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The Mandelson–Epstein connection was public knowledge long before the 2024 election. The question of how the Prime Minister could claim ignorance deserves scrutiny.
Keir Starmer’s claim that he was unaware of the depth of Peter Mandelson’s relationship with convicted child sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he appointed him British Ambassador to the United States in December 2024, at best occupies shaky ground. The evidence that Mandelson posed a serious reputational and security risk was not hidden in classified files. Much of it was sitting in plain sight, reported by national broadcasters and newspapers, and filed in open US court proceedings, years before Labour won the general election in July 2024.
The first major public warning came in October 2019, when Channel 4’s Dispatches programme broadcast testimony from a source close to Epstein describing a phone call Mandelson made to the convicted sex offender while he was serving his jail sentence.
Mandelson, then one of the most senior figures in Gordon Brown’s government, had reportedly called Epstein in prison to ask him to arrange a meeting with JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon. The source told Dispatches they were astonished that a serving cabinet minister (described as probably the most powerful man in Britain after the Prime Minister) was calling a convicted child abuser in jail to solicit a business favour. Epstein referred to Mandelson by the nickname ‘Petie’ during the call. This was not a minor footnote in an obscure publication. It was a primetime Channel 4 documentary at the height of the Epstein scandal.
In August of the same year, the Daily Mail published photographs and reported that Mandelson had taken a shopping trip with Epstein in Saint Barthélemy in December 2005, and had previously visited Epstein’s private Caribbean island, Little Saint James: the property later nicknamed ‘Paedophile Island’ by locals in the Virgin Islands. The Mail reported that Mandelson had known Epstein for several years by that point.
The paper trail continued to grow. In June 2023, a full year before the general election, an internal JPMorgan report from 2019 was filed with a New York court as part of civil litigation. That document, now part of the public record, stated explicitly that ‘Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew and Lord Mandelson, a senior member of the British Government.’ In early 2024, further US court documents resurfaced showing a photograph of Mandelson with Epstein on Little Saint James island.
Mandelson expresses regret
By this point, Mandelson himself was making public admissions. In a 2023 interview with the Financial Times, he said he ‘very much regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein.’ Appearing on Sky News in May 2024, just weeks before polling day, he stated: ‘Why did many people meet him? He was a prolific networker. And I wish I’d never met him.’ These were not private confessions. They were on-the-record media appearances, available to anyone in Starmer’s team conducting even the most basic due diligence.
When Starmer went ahead with the appointment in December 2024, he was handed a formal due diligence report by his own staff which specifically flagged Mandelson’s Epstein connection as a ‘reputational risk.’ It noted, among other things, that Mandelson had stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment in 2009 while the convicted sex offender was serving his prison sentence. Starmer proceeded with the appointment regardless.
The Prime Minister now says he was not ‘in the know,’ that he was not properly informed, and that he may have inadvertently misled Parliament. But the public record – a national television documentary, multiple newspaper investigations, open US court filings, and Mandelson’s own on-camera admissions – tells a different story. The connection between Mandelson and a convicted child abuser and sex trafficker was not obscure intelligence available only to those with security clearance. It was published news. The question is not whether Starmer could have known. It is whether he chose to ignore the facts, went against those urging caution and is now attempting to gaslight.
There’s more though. There’s now the question of the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy and his involvement.
Who really gave the order to ignore security vetting?
The government’s account, that rogue civil servants bypassed ministers to clear Mandelson, raises more questions than it answers.
At the heart of the Mandelson security scandal lies a claim so extraordinary that it strains credibility: that senior Foreign Office officials unilaterally overrode a formal security vetting rejection (on Britain’s most important diplomatic posting) without the knowledge or direction of any minister of state. Starmer and his government ask the public to believe that career civil servants, acting entirely on their own initiative, took a decision with enormous political consequences and told nobody. The evidence as noted, suggests a rather different story.
The basic facts are established. Peter Mandelson was publicly announced as UK Ambassador to Washington in December 2024, before his in-depth vetting had even begun. That vetting, the highly confidential ‘developed vetting’ process, concluded in late January 2025 with a formal recommendation from UK Security Vetting (UKSV) that Mandelson should be denied clearance.
We are told that within 48 hours, that recommendation had apparently been overruled by officials inside the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, using what is described as an (extremely) rarely invoked authority. Mandelson took up the post in February 2025.
The crucial detail, reported by the Guardian, is that those officials acted on the understanding that the Prime Minister wanted the appointment to proceed. In other words, the override was not an act of bureaucratic rebellion – it was officials giving effect to what they understood to be a clear political wish from Downing Street. That single fact dismantles the government’s entire defence.
Sir Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary and one of the most senior civil servants in the British state (previously Theresa May’s chief Brexit negotiator) was identified as one of the few people who knew the true outcome of the vetting. He harboured private concerns about the appointment but proceeded regardless.
Robbins was sacked within hours of the story breaking. Significantly, the Financial Times subsequently reported that Robbins is taking legal advice and feels aggrieved at his dismissal. This is the clearest possible signal that he believes he has been made a scapegoat for a decision that carried political authorisation.
What is David Lammy not telling us?
David Lammy was Foreign Secretary throughout this period. The Foreign Secretary is the minister responsible for the Foreign Office and its Permanent Secretary. Under normal constitutional arrangements, a Permanent Under-Secretary does not use a rarely invoked authority to override a security rejection on the most sensitive diplomatic post in the government’s gift, without at minimum informing (and almost certainly seeking guidance from) the Secretary of State (In this instance Lammy). He (Lammy) then formally signed off Mandelson’s appointment. The claim that he did so in complete ignorance of the vetting outcome, never having been briefed by his own Permanent Secretary, represents either a catastrophic breakdown in the basic machinery of government, or something that may be considered outright lying.
Further, national security adviser Jonathan Powell described the appointment as ‘weirdly rushed’ and said he raised concerns with Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. A junior Foreign Office minister also had reservations. McSweeney subsequently resigned, accepting responsibility for advising the appointment. The pressure to push Mandelson through, despite the concerns of diplomats and security officials, clearly came from the political centre, not from a small group of civil servants acting in a vacuum.
A series of improbable events
Forty-eight hours to override a security rejection. A Permanent Secretary who ‘felt aggrieved’ at being sacked for it. A Foreign Secretary who formally approved the appointment. A Prime Minister whose office drove the process. The government’s account asks us to believe that all of this happened without any minister being in the loop. It is, as Starmer himself said of the broader situation, incredible. He may be right but not quite in the way he intended.
NB: Let’s not forget JP Morgan were central to the financial crash of which Brown was a major architect.
