Although expected, the arrest of Peter Mandelson by the British police has been a real shock in a country still in shock after the brief passage of Andrésthe king’s brother Carlos IIIby police station.
Mandelson’s role in his country’s politics is often reduced to his last role as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Washington. This is an error that hides a career spanning more than four decades at the top of the Labor Party.
Of course, this last appointment, made by himself Keir Starmer shortly after coming to power and when it was already known that Mandelson had continued to have contact with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein after his first imprisonment in 2008, he has great political importance.
After all, Starmer is going through a nightmare moment, between the setbacks in the polls and internal criticism. Now, we are talking about a man whose influence cannot be limited to a single prime minister.
Peter Mandelson, grandson of another British Labor figure as he was Herbert Morrisonthe right hand of Clement Atlee In the first post-war Government, he stood out from the beginning as a silent leader capable of designing all types of strategies from the party’s communication department.
They were the eighties and the very long figure of Margaret Thatcher It left the rest of the political spectrum in the shadows. Something new had to be invented and Mandelson was in charge.
Attributing the concept of the “third way” exclusively to Mandelson may be an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that he was one of its main promoters.
Convinced that there was no political room for workerism at the end of the 20th century, Mandelson trusted a young Tony Blair and was his court advisor during the nineties, waiting for the administration of John Major fell due to maturity after seventeen uninterrupted years of Conservative Party governments.
The hand that rocked the cradle
Blair represented modernity and temperance. A bridge between generations, sensibilities and ideologies.
Able to maintain a privileged relationship with the United States and the European Union at the same time, Blair embraced the “Cool Britannia” cultural movement as Harold Wilson had done with the “Swinging London” of the sixties, thus achieving great media popularity that went beyond his political legacy.
All of this would have been impossible without Mandelson, who led the successful 1997 election campaign and later held the position of “minister without portfolio,” basically responsible for coordinating all members of the government and assisting the prime minister in the way a chief of staff would do in the United States.
Blair appointed him Secretary of State for Trade and later Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in the midst of negotiating the peace agreements with Sinn Féin. Later, he would abandon domestic politics to dedicate himself to European affairs.
It is around this time—around 2003 and 2004—when his name begins to appear in the so-called “Epstein papers.”
Apparently, the New York businessman had paid him tens of thousands of pounds without apparent justification.
It must be remembered that, beyond the prostitution and child trafficking network that he developed over the years, Epstein was at the time one of the most successful businessmen in the United States… and a good part of that success had to do with the excellent contacts that he boasted.
A stain for Starmer
The end of the Blair Government and the arrival of Gordon Brown It coincided with his entry into the House of Lords, which could have been considered a golden retirement for the man whom the British press called “The Prince of Darkness.”
Brown and Mandelson had been enemies for years—the former, more old school; the second, depending on the wind blowing—and it seemed that the new prime minister wanted to get him out of the way.
It wasn’t like that.
Mandelson served with Brown as first secretary and business secretary. Just at that time, after the release of Jeffrey Epstein, contacts with the businessman returned and that is where the British police believe that Mandelson leaked Downing Street secrets to his old friend.
That is precisely what he is accused of, of revealing confidential information, which is considered “malpractice in public administration”, exactly the same charge that the king’s brother faces.
The fact that, after all this, in November 2024, Starmer trusted him for a position of such importance as leading the diplomatic delegation in the United States, just when another old friend of Epstein came to power again, Donald Trumphas provoked all kinds of criticism.
The first mass publication of emails by the Department of Justice has already caused his dismissal as ambassador and his withdrawal from the Labor Party and the House of Lords.
What remains to be seen now is whether, beyond the political controversy, Mandelson will have to pay criminal responsibilities in an issue that is being taken much more seriously in the United Kingdom than in the United States itself.
It also remains to be seen if this will not be the last nail in the coffin of the Starmer Government, beaten in the polls by the rise of Reform UK in Nigel Farage.
There are many within his own party who believe that the prime minister should resign and make way for a new face. It should be noted that the Conservatives, with five prime ministers in just over eight years, did not do too well.
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