Peter mandelson

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Growth slows to zero, Scotland rejects assisted dying and Trump sends Marines to the Gulf 

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, spoke to President Donald Trump of America about the importance of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but resisted his call for Britain’s ships to be sent there. The government considered sending British-made Octopus drone-interceptors to the Middle East. Sir Keir said £53 million would help a million households reliant on heating oil – £53 a household; ‘It’s moments like this that tell you what a government is about,’ he said. The economy showed zero growth in January, according to the Office for National Statistics. The ONS added alcohol-free beer to the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. John Lewis awarded staff a

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: HMS Dragon sets sail, Mandelson records released and Trump declares victory

Home John Healey, the Defence Secretary, visited Cyprus after criticism of Britain’s response to drone attacks on the RAF base there. The Cyprus High Commissioner said: ‘The people are disappointed, the people are scared, the people could expect more.’ The destroyer HMS Dragon sailed for Cyprus from Portsmouth on 10 March. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Commons that inflation was likely to rise; the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated an extra percentage point increase on prices by the end of the year. The Prince of Wales aircraft carrier would not head for the Middle East. President Trump of America said: ‘That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer… We

Wednesday

Ian Maxwell

My sister Ghislaine became a prop in the theatre of global online outrage

My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father Robert went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offences linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimised villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest of the former Prince Andrew shows how fully a newer system has taken hold: one in which guilt is first declared on the homepage and only later, if at all, tested in court. My sister became a digital-age Myra Hindley, a single face through which the internet could monetise disgust Old protections – the presumption

Tuesday

Tim Shipman

Peter Mandelson haunts Labour

13 min listen

Overnight, Peter Mandelson has been released on bail after being arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has not commented publicly in recent weeks, though he has previously denied any wrongdoing. How long will this row continue to haunt Labour? With more documents due to be released relating to his appointment as US ambassador, can the party contain the damage — or is this just the beginning? Elsewhere, Keir Starmer has made an unexpected visit to Gorton and Denton. Is this a show of confidence — or a last-ditch attempt to shore up support? Tim Shipman and John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony Blair, join Megan McElroy

Saturday

James Heale

Starmer, Mandelson & HMT: why Gordon Brown has never been more relevant

17 min listen

James Macintyre joins James Heale to discuss his new biography of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown: Power With Purpose. While the book has been years in the making, little did James know that it would end up published at the same time that its themes and subjects could never be more relevant. James tells our deputy political editor about the relationship between Brown and Blair, what the Labour leader makes of Keir Starmer’s problems today and his reflections – with hindsight – about bringing the now-disgraced Peter Mandelson back into government in 2008. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Starmer, Mandelson & HMT: why Gordon Brown has never been more relevant

Wednesday

Nicky Haslam

Peter Mandelson’s secret crush

Back in the mists, early 1980s I suppose, I was asked to decorate a penthouse apartment in London for a tycoon who collected large-scale contemporary American art. Decor done, art hung, the porter asked if he could show it to the prospective buyer of the same-layout penthouse next door, a member of the Gaddafi family attending university in London. ‘Sure,’ we said, and a young man in black robes arrived a bit later. He did a quick recce, approved, and said he wanted to have exactly the same decoration, including the art, and ready to move into in ten days. My team pulled together a pretty good replica while Tom

Charles Moore

How Keir Starmer might still hang on

A government minister and I dined just after the fiasco of the 2017 general election, with Theresa May clinging to office. We agreed our feelings: ‘Well, she’s utterly useless, but she’s got to stay.’ Similar emotions arise today. Nobody – and I genuinely mean nobody – can truthfully say that Sir Keir Starmer is doing a good job, but politics is not, thank goodness, a logical occupation, so it does not necessarily follow that he should resign. If you lead your party to a victory fair and square in a general election, it is your duty to try to go on governing until the next one. You owe it to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: McSweeney resigns, Starmer hangs on and Streeting plots

Home Morgan McSweeney, the helmsman of Labour, walked the plank by resigning as chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, whom he had advised in 2024 to appoint Lord Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. Mr McSweeney’s resignation statement began: ‘After careful reflection, I have decided to resign from the government,’ as though he had been a member of the government. In a speech meant to be about funding for local communities, Sir Keir said he was ‘sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed him’. But he added: ‘I had no reason to believe he was telling anything other than the truth’, even though the Financial Times

Peter Jones

Why not privatise tax collection?

