History is being rewritten. The story we are told is that an evil man called Peter Mandelson, pursuing his own interests, went rogue to collaborate with a serial abuser of girls and women, undermining the good work of people seeking to defend the public interest. All this is true. But – and I fear many will find this hard to accept – it is only half the story.
The much harder truth is that Mandelson’s disgraceful dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were less a betrayal of his brief than an unauthorised extension of it. In 2009 – just as, we now know, Mandelson was passing sensitive information to Epstein – I argued that the government department he ran, called Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Berr), “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.
Berr was a smaller and less chaotic version of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Its purpose, I suggested, was to bypass the House of Commons on behalf of capital. It allowed Gordon Brown’s government to create the impression that it was defending the public interest while simultaneously, but more quietly, appeasing powerful lobbyists. In contrast to other government departments, Berr was largely run by unelected lords, who had either been corporate executives, corporate lobbyists or, like Mandelson, members of a concierge class operating on their behalf. I wrote that these ministers, appointed by Brown, “appear to have formed their own lobby group within government”.
Berr sought to part-privatise Royal Mail, breaking a manifesto commitment. It succeeded. It tried to block the EU working time directive: UK government filibusters delayed and weakened it. It attempted, less successfully, to undermine the equality bill, whose aim was to ensure equal pay for women (Mandelson’s simultaneous dealings with Epstein were not the only respect in which he showed disdain for women’s rights). It undermined environmental legislation. It was “quietly building a bonfire of the measures that protect us from predatory corporate behaviour”.
So when Brown, who was prime minister at the time, expresses his shock and betrayal, please forgive me a small gasp of frustration. In his interview on the BBC’s Today programme, Brown claimed that in 2009: “We were solving a major financial crisis … all my thoughts were on how we could save people’s jobs and savings and their livelihoods.” But not only did he allow Mandelson to attack the public interest on behalf of business, he greatly increased Berr’s budget. This was despite the fact that, as I noted at the time, Mandelson “was partly responsible, both in Blair’s government and as European trade commissioner, for promoting the culture of deregulation that catalysed the economic crisis”. On one hand, Brown was trying to solve it. On the other, at the behest of corporate lobbyists, he was setting up the next one.
Brown also told the BBC, in justifying his appointment of Lord Mandelson, that the man had “an unblemished record as the [European] trade commissioner”. An unblemished record of what, exactly? Neocolonialism, perhaps. While Mandelson was in that post, he sought to impose draconian trade provisions on some of the poorest countries on Earth. He put pressure on them to let EU corporations muscle out local firms and make privatisation legally irreversible, threatening people’s access to health, education and water. He sought to force African countries to hand over crucial resources at the risk of widespread hunger.
Yes, when Mandelson was a minister in Brown’s government, he betrayed the national interest. But this is what, by other means, he was appointed to do. His treachery, while it went way beyond his official mandate, was not a bug, but a feature. The corrosion of democratic values was institutional. And this spirit has prevailed ever since. Keir Starmer’s government of all the lobbyists is no exception.
Brown, in proposing remedies for the secretive machinations Mandelson conducted, writes: “Conventions about commercial confidentiality should no longer prevent public service contracts delivered by private companies being subject to reasonable freedom of information requests.” I could scarcely breathe when I read that. It is exactly the demand some of us made when Brown rolled out the private finance initiative (PFI) across the public sector, enabling businesses to get their hooks into every aspect of state provisioning. When we tried to see the contracts, to understand what was being done in our name, Brown’s Treasury repeatedly blocked our information requests on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”.
The sense of betrayal that Brown quite rightly feels is the same sense of betrayal some of us felt towards the governments in which he served. Yes, Brown had and retains some great qualities, and did much good. But he is also a remarkable escapologist. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten how his PFI programme planted a timebomb in public services, enabling corporations to take the profits while leaving the risks with the state: one of the reasons why they are now in so much trouble. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten his crucial role in the Iraq war: standing with Tony Blair and financing it. He rightly called for Vladimir Putin and his “enablers” to face justice for their crime of aggression in
Ukraine. Yet it’s the same crime that Blair and his enablers (including one G Brown) committed in Iraq.
But it is not just Brown who is rewriting history. The media are 50% of any problem, and the story most of it loves to tell is of one bad apple. Heaven forfend that we see the systemic problems. There is a reason why Mandelson kept returning to government, despite sackings for his over-enthusiastic relationships with plutocrats. He was brought in to do the dirty work. The governments in which he served could loudly claim to be doing something, while subtly and simultaneously undoing it.
