The Bathrobes and The Beast

Every banknote should bear the recently uncovered image of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson and the then Prince Andrew, with both the old Establishment and the metropolitan liberal elite in a state of undress. Those depicted may be classed as wildlife, since they are feral. That photograph should silence both proponents and opponents of the removal of the hereditary peers from Parliament, and stay the tongues both of monarchists and of republicans. Like the monarchy, that removal is now the status quo in the context of two sides whose arguments were each rubbish in its own terms, meaning that the case for change had not been made. And even by the standards of the great Paul Knaggs, this is outstanding:

A photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson in bathrobes alongside convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been released from the US Department of Justice files. It is the first known image of all three men together. It is also a portrait of a system that believed it would never face a reckoning.

Is there anything more revealing than the sight of an English prince and a British statesman lounging in towelling robes, sipping from star-spangled mugs in the easy company of a monster?

The image unearthed from the latest tranche of Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice is not merely a photograph. It is a document. It is the first known image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Lord Peter Mandelson together with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Three men around a wooden table on a deck in Martha’s Vineyard, understood to have been taken between 1999 and 2000. They look relaxed. They look comfortable. They look like men who believed, with complete confidence, that the world inhabited by the girls Epstein trafficked could never possibly reach their private decking.

They were wrong. And the unravelling, which has been long in coming, is not yet complete.

“This is not a story about individual moral failure. It is a story about a system that was designed, consciously or not, to protect powerful men from consequences.”

THE ARCHITECTURE OF INTIMACY

Mandelson submitted a claim for severance pay of £547,201

The photograph sits alongside a cascade of revelations that have arrived, in the past week alone, with the force of a tide that can no longer be held back.

On Wednesday, the UK government released 147 pages of documents covering the appointment of Lord Mandelson as British Ambassador to the United States in December 2024. What those papers show is not the portrait of a man who deceived a trusting Prime Minister. They show a Prime Minister who was handed a clear warning and chose to proceed anyway.

A due diligence report prepared by senior civil servants flagged what it described as a “general reputational risk” arising from Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein. The relationship, the report noted, ran from 2002 to 2019, spanning Epstein’s conviction, his imprisonment and his death. It noted that Mandelson had stayed at Epstein’s New York home while the convicted sex offender was serving his sentence. It cited a JPMorgan report from 2019 that identified Epstein’s “particularly close relationship” with both Mandelson and the then-Prince Andrew.

Keir Starmer was given this document. He read it, or his advisers read it for him. His communications director was, in the language of the files, “satisfied” with Mandelson’s responses to questions about Epstein. The appointment went ahead.

When the full scale of the relationship became unmistakable, Mandelson was sacked. He then submitted a claim for severance pay of £547,201, the remainder of his four-year contract. He settled, in the end, for £75,000 of public money. A Foreign Office official noted approvingly that the settlement had been negotiated “down this low with minimal fuss.” The phrase deserves to be read slowly. A man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, a man who allegedly shared sensitive government information with a convicted paedophile, received seventy-five thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money to go quietly. And the official responsible was praised for keeping the fuss to a minimum.

“The bathrobe is a fitting garment for these men. It is a state of undress. A studied informality that signals power too secure to need a suit.”

THE WEIRDLY RUSHED APPOINTMENT

Note to PM says communications chief was ‘satisfied’ with responses over Epstein contact

The documents reveal something else that deserves attention. Mandelson was given access to high-tier classified briefings before his security vetting was even completed. On 23 December 2024, an email from the US and Canada department told him he would be briefed “at higher tiers” from 6 January onwards. Confirmation that he had passed security clearance did not arrive until 30 January.

Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser, later described the appointment process as “weirdly rushed and unusual.” He told Starmer’s lawyer he had raised concerns about the individual and his reputation. He raised these concerns after Mandelson had already been appointed. After he had already been briefed into classified material. After he had already, it seems, met the King.

This is not competence. This is not oversight. This is the British establishment operating on the assumption that men of a certain standing simply do not require the scrutiny applied to everyone else.

Mandelson, it has now emerged, also facilitated a meeting between Epstein and the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in May 2002. The Architect of New Labour, as he was known with a mixture of admiration and dread, was apparently the bridge between the most powerful politician in Britain and the most dangerous predator of the age. How many other bridges he built, and for whom, remains a question the documents have not yet answered.

THE PRINCE AND THE PEDOPHILE

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s association with Epstein has been public knowledge since his catastrophic Newsnight interview in 2019. What the Epstein files have revealed is that the relationship was far more corrosive to the public interest than previously understood.

Emails released by the Department of Justice show that Andrew forwarded confidential reports from his work as the UK’s trade envoy directly to Epstein. One email, from November 2010, was sent to Epstein five minutes after Andrew received it from his special adviser. It contained details of official visits to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. On Christmas Eve 2010, Andrew shared a confidential briefing on investment opportunities in the reconstruction of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, a region where British soldiers were actively fighting and dying, and where UK government money was funding rebuilding efforts.

The Official Secrets Acts of 1911 and 1989 are explicit. The duty of confidentiality for trade envoys applies during their tenure and after it ends. Andrew forwarded classified material to a man who had been convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

He has consistently claimed he cut off contact with Epstein in December 2010. The emails show contact continuing well beyond that date, including a message from February 2011 in which he told Epstein he had “thought of you” after visiting a private equity firm. The correspondence also includes an invitation for Epstein to dine at Buckingham Palace, and a photograph that appears to show Andrew kneeling over an unidentified woman on a floor.

