If there ever was a Labour MP who should have been sitting with the Conservatives, it was Peter Mandleson. What’s come out in the last few days should come (and I don’t think it does) as no surprise to anyone. Also, for those of us who have been trying for years to point out to those spending too much time on social media that there is no global conspiracy – well, here it is, there is a global conspiracy, and it is centred on a paedophile. Who knew? Clearly quite a lot of people.
It seems to me that Epstein used his (I was going to say ‘peccadillos’, but lets call a spade a spade) paedophilia as both a money maker and as a lever to blackmail those complicit in his other schemes to stay quiet. It’s amazing how some wealthy but not stinking rich grub around for every more wealth. Judging by the amounts of money that Boris Johnson appears to be able to make from various columnist gigs, it strikes me that the $75,000 Mandelson got from Epstein was probably not worth the effort, and as for the reported £15,000 Sarah Ferguson got from Epstein to pay off debts, really? How fucking cheap are these people.
So Peter Mandleson was in effect selling UK secrets to Epstein (and who else?) so that Epstein and his clients could make even more money than they already did/had, giving them yet more power and access. Just to underline, this was a siting UK Labour Minister passing UK secrets to a Wall Street financier so that he could make himself even more stinking rich.
This is what New Labour understood about the cogs of power, that the power lay with the rich, media barons and the like. What they did with this knowledge was get themselves into power and then do everything they could to keep buttering up to these people rather than facing them down (as Starmer is doing now, much less successfully).
None of this is news to anyone who has been around for a while. One such, George Monbiot, has recently shared an article from 2009 excoriating Mandelson and the department he ran, and importantly implicating then Prime Minister Gordon Brown (and of course his predecessor Tony Blair), and the way Mandleson operated as an lobbyist-for-business from inside government (as many have pointed out, businesses are quite good at lobbying themselves) as this was no anomaly, this behaviour, but was a feature of the government at the time (and since).
And Mandelson was never coy about this, he was always famously relaxed about extreme wealth and now we have the proof, seemingly, of what we all knew all along.