Mandelson’s treachery is an extreme instance of the dominant mode of UK politics over the past 45 years: the subordination of democracy to the demands of the ultra-rich. Abuse and exploitation – of women and children, of poorer countries and their people, of workers and contractors, renters and customers – are baked into the system.
If you cannot diagnose a problem, you cannot fix it. We urgently need to see this for what it is. Mandelson’s grovelling to the sinister rich is disgraceful, disgusting, deceitful, a crushing of women’s rights and of democracy. But it is not a deviation from the system. It is a manifestation of it.
Britain’s political scandals have acquired a peculiar quality. They don’t feel like ruptures in an otherwise healthy system, but small windows thrown open onto the machinery itself. A loan here, a consultancy there, a weekend on an oligarch’s yacht, a minister leaving office on Friday and returning on Monday as a lobbyist for the firms he once regulated. Nothing necessarily illegal. Yet each episode leaves the same impression: that the real life of the British state is conducted elsewhere, beyond the theatre of parliament, in private rooms where wealth and power recognise one another without introduction.
The Epstein-Mandelson affair belongs to this category. It’s shocking because it’s so familiar.
In Peter Mandelson – minister, fixer, envoy, consultant, intermediary between cabinet and capital – one sees the career of Britain’s governing caste in miniature. A stratum that long ago stopped representing the public and instead made politics a form of brokerage: arranging introductions, smoothing obstacles, managing the flows of other people’s money. Mandelson isn’t a deviation from the system. He is its most perfect expression.
As business secretary under Gordon Brown, Mandelson appears to have passed Jeffrey Epstein advance notice of market-moving events: details of a €500bn eurozone rescue deal hours before it became public; a confidential paper outlining £20bn of potential asset sales; and suggestions that Epstein coordinate with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to pressure the government over taxes on bankers’ bonuses. They were the sort of signals on which currencies swing and fortunes are made.
Mandelson’s actions are best understood as the logical expression of what he’s long represented. His most famous line – that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – is often remembered as a quip. In fact it was a doctrine. The role of government was no longer to discipline capital or direct investment toward national development. It was to reassure the wealthy that they would grow ever richer, and to manage the political consequences below.
The phrase is sometimes compared to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s “let some people get rich first”. But Deng’s tolerance of inequality was tethered to a project of national development, productive capacity, and strategic state power. Wealth was a means to secure sovereignty. In Britain, enrichment became the end in itself. Industry hollowed out. Finance swelled. The state stopped building and started selling. Where Deng used markets to strengthen the nation, Britain used the nation to service markets.
This settlement required political engineers. Mandelson was chief among them. He worked to modernise Labour’s language and rewire its loyalties – to make the party safe for boardrooms, pliable to lobbyists, and hostile to any revival of its older commitments to trade unions or public ownership. When Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership threatened that order, Mandelson boasted that he worked “every single day” to remove him. The candour was striking. It revealed what had long been true: that the party’s most senior figures felt more answerable to capital than to organised labour.
After office came monetisation. Through lobbying firm Global Counsel, Mandelson sold what really matters in modern Britain – access. Global Counsel’s client list reads like a directory of corporate power: JP Morgan, Accenture, Palantir, Shell, Nestlé, Anglo American. The firm hired him because he knew the wiring of the British state – which minister to call, which rule to soften, which door would open quietly after hours.
In other words: how to translate public authority into private advantage.
Nor was Epstein incidental to this story. At the founding of Global Counsel, the financier reportedly provided introductions and business advice, connecting Mandelson to the wealthy networks the firm would later serve. A man who would later be exposed as a child sex offender and human trafficker moved easily in these circles. This isn’t a quirk of British politics. It reflects an oligarchic logic perfected elsewhere.
In the US, wealth and office interpenetrate and elite interests reliably shape policy while public demands rarely do – as two political scientists showed more than a decade ago. Billions flood elections each cycle. Lawmakers trade shares in the very sectors they regulate. Congressional portfolios routinely beat the market. US Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s disclosed investments, for instance, have produced roughly an 838% cumulative return over the past decade – the sort of outperformance less suggestive of genius than of proximity to power. Britain has adopted the same habits with less spectacle and smaller cheques.
Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.
The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.
While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.
Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital.
So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.
A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.
