‘Who can we tax to pay benefits?’ Explosive Mandelson files humiliate Starmer

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:43The Mandelson files have dropped and they are explosive. They expose how the so-called Prince of Darkness undermined his own prime minister at every turn. They also describe an amateur Labour Party that, according to the Work and Pensions Secretary, was only interested in taxing more to pay for benefits. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tomini.

2:16Tim, what a time to be reunited and what a time to be alive as the biggest Mandelson's files yet have dropped. Yes. More than a thousand pages of documents. This is the final part. We already saw documents that were related to the vetting process for the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States in 2024. These are documents related a bit to that, the time before and the time after. And they're really about Peter Mandelson's communications with the government as a whole. Yes. They amount to over 1 ,000 pages. We've been going through them with a fine tooth comb. And it's a question of breaking news because someone may find something new.

3:02They might find a new needle in the haystack while we're talking. But there are certain themes that stand out. So I think this is a game of two halves as far as what the documents show. First of all, they show how ruthlessly ambitious, meddling, manipulative and conniving Mandelson was, both in landing the role and then in his exchanges with other members of the cabinet. And charming and quite funny. OK, so I've given it a negative spin. That would be the positive spin on the Prince of Darkness. His lawyer might say. Indeed. And then we have another story, which is almost the more intriguing one.

3:39And we'll give you all of these headlines, don't worry. But we have the story of a man who is appointed to this plum diplomatic role in America, actually behind the scenes, undermining not only the Labour government he's serving, but also the Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Yes. Critical of him, encouraging other cabinet ministers to lay in. So we have the story of the dysfunction at the heart of the appointment of Peter Mandelson and Mandelson himself, but Mandelson in turn tells a story about the dysfunction of the government that he is serving in. As you can imagine, Peter Mandelson is not satisfied to limit his responsibilities to being ambassador to the United States.

4:22No. Instead, he comments upon all sorts of areas of government policy. Most ministers, I have to say, show discipline and brush him off. Yes. Some say, let's talk about this on the phone rather than in WhatsApp messages. But some cabinet ministers rather naively are willing to talk policy. And I think that is what a lot of people are going to pick up on after this, as the story moves from the trials and tribulations of Peter Mandelson to the crisis at the heart of the Labour government. Before we get on to the juiciest headlines, let's just quickly go through the timeline. So we have Mandelson appointed as US ambassador in December 2024.

5:04He's appointed because they think that they need a Trump whisperer, that not just anyone can do this role, that it needs to be somebody extra special, a wheeler and dealer, someone, Tim, previously known as the Dark Lord. At the same time, this is not the only job that Peter's going for, and we'll come back to this, but it's important context. He was also trying to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and failing that, he had a go for ambassador to the United States. The post comes to a dramatic end in September. It's September the 10th that the Prime Minister expresses confidence in Peter Mandelson after it emerges that he had a very close personal relationship with the late convicted billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

5:47My best pal. My best pal, yum yum, and all the rest of it in the birthday book. The following day, Keir Starmer has to reverse ferret, not for the first time, by the way, and say, actually, no, I no longer have confidence in Peter Mandelson. He needs to be sacked. And by the way, just to add, in these documents, Mandy does have a moan about Keir Starmer's habit of backing one candidate for a job and then switching to another. That's probably the least of his worries. Then we have the fallout from the entire saga, the humble address, which has been brought about by the opposition, by the Tories, saying, right, show us the documents, show us you're working.

6:20when we discovered that process had not been followed and actually he hadn't been properly vetted. It then became a debate about what Starmer knew or didn't know, and we will get into that. And that has led to these documents being dropped. So as you say, we had the first tranche back in March, and this is the second final big drop laying bare quite a lot, although it should be said. For instance, in some of the emails exchanged between Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney of I Lost My Mobile Phone fame, who used to be chief of staff to the prime minister, quite a lot of the messages have been redacted.

6:53In the new tranche as well. So we don't have a full, full picture, but let's go through what we found out. And remember famously, there was a box on a form in the first tranche in which the Prime Minister was invited to give his own comments on the appointment of Mandelson, and it was empty. And indeed, the Prime Minister is missing from this second tranche as well. We don't learn much about his thoughts and feelings from reading it. We really only have confirmation of what we already knew, that the appointment was weirdly rushed, that the vetting procedures weren't really followed. There's no smoking gun here, by the way, to say that Starmer was lying when he said he felt he had been lied to by Mandelson and wasn't given the full truth by civil servants.

