Shock! as 'Prince of Darkness' revealed to be a dodgy, duplicitous wrong 'un

Journalists who used Peter Mandelson as a resource for years are now pretending to be surprised about his character.

Previously: Reporting on the Minneapolis ICE shooting, BBC News is soaked to the skin but still not sure if it’s raining...

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Yesterday on BlueSky, Rachel Cunliffe, the New Statesman’s Associate Political Editor, wrote a short thread about the latest Peter Mandelson scandal:

Trying to explain to non-politicos that no, we had no idea Mandelson had leaked market-sensitive information to a foreign pal when he was forced to resign in September, that scandal was about said ‘pal’ being convicted of a child prostitution offence, which is scandalous for totally different reasons and that this scandal is separate to the other completely different scandals which forced his resignations the first two times which had nothing to do with Epstein but which everyone knew about in detail and then explainging that he was appointed as US ambassador in 2024 anyway.

You can mentally remove the sex trafficking and child rape and imagine for a moment that Mandelson is pals with a normal foreign investor who is not a convicted criminal… and it is still virtually impossible to process the idea of him forwarding sensitive emails while in cabinet.

That’s a concise summary of the scandals and multiple undeserved redemptions and returns that make up Mandelson’s political career, but it’s hard not to get stuck on the phrase “virtually impossible”. Was it really “virtually impossible” to imagine that Peter Mandelson — a man known for being a double-dealing, money-obsessed, panderer to power — might trade privileged information for access and, quite probably, cash?

For decades, Mandelson was both an irritant for the press and a reliable source of leaks, gossip, and backbiting. The part missing from many of the post-mortems on his political career that have appeared in newspapers and news programmes this week is how often he appeared as a media figure, treated as a ‘sensible’ big beast of British democracy. In the years leading up to Keir Starmer’s calamitous decision to appoint him as Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Mandelson was a permanent panellist on Times Radio’s How To Win An Election podcast, treated as a loveable cartoon baddie.

In 2023, introducing Mandelson as part of the How To Win An Election team, The Times described him as the “great political survivor, the perennial comeback kid”. In his final appearance on the podcast, he was asked by the host, Hugo Rifkind: “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a quiet life and carry on here with us?” It must be ringing in his ears now.

It’s not surprising that it was Katy Balls of The Times that secured the first interview with Mandelson after the latest Epstein revelations. In a piece strikingly headlined Epstein is like dog muck; the smell won’t go away, Mandelson, one of British politics’ biggest and most unflushable shits, is pictured doing domestic tasks with his own dog at his feet. He attempts to present himself as “naive” and actually a victim of Epstein, the “master manipulator”. This unbelievable performance is capped with a truly unbelievable quote about his penchant for friendships with the ultra-rich:

I don’t think I am drawn towards rich people so much as rich people have big personalities, a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience to share. I hoover that up, but not because they’re wealthy. It’s because of what they do and what they’ve learnt and the responsibilities they’ve exercised, not the size of their bank accounts.

Don’t you see? The rich are just better, even the ones who are international sex traffickers.

When Mandelson was fired as ambassador last September, The Times acted shocked, and its columnist Matthew Parris, who previously defended the man formerly known as Prince Andrew on several occasions, was rolled out to excuse him as just simply too loyal. Now, surprise, surprise, Parris is backing Mandelson again.

Parris, the man who famously outed ‘Mandy’ during a 1998 episode of Newsnight, writes under the headline Labour owes debt to giant of politics in modern era that Mandelson is “a towering figure in modern British political history”. He continues:

As this newspaper’s parliamentary sketchwriter when Mandelson was trade and industry secretary, I saw — beyond his brilliance at public relations — a luminously competent, engaged and professional minister, sleeves rolled up, at the dispatch box. There are not so many giants in modern British politics that we should impulsively pull such a record down.

Can you imagine a ‘normal’ man who palled around with a convicted sex offender and shared confidential information with that very same sex offender having their CV so thoroughly massaged and praised?

Flailing around to justify his argument that it’s a mistake to lose Mandelson from the House of Lords, Parris suggests “the place is big enough for a few bounders” — he’s just a ‘bounder’, hey? — and goes on:

… In 30 years’ time, accounts of the half-century of British politics from Margaret Thatcher’s entry into Downing Street to the rise of Reform will feature a few score men and women who were pivotal. Peter Mandelson is one of them. Some among these will (I predict) be seen to have been on the right side of history.

Peter is one of them too. Drumming him out of the Lords will look strange to our successors. When life recedes into the rear-view mirror, the events of the last few months will not wash out a whole career of service to his country, though they may seem to today.

Peter ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ Mandelson on the right side of history? The scandals that first saw him flung from government are now history. The undisclosed interest-free loan from Geoffrey Robinson that allowed him to buy his big house in Notting Hill, and his lobbying to get Srichand Hinduja, a billionaire donor to the Millennium Dome project, a passport even as he faced corruption charges, show exactly how mucky and money-driven he was from the start. It’s Mandelson’s history that should have excluded him from public life long before his brief sojourn in Washington.

As I was writing this newsletter, BBC Political Editor, Chris Mason, was on the Today programme delivering another soft review of Mandelson’s career (“… much was known about his character, but at the same time much was known about someone who was hugely politically able…”). Time and time again, we’re told about how smart and savvy Mandelson was and is, but the evidence before us is of someone who chose connections with the filthiest of the filthy rich over his supposed commitment to public service.

The answer to why Mandelson was excused so frequently and given so many chances to pop up in the press, on radio, and on TV, is simple: He was useful to the media. The image of him as the master Machiavellian, the ‘prince of darkness’, was itself a media confection, and he was a particularly good source — both on and off the record — during the years when the British media was engaged in all-out war on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. When Mandelson said publicly that he “[worked] every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of [Corbyn’s] tenure in office,” it was a confession that he was working against the party of which he was still a member.

The media’s air of surprise that Mandelson was leaking government discussions is ersatz. It’s about as convincing as the moment in Casablanca that Captain Renault bursts into Rick’s and declares: “I’m shocked, shocked to find there is gambling going on here!” Journalists who have benefited from Mandelson’s leaky, gossipy, scheming approach to politics are now pretending that they couldn’t possibly imagine this kind of thing happening in such a respectable establishment as the Labour Party…

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