Andrew’s name appears at least several hundred times throughout the released documents. He was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office in February 2026, released on bail and, despite being stripped of his titles, remains eighth in line to the throne. An Act of Parliament would be required to remove him from the succession permanently. That Act has not been introduced.

“No crime is being committed within the frame of the photograph. But it is evidence of something the British establishment has spent two decades trying to obscure: a relationship of sustained intimacy between two of its most prominent figures and a convicted paedophile.”

THE DEFENCE OF THE INDEFENSIBLE

The standard response from the Mandelson camp has been the “unequivocal apology.” Say the words, accept the criticism, wait for the story to move on. It is a technique that has served him well across a career marked by three resignations, two comebacks and an apparently inexhaustible capacity for reinvention.

This time, the technique has failed. The law has followed him.

The defenders of these men reach for the argument of “guilt by association.” They suggest that high-flying social circles are not governed by the moral credentials of every host. They claim these were fleeting encounters, historical relationships, the errors of a different era.

This is a nonsense. In any other walk of life, a man who maintains close friendship with a child abuser after his conviction, who stays in his house while he is in prison, who urges him to “fight for early release” and promises that his friends “stay with you and love you,” does not survive professionally. He does not receive honours. He is not appointed to the country’s most important diplomatic post, with access to classified intelligence, by a Prime Minister who has been shown a dossier of his connections.

The question of Starmer’s own conduct cannot be avoided. He told Parliament he did not know the depth of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein. The documents suggest he was given a detailed summary of that relationship before the appointment was made. On 12 March, in Northern Ireland, he admitted: “It was me that made the mistake.” The admission is welcome. It is not sufficient.

WHAT THE PHOTOGRAPH TELLS US

The photograph released today is not evidence of a crime. No law is broken in the sitting of three men around a table in bathrobes. But what it does, with quiet and devastating clarity, is place these men in the same frame. It makes the relationship undeniable. It gives the public something concrete where before there were only allegations, emails and denials.

The British establishment has always relied on abstraction. On plausible deniability. On the blurring of timelines and the multiplication of qualifying clauses. “I was wrong to believe him.” “I regret that association.” “I did not know the full extent.” The photograph cuts through all of it.

It is a record of intimacy. It is proof of comfort. These were not chance encounters at charity galas or brief handshakes at international summits. These were private mornings with a man who was, at the time the photograph was taken, already regarded in some circles as deeply problematic, and who would go on to be convicted of the sexual exploitation of a child.

The women and girls Epstein trafficked did not have bathrobes or star-spangled mugs or private decks in Martha’s Vineyard. They had no protection whatsoever. Not from Epstein’s network. Not from the institutions that were supposed to hold power to account. Not from the men in the photograph.

Mandelson has resigned from the Labour Party and the House of Lords. Andrew has been stripped of his titles and exiled, in effect, to a cottage on the Sandringham estate. Both have been arrested and bailed. Multiple police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, are examining the evidence within three million pages of documents. More files will be released. More names will emerge.

The investigation continues. The reckoning is not complete. And the question for the rest of us remains the one it has always been: will we pay attention long enough to insist that the outcome matters?

THE SYSTEM, NOT JUST THE MEN 

It would be a mistake, and a convenient one for the establishment, to frame this story as one of individual moral failure. Two men made bad choices. Two men kept bad company. Two men face the consequences. Move on.

The story is not that simple, and the working class of this country cannot afford to pretend that it is.

What the Epstein files reveal, in accumulation, is the operating logic of the British elite: that power is a network before it is anything else. That the network protects its members. That due diligence is a form that must be completed, not a principle that must be applied. That apology is a tool of survival, not an act of genuine accountability.

Mandelson was given classified briefings before he was cleared. Andrew shared state secrets with a convicted sex offender. Starmer was warned of reputational risk and chose to proceed. Jonathan Powell, a career establishment figure, described a process as “weirdly rushed” only after it had already been completed and the damage already done. A public servant congratulated a colleague for keeping a controversial payout “down this low with minimal fuss.”

These are not individual failures. They are the normal operations of a class of people who have never genuinely believed that the rules of public life apply to them. They are the operational reality of a system in which the gatekeepers and the gated are, too often, the same people.

The English radical tradition, from the Levellers to Orwell to Benn, understood this truth in its bones. The powerful do not surrender their privileges willingly. They do not restructure broken institutions unless they are compelled to. They do not extend accountability to themselves unless the alternative becomes worse than the cost of accepting it.

We are at that juncture now. The photograph exists. The files exist. The arrests have been made. The apologies have been delivered. What has not yet been delivered is the structural change that would make it impossible for this pattern to repeat.

We need a fundamental restructuring of the processes by which power is appointed, vetted and held to account. We need transparency requirements that cannot be circumvented by “weirdly rushed” timelines. We need a public interest test for the award of public money to disgraced former officials. We need, in short, a state that serves the people who pay for it, rather than the people who have always assumed they are entitled to run it.

The men in the photograph thought they were safe. They thought their bathrobes, their mugs, their comfortable deck in Martha’s Vineyard would remain private. They were wrong.

What we are witnessing is the total erosion of the gatekeeping class. When our princes and our politicians share bathrobes and mugs with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, they forfeit the right to demand our deference. This is not just a story about individual deviance; it is a story about the failure of British institutions to police themselves.

The British public has been governed for too long by a class of people who believe that rules are for the “little people” and that power is a private club. We do not need more apologies. We need a fundamental restructuring of public office that ensures no individual, no matter how many titles they hold or how many elections they have “spun,” is ever again allowed to operate in the shadows of such profound moral darkness.

The bathrobe is a fitting garment for these men. It represents a state of undress, a lack of professional rigour, and a shameful comfort in the presence of evil.