7:32No, on the contrary, there is a letter from Ollie Robbins to Mandelson on September the 25th in which he lays out the many ways in which it might be said that you have misled this government and not been open about your dealings with Epstein. and also accuses him of a lack of sensitivity towards the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. So I wouldn't be surprised if the government tries to claim this tranche of documents as a win. Ollie Robbins was the chief civil servant at the Foreign Office, and we covered his appearance before the Privileges Committee several weeks ago, where he basically said that undue pressure was put on him to rush this through without the proper vetting, and that he himself had expressed concerns that there was a reputational risk to appointing Mandelson, and that actually he shouldn't have access to anything before he had got his vetting.

8:20But instead we learnt that Mandelson's going around with clearance, demanding access to very sensitive paperwork and all the rest of it, which we'll get into. Shall we start with how Mandy lobbied for the job with the Foreign Secretary, as he was then, David Lammy? Yes, in his own hand. Yes, so it's a handwritten note. Now this echoes something Jacob Rees-Mogg told me last week while you were away. this propensity for mandelson to kind of wheedle his way in with a huge amount of flattery with handwritten letters um basically i mean in terms of lobbying this guy is the creme de la creme he can get to anyone he writes personal notes he's persuasive the language he uses with lammy i mean with the benefit of hindsight it's actually comical but at the time it's quite convincing isn't it?

9:06I just wanted you to know that if you were minded to appoint me, I would make sure you never regret it. If you were minded to appoint me. I fear that navigating Britain's interest through the Trump administration will require superhuman skills and luck and a massive team effort. For me, it would be the last thing I do in public life. And it would be a huge honour to serve you and the government in this role. He didn't know that it would be the last thing he does. It would be the last thing he does in public life. I love that you're basically, you've got Mr Burns going on there with a shade of the Dark Lord.

9:45So this was him basically learning that his name might have been in the frame for this job, probably because he put his name in the frame. By writing people letters. By writing letters and lobbying heavily on behalf of himself and basically saying to Lammy, this was back in November of 2024, so a month before the appointment, please, please give me the job. However, Tim, he wasn't in that much of a rush to start. Why might that be? Well, quite a lot has been written about his involvement with a think tank now defunct called Global Council, not least because it had links to Russia, China and others.

10:20And people were scratching their heads upon news of this appointment saying, is this appropriate? Is it appropriate to have a US ambassador who has got very close links to Russia and China? No matter. He sent an email basically saying, I'd like to put off starting because I want to give a very lucrative, I want to take part in a lucrative public speaking gig on behalf of the Chinese. In Shanghai, yeah. Why didn't that start alarm bells ringing? Do you know what I mean? He's almost doing the vetting for you there. Yes. So he asked for his start date to begin appearing on the FCDO payroll to be on January the 13th, which is after this conference in Shanghai.

11:03Internal memos show that civil servants discuss that his private sector engagements had to be heavily locked down by HR. Ollie Robbins later noted in September 2020, 2025, that, quote, the discussion on his global council shares rumbled on forever. Well, they were concerned with a potential conflict of interest there. And he did step back from that think tank. But the think tank carried on and actually came back to bite him. Because it wasn't only that he failed the vetting on the basis of the Epstein relationship. It was also on the basis of that think tank's relationships with despotic regimes.

11:41Yes. The note to Lamy is on House of Lords notepaper. Of course. Some of the correspondence from earlier in all of this is on Global Council paper. Which is rather damning and probably inappropriate because that's a corporate role. That's a corporate role. It's not a parliamentary one. But I think that leads on nicely to the next section of this, which was him thinking that because he was a member of the House of Lords and indeed a privy councillor, no less, Tim, that he should be afforded special treatment when it came to the vetting. So we see evidence in his documents of Mandelson basically saying, I'm a special case.

12:17You don't need to look at me that closely. He even expresses some incredulity when a civil servant says to him, well, no, we do need you to list all of the significant foreign nationals that you know. And he replies, all of them, as if it's completely ridiculous to ask. And someone else says he knows everyone. Yeah, which is a good observation. I'm not sure from my first reading of it whether this note comes from him or from others. but it does look like civil servants asked, do we even need to do the very deep security vetting given that he's a member of the House of Lords? Which was probably because he was going on in that vein in their ear.

