The former British Ambassador to the United States who spectacularly resigned after the extent of his links to Jeffrey Epstein became impossible to ignore was advising members of government before his fall from grace, a report states, piling further pressure on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer who appointed him.
Peter Mandelson, one of the chief architects of the New Labour movement in the United Kingdom who carved himself a role as a grand old man of the party and successfully found a role as Britain’s ambassador to the United States — before his later downfall, the fallout from which is still settling — went far beyond his official role and was attempting to micromanage the British government from Washington, it is claimed.
Citing documents that are said to be on the verge of becoming public when a new tranche of files are published next week, The Daily Telegraph said it will be proven that Mandelson was advising cabinet ministers before Epstein document releases in the United States made public his lies about his friendship with the paedophile financier.
The paper reported that Mandelson “often messaged senior Labour politicians and officials with suggestions on how to conduct official business far outside his remit as Britain’s ambassador to the US’” and cited a government source who said of Mandelson’s attitude to the government: “thinks his opinion should be heard and listened to”… “There is a certain generation of politician who thinks they have something to offer. He does that whether people want it or not.”
The revelations are part of a tranche of apparent leaks about the contents of next week’s documents dump and likely link to a briefing war over them, and attempts to ensure the full story is released. The government was commanded to publish what it held on Mandelson by a Parliament vote but has since insisted integrity of internal processes, including the vetting process, require that swathes of papers need to be withheld or redacted. Rebels say this is a failure to obey Parliament’s command — tantamount of treason — and accuse the government of a coverup.
Also being leaked — again quite possibly in part to pressure the government into making sure it releases everything, and to keep the sorry Mandelson saga in the headlines — are revelations about concerns allegedly flagged during Mandelson’s vetting process to take up the role. Already a matter of controversy as the vetting process is said to have begun after his appointment was announced — rendering it, it is claimed, a rubber stamping exercise with pressure to find the right answer or else embarrass the elected government — details of the figures in Mandelson’s life flagged as potential risks are being named.
British newspaper of the left The Guardian notes among those cited in vetting were Minister of Finance of the People’s Republic of China Lan Fo’an, sanctioned Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and Israeli military intelligence chief General Tamir Hayman. Also stated but unnamed is an alleged close relationship with an unnamed British man.
The paper cites the response of former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, who has very much become a regular media commentator in Britain after leaving the Secret Intelligence Service and has been a critic of the appointment of Mandelson. The process of vetting is about discovering potential weaknesses and mitigating them — given it is assumed anyone with enough experience to take on the role of diplomat will already have a wide array of global personal relationships — but Dearlove asserted his view that Mandelson’s were so significant it would have been “totally impossible” to mitigate these potentially compromising factors.
He told The Guardian: “The whole thing is completely extraordinary… What mitigations could you put in place? The only mitigations I can think of is that certain papers that are circulated in the Washington embassy cannot be viewed by the ambassador. That would be totally impossible… When I was head of MI6, if I’d been warned not to share papers with a minister or ambassador, I’d have asked to discuss the situation with the foreign secretary or the prime minister.”
If borne out the revelations will pile further problems on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who both pushed for Mandelson to be appointed and then attempted to distance himself from him after things started to fall apart. Part of this process was Starmer’s Svengali, Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney who took the fall and resigned over the Mandelson scandal. Yet that was later served back when McSweeney was dragged before a Parliamentary committee and span to save his own reputation, implicating the Prime Minister all over again.