Twice a year the taxman comes to call, exhibiting all the bossy incompetence one expects from the government machine. Why not do as the Romans did, and privatise it? After all, one would surely rather give one’s money to a publican, even if a sinner. The publicanus, as the name suggests, was a public servant, i.e. a contractor for public works of any kind. Indeed, from early on, wars were fought, roads built and mines worked on the back of service contracts offered out to hopeful bidders, as was the right to gather dues from harbours and toll stations. Gaius Gracchus in 123 bc legislated for publicani to collect taxes

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

I was right about Peter Mandelson

A fight between Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson? A difficult one to call, really. Like a war between Pakistan and Turkey: you kind of want both sides to suffer unimaginable losses. It happened fairly often, though, in that uniquely dysfunctional Blair government and before, when his cabal of liars and smarmers were preparing for power. Here’s Campbell on the subject: ‘He started to leave, then came back over, pushed at me, then threw a punch, then another. I grabbed his lapels to disable his arms and T.B. [Tony Blair] was by now moving in to separate us and P.M. just lunged at him, then looked back at me and shouted,

Charles Moore

Why did Peter Mandelson want Jeffrey Epstein to read my column?

Last Saturday, a friend in Washington emailed to say he had been studying some of the latest 3.5 million pages of Epstein files. A few months ago, I had pointed out here (Notes, 11 October 2025) that much of Epstein’s famous ‘black book’ was just the contacts book of Oxford friends of Ghislaine Maxwell. As their contemporary, I congratulated myself on having been at Cambridge, thus avoiding meeting Ghislaine. So my friend’s message came as a bit of a blow. He rubbed it in: ‘You may be interested to hear that you, yourself, feature no fewer than 40 times.’ His second paragraph, however, kindly explained: the 40 references to me

Toby Young

Should I be cancelled for being in the Epstein files?

I was planning to begin this column by saying how relieved I was to be mentioned in the latest Epstein files. Finally! After all, Jeffrey Epstein’s list of acquaintances reads like a Who’s Who of the global power elite. How embarrassing would it be to have lived in the same city as him from 1995 to 2000, as I did, and not even receive a glancing reference? But I realise this is a subject that shouldn’t be made light of. The revelations about Lord Mandelson are genuinely shocking, even to someone as jaded as me, and raise important questions about what Sir Keir Starmer knew and when. They may also

Monday

Tim Shipman

What next for Peter Mandelson?

12 min listen

It is one of the staple headlines of British politics: Peter Mandelson has resigned. The so-called Prince of Darkness was sacked as US ambassador last September, yet that has done little to stem the flow of stories about the alleged nature of his relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. This weekend saw the publication of a further three million emails, triggering another avalanche of claims about Peter Mandelson’s links to the dead sex offender. So what next for Mandelson? And which former political grandees have successfully managed the transition out of the Commons? Should he be taking notes from George Osborne? James Heale and Tim Shipman discuss. Produced by Megan McElroy

What next for Peter Mandelson?

