The Company They Keep

Paul Knaggs writes:

The race to lead Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s most powerful communications regulator, has reached its final, most cynical stretch. By April 2026, a single individual will hold the authority to define “misinformation” for the entire British public; to determine what is broadcast, what is permissible, and what is silenced. That individual, if the current frontrunner holds her position, will be Baroness Margaret Hodge: a woman whose political career is less a study in public service than in the dark arts of institutional survival.

It is a prospect that ought to disturb anyone who believes that the people appointed to guard democratic discourse should themselves be able to withstand scrutiny. And it is a prospect that raises, with uncomfortable urgency, a question that British public life has spent decades avoiding: who watches the watchmen?

The answer, as it turns out, is nobody. Or at least, nobody who isn’t already related to them.

Which brings us to a photograph. It has been circulating on social media in recent weeks, and it captures something that a thousand column inches of political analysis cannot. Two figures walk side by side in matching navy blue, comfortable in each other’s company, comfortable in the world they share.

On one side, Hodge herself: the self-styled “Anti-Corruption Queen,” a Dame, a public accounts scourge, the woman who built a parliamentary reputation putting corporate tax dodgers on the rack. On the other, Peter Mandelson, quintessential architect of New Labour’s Third Way. A man once “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,” he is now the subject of a Metropolitan Police criminal investigation; his homes in Camden and Wiltshire have been searched, his peerage effectively sidelined, and his party membership resigned in the wake of the latest Epstein File revelations.

This is more than a stroll between old colleagues. It is a visual manifesto of British establishment immunity. As Mandelson faces allegations of leaking market-sensitive government information to a convicted sex offender, and Hodge’s own past ghosts, from the harrowing Islington child abuse scandals to the Liechtenstein tax havens, refuse to stay buried, the photograph does more than just pose a question.

It serves as a snapshot of a class that polices everyone except itself. That the frontrunner to chair the body which will regulate truth in public broadcasting should be photographed in such company is not an irony: it is a warning for all media outlets seeking to tell the truth. In a system where the regulators and the regulated share the same pavement and the same secrets, we must ask: who is truly watching the watchmen?

The Islington Ghost that Never Left 

Before she was a Dame, Margaret Hodge was the leader of Islington Council in the 1980s. Her tenure was defined by what she later admitted was “shameful naivety,” as victims of a prolific paedophile ring in the borough’s care homes were ignored, dismissed, and in some cases, insulted.

When Demetrious Panton, a survivor of that abuse, came forward in 2003, Hodge did not offer a hand of support. Instead, she used her position as Children’s Minister to write to the BBC, describing him as an “extremely disturbed person.” It took a High Court libel settlement and a £10,000 donation to charity for her to offer an “unreserved” apology.

It is worth sitting with that detail. A woman who had overseen a council implicated in the systematic abuse of children, who responded to a survivor’s allegations by attempting to discredit him through the national broadcaster, subsequently reinvented herself as Parliament’s foremost champion of accountability. The Public Accounts Committee became her stage. Corporate executives squirmed. Amazon, Google, Starbucks. She was brilliant. She was relentless. She was magnificent television. 

She was also, it turned out, a shareholder.

The Hypocrisy of the “Tax Crusader” 

Hodge later reinvented herself as the scourge of the tax-avoiding elite. Yet, in 2015, it was revealed that she had received over £1.5 million in shares from a family trust based in Liechtenstein, a jurisdiction she had previously condemned as “secretive.” The shares originated from Stemcor, her father’s steel-trading empire. While she maintained everything was “above board,” the optics were devastating: a public official railing against the very offshore structures that bolstered her private wealth.

Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge had been accused of hypocrisy by The Times (29 April 2015) when it reported that the Labour MP received ‘more than £1.5m in shares’ from a Liechtenstein trust and transferred onshore via the Liechtenstein disclosure facility, which allows individuals to move previously undeclared assets back to the UK under more favourable terms than other HMRC facilities and without criminal action. The newspaper indicated that prior to its story Hodge had ‘not declared that she benefited from an offshore trust’.

