The statement had been workshopped to within an inch of its life. Sitting across from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Peter Mandelson folded his hands across each other and intoned: “I want to apologise to those women for a system that refused to hear their voices and did not give them the protection they were entitled to expect.”
The interview, aired on Sunday, was the first occasion that Lord Mandelson, one of the triumvirate who ruled New Labour in the 1990s, had publicly addressed his friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein since it cost him his more recent role as Ambassador to the US. Kuenssberg attempted to interject – “will you apologise for your association with him after his conviction?” – but the Labour Party’s most famous spin doctor had memorised his script and would not be thrown off course.
Mandy went on: “That system gave him protection and not them.” It was like watching a robotic Pinocchio, although we couldn’t actually see this wooden boy’s nose grow longer. His breathing was slow and steady. “If I had known, if I was in any way complicit or culpable, of course I would apologise for it, but I was not culpable. I was not knowledgeable of what he was doing. And I regret, and will regret, to my dying day, the fact that powerless women, women who are denied a voice, were not given the protection they were entitled to expect from the American system.”
A system – specifically an American system – was to blame for protecting Epstein. Not a clueless British visitor like Mandelson, who merely stayed in Epstein’s houses, comforted Epstein after his conviction (“fight for early release” and “I think the world of you”, he wrote in emails) and introduced Epstein to his powerful friends – including, prior to Epstein’s conviction, the sitting UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Had the BBC passed the microphone straight from Mandy to one of Epstein’s victims, one wonders what those “powerless” women might have used their voices to say in response.
Within 48 hours, Mandelson was in damage control mode. In a statement issued on Monday, he doubled down on his ignorance of Epstein’s crimes, but finally offered a personal apology to his victims: “I was wrong to believe him following his conviction and to continue my association with him afterwards. I apologise unequivocally for doing so to the women and girls who suffered.”
We’ve been here before: a disastrous BBC interview, a panicked follow-up statement saying he “unequivocally” regretted his association with Epstein far too late. This is the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor playbook.
In his interview with Newsnight in November 2019, Andrew notoriously refused to express regret for his friendship with Epstein (although he said it was wrong to meet him a final time): “the people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful.”
Four days after the programme aired, a statement released by Buckingham Palace finally conceded regret. Mandelson’s hapless clarification follows the same pattern. But why would Peter Mandelson, the communications genius credited in 1997 with Labour’s greatest electoral landslide in its history, repeat such basic errors?
This is a story of two men, Andy and Mandy, who share an addiction to fancy houses and wealthy friends. Each time that Mandelson’s career has foundered, he has come a cropper due to his proximity to the rich and flashy: the Labour media mogul Geoffrey Robinson; the billionaire Hinduja brothers; the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and now Epstein.
It’s notable that Prakash Hinduja, whose UK passport application Mandelson passed to the Home Office in 1998 was sentenced to four years in jail by a court in Geneva in 2024 for exploiting domestic workers, although there is no suggestion that Peter Mandelson knew of these crimes or endorsed the application.
Indeed, he seems to have been curiously unobservant around his friends. In Epstein’s homes, he told Kuenssberg, he never saw anything to suggest he was preying on young women. This is despite contributing to Epstein’s birthday book a photo of himself alongside a woman in a tank top and briefs.
His stay at Epstein’s “Zorro” ranch likely failed to excite Mandelson’s curiosity, despite reports that “a six-foot by six-foot oversized portrait of Ghislaine Maxwell, with her legs fully spread, completely naked, and a golden dagger in her right hand, was dead centre in the elevator hall of the basement”. Perhaps, in the world of Mandelson’s patrons, this is normal decor?
What really unites Andrew and Mandelson, however, is their conviction that they have great gifts to offer the world, if only pesky journalists would focus on what matters and stop talking about Epstein.
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Andrew initially wanted a BBC interview back in 2019, we are told, because he wanted attention on his entrepreneurship project, Pitch@Palace. Mandelson spent the first 18 minutes of Sunday’s interview talking about his insight into Donald Trump, before grudgingly moving on to the matter of Epstein.
It’s no coincidence that Mandelson has re-emerged during a week which his experience as a Trump-whisperer is most likely to be in demand. His BBC interview coincides with a piece published in last week’s Spectator, in which Mandelson expresses his support for Donald Trump’s intervention in Venezuela.
But can he reinvent himself as a statesman (again), now that we know he lied about the extent of his association with a convicted paedophile? It’s worth asking Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor how that’s worked. Even Donald Trump, who Mandelson was so careful to praise last week, might take a pass on offering Mandelson his next lifeline.
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