Thursday

Rachel Johnson

How not to be a spy

Like our former ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson, I was once vetted by the security services. My brush with the spooks started, as in a Cold War spy novel, with a meeting on a bench in St James’s Park after a distinguished foreign policy wonk of my acquaintance had suggested lunch. As the weather was fine, we decided to pick up sandwiches from the café and sit admiring the pelicans. The diplomat explained the Foreign Office was scouting for new blood for the Policy Planning Staff. I was at the Financial Times and had never knowingly had a blue-sky thought in my life but this sounded… different. The

Friday

Julie Burchill

Peter Mandelson’s greatest sin? Baby talk

There’s was so much to loathe and laugh at in Peter Mandelson’s contribution to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘birthday book’ (which inadvertently has turned into more of a ‘burn book’). But the words ‘yum yum’ were, for me, in a league of their own. Whatever they were referring to – it could have been the peachy posterior of a pool-boy or a particularly perfect profiterole – they identified Mandelson as a practitioner of verbal infantilisation. For this alone, he deserved to be sent packing. I spent five months in hospital during last winter and spring, and though the nursing staff were generally excellent, we were oft spoken to like children in preschool. I

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Charlie Kirk killed, Peter Mandelson sacked and Harry takes tea with the King

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, asked Lord Mandelson to step back as ambassador to Washington. This followed the publication of alarming emails of support Lord Mandelson had sent to Jeffrey Epstein after the financier’s conviction for sexual crimes. Questions remained about what Sir Keir knew and when before Lord Mandelson’s sacking and appointment. Some Labour MPs expressed frustration with the Prime Minister’s leadership. His director of political strategy, Paul Ovenden, resigned over a lewd joke about Diane Abbott he had relayed eight years ago. Some claimed Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester who has set up a soft-left group called Mainstream, was going to try to become

Friday

James Heale

Will Mandelson bring down McSweeney?

20 min listen

The fallout from Lord Mandelson’s sacking continues. All eyes are now on Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – could he take the fall for Mandelson’s appointment? As Whitehall editor of the Sunday Times Gabriel Pogrund tells James Heale and Lucy Dunn, Mandelson and McSweeney’s relationship stretches back to New Labour. But, Pogrund warns, as McSweeney lay the foundations for Labour’s victory in 2024, losing him would mark a ‘revolution in the Starmer project’. Plus: after a slew of bad news for the government, there was one Labour victory this week – at the annual Westminster dog of the year competition. Megan McElroy interviews some of the MPs who

Thursday

Michael Gove

Why Mandelson had to go & the legacy of Charlie Kirk

40 min listen

In this bonus episode Michael and Madeline tackle two extraordinary political stories. First, the dramatic resignation of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s US ambassador, following renewed scrutiny of his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Why did Keir Starmer take so long to act – and what does the debacle reveal about his leadership style? Then, across the Atlantic, America is reeling from the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Michael and Madeline reflect on the tragedy, what it means for free speech, and whether political violence is reshaping the way debate happens in the public square. Produced by Oscar Edmondson, Oscar Bicket and Matt Miszczak.

Tim Shipman

Prince of Darkness sacked (again)

22 min listen

Another week, another departure. Conservative MP Neil O’Brien – who serves in the shadow cabinet as minister for policy renewal and development – was granted an urgent question in Parliament this morning, to question the government about Peter Mandelson. Then the news broke that Lord Mandelson had been sacked by Keir Starmer following further disclosures about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Neil joins Tim Shipman and James Heale to discuss the latest developments and also the questions that still remain: what did they know about Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein; if they didn’t know, why didn’t they know; and will the government be forced to release their vetting files on Mandelson’s

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Mandelson’s Epstein problem is not going away

When King Charles hosts Donald Trump for the state banquet at Windsor Castle next week, the dignitaries should know better than to mention Jeffrey Epstein. Inevitably, however, Epstein’s ghost will hang over proceedings, the paedo-Banquo at the feast. In the coming days, the details of Mandelson’s bond with Epstein may end up overshadowing all talk of the special relationship The royal family will entertain the President, though the Duke of York will (surely?) stay away. He no longer works for the crown and everyone knows why. Trump, meanwhile, will still be batting away suggestions that in 2003 he contributed a puerile drawing to Epstein’s 50th ‘birthday book’ – a strange