The Times reports that Hodge was the beneficiary of a Liechtenstein trust that was wound up in 2011, and which had held shares in Stemcor, the steel trading business set up by her father, and that Hodge herself received just under 96,000 shares that came from the low-tax jurisdiction of Liechtenstein. Additionally, three-quarters of the shares in the family trust had been held in Panama, another low-tax jurisdiction that Hodge had criticised just weeks before as being ‘one of the most secretive jurisdictions [with] the least protection anywhere in the world against money laundering’.

A public official railing against the offshore structures that quietly bolstered her private wealth. The British establishment has a term for such people: they call them “distinguished public servants.”

A Dynasty of Influence

The rot of ‘insiderism’ does not stop at the Palace of Westminster. It runs through White City too. Hodge’s daughter, Lizzi Watson, has held senior editorial positions at the BBC, serving as deputy editor of the BBC News at Six and News at Ten, and latterly as Executive News Editor for News Commissioning. The BBC, to its credit, has a declared policy requiring staff to report conflicts of interest arising from family connections. The BBC, to its considerable discredit, refused under Freedom of Information requests to confirm whether that policy was followed in this case, or even to formally confirm Watson’s employment details. The corporation that exists to hold power to account declined to be held to account.

When Corbyn supporters, and later others, raised the question of whether the relationship between one of the most publicly aggressive anti-Corbyn MPs and a senior editorial figure at the corporation’s flagship news output warranted examination, they were met with the standard institutional shrug. The “Village” of Westminster and the “Square” of White City, to borrow the geography, are not separate communities. They are the same village, with different postboxes.

No allegation is made here of editorial interference. None need be. The point is structural. When accountability depends on the personal discretion of people connected by blood, marriage, and schooling to those being scrutinised, it is not really accountability at all. It is a performance of accountability, staged for public consumption, by people who have no intention of being consumed.

The Prince of Darkness and the Ofcom Shadow 

Then there is Mandelson. The man who once claimed to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” is now the subject of police searches in London and Wiltshire. The 2026 tranche of “Epstein Files” suggests a relationship far more transactional than mere social acquaintance, including claims of secret payments and the sharing of sensitive government bail-out data.

What unites these figures is not malice, at least not obviously. What unites them is the unspoken assumption that consequences apply to other people. The assumption that a political career can survive the libelling of an abuse survivor, that offshore wealth is different when it belongs to you, that friendship with a convicted sex offender is a personal failing rather than a structural failure of the systems that kept elevating you regardless.

The Mandelson affair is not merely a scandal about one man and a paedophile financier, though it is certainly that. It is a scandal about a system that vetted Mandelson for a senior diplomatic appointment in full knowledge of his continued relationship with Epstein after the 2008 conviction, and appointed him anyway. That chose, in Starmer’s words, to believe his “lies.” That built around these figures a permanent architecture of implied immunity, so thick and load-bearing that even now, with police officers rifling through the drawers in Wiltshire, the scaffolding is only just beginning to crack.

The British establishment does not reform. It rearranges the seating plan and calls it progress. When the same names recur across decades of failure, protected by the same institutions, lauded by the same commentariat, appointed by the same patronage networks, we are not looking at a string of unfortunate coincidences. We are looking at a system operating exactly as designed.

Sir Keir Starmer told Parliament that Mandelson had “betrayed our country, our parliament, and our party.” He is correct on all three counts. But the deeper betrayal belongs to a political culture that made such a man indispensable, generation after generation, scandal after scandal, and called it wisdom.

The British establishment does not reform; it simply rearranges the seating plan. When we see Hodge and Mandelson together, we are not looking at the past; we are looking at the protected present.

Accountability is a ghost in a system designed by its beneficiaries. It is a prisoner in a cell, never to be released.