: “We are in an era of much weaker party loyalty and affiliation than ever before. They [voters] are casting around for a different sort of politics, less hidebound by tradition, old emblems, sentimentality, and for a more transactional, efficacious approach… They are not so much left behind; it’s Labour that is being left behind.”
This abandonment of what the sociologist Max Weber called Gesinnungsethik, the ethic of conviction, plonks you without a compass in a maze of realpolitik. It leaves you justifying the means for what turn out to be dead-ends: for example, appointing Mandelson, whose links with Epstein were known at the time, to the post of US ambassador because of his “unrivalled experience”.
Our government is lost in the twilight of this pragmatic political era, finding the “dirty hands” theory of leadership etched on its own palms.
[Further reading: Matt Goodwin isn’t very British]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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