No Admission of Liability?

Does "Petie" Mandelson regret his association with Jeffrey Epstein? Prince Andrew is an utterly unimportant person. Epstein's British connection that matters is to Mandelson, who pretty much ran the Labour Party when it was last in government, and who is back running it now, having solicited a large donation from Epstein's cell as a convicted and incarcerated paedophile.

In the meantime, Mandelson has been European Commissioner for Trade, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council, and First Secretary of State. In all but name, he was Deputy Prime Minister under Gordon Brown, and arguably under Tony Blair as well. Prince Andrew has never even run his own bath.

Mandelson, however, is now running Keir Starmer, who is the most inexperienced politician ever to have become the Leader of the Opposition. As we all know, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the decision was made not to prosecute Jimmy Savile. At the very least, he was as responsible for that as Cressida Dick was for anything that caused her resignation. In reality, it is inconceivable that that decision was made by anyone other than him, because of Savile's fame and connections.

And there are the Royal Family and the political elite again. The rest of us live our entire lives without ever encountering a paedophile, yet our betters have the misfortune to trip over them every time that they go out. As with illegal drug use, they extrapolate from their own experience and present such behaviour as normal, not even so much because they want it to be, but because they sincerely believe that it is.

Although every specific allegation that Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-Semite has been easily refuted, the idea lingers in the air. It never made any electoral difference. Starmer's change to Labour's Brexit policy caused both the 2019 General Election and its outcome, or else an Election this spring would have delivered a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party. But it was there, and it still is.

The lingering idea of Starmer and "oh, something to do with paedophilia" would, however, have a great deal of electoral cut-through if anyone were prepared to push and twist the knife hard enough. Between Savile and Mandelson, with his close ties to Epstein and thus to Prince Andrew, that ought not to be difficult to do.

Why did Starmer let Savile off? Why is Starmer so dependent on Epstein's closest associate in Britain, indeed one of Epstein's closest associates in the world? What sort of person therefore wants Starmer to become Prime Minister? In between pointing out that any Labour candidate here at North West Durham was the candidate for people who did not want a mixed-race MP, I shall be asking those questions very forcefully indeed. As of this moment, I am already doing so.