12:58Who knows? The documents create an environment where it seems as if Peter Mandelson was agitating for access, for information, for sensitive material before this vetting had been completed. And we know that because we've seen photographs of him with special passes on before he cleared the vetting, accessing actual government buildings, which presumably are also full of private and confidential material. An example of Mandelson's arrogance on December the 21st, Robert Tinline, Director of Americas at the Foreign Office, noted that Mandelson, quote, thinks that as a privy councillor, he can see things without waiting for vetting.

13:36And as an example, perhaps, of civil servants massaging his ego, he was advised to reassure the vetting team that you've been comprehensive, even if it's all quite artificial. sure. We know that the vetting failed, Tim, and we know that there was a breakdown in communication of that to the Prime Minister. We still don't quite know who in Number 10 knew what. We've heard various different accounts of it all, including from Keir Starmer himself. No matter. But what's significant is when the whole House of Cards came tumbling down in September 2025 and he was sacked, what the documents seem to show are civil servants trying not to link the decision to sack him to Epstein and I think link it to his links to Russia and China, because there'd be more of a, we can't reveal too much about this because it's in the national security defence to that link, than there would have been to the late billionaire paedophile.

14:37So although Starmer himself says that he sacked Mandelson, and this is the full quote, because he had been less than totally candid about his relationship with Epstein, because politically, that's a better defence for the Prime Minister, isn't it? The Prime Minister is saying, I don't know the true extent of this man's relationship with Epstein. And when I asked him about it, he lied to me. For Starmer, that's a better defence. But for the blob, a better defence is he was actually sacked over Russia and China. And by the way, no, we can't give you any files on that at all, because that could be compromising to national security.

15:15Also, the civil servants know that the Epstein relationship had been judged to be a reputational risk when the initial vetting took place. I think that interpretation is correct. And it seems to be supported by Elsa Terry, someone who worked with Inside Number 10, who agreed with that point made by the chap from Propriety and Ethics, arguing that if you leave in references to Epstein, if you hone in on Epstein, it will, quote, make it harder to mount a defence not to release the documents to Parliament. So it seems to be suggesting that the machine didn't want the documents to be released. And we know we have the humble address and the release of the documents because that might be OK for civil servants.

16:00But when you're politicians trying to claim that you're whiter than white, you have to unfortunately side with sunlight being the best disinfectant. We can't have a situation where Darren Jones, the Prime Minister's right hand man, is going into Parliament, giving humble addresses saying, there's nothing to see here because the Prime Minister didn't do anything wrong. It's all the civil servants fault. As a government, they had to argue for the Epstein line and for exposing it all, because they were trying to cover Keir Starmer's arse when it came to what he did or didn't know. All this on the day that it's revealed that Darren Jones is considering running against Andy Burnham.

16:37Yes. For the leadership. He thinks he's the centrist candidate. He does and he possibly is, actually. Yes. He used to be Rachel Reeves' right-hand man. Now he's Keir Starmer's. What a CV that is. Well, there's a lot of respect for him within government. He's seen as a steady hand. And it's not in the country. Do you remember that time when he appeared on Question Time and suggested that all the people in the migrant votes were women and children? Yes. And the Question Time audience, which you and I know, is usually left-leaning, literally openly laughed in his face. Anyway. Well, here is Darren Jones giving the government's response to these releases.

17:10With the exception of the small number of documents that are withheld at the request of the police, which we intend to publish when the police are content for us to do so, the government now considers that it has duly discharged the duties set out in the Humble Address. I will, however, return to the House for the general debate on Wednesday to provide a further opportunity for colleagues to ask questions. And on that basis, Mr Speaker, I commend the statement to the House. And here's the opposition's Alex Burkhart tearing the government's response apart. It was clear that due diligence was not followed.

17:41It is a failure that is visible from space. It is a failure that will define this Prime Minister's premiership. It is a failure that will be written as his political epitaph. Coming up, we're going to be discussing the very juicy text message exchanges between Mandelson and members of Starmer's cabinet.

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19:43us. Well, one group of people who will be very unhappy that any of these documents have come to light are the various Labour MPs and ministers that Mandelson interacts with. He interacts with them for two things. One is when he resigned, because we literally see the WhatsApp chains for everything. Although he initially tried to resist giving up any WhatsApp messages, it should be stressed. Right, right. So these are messages gone to other people. We're seeing other people's messages. So one thing we see, which is humiliating for the poor man, is his resignation letter. Poor man. Goes to everyone.

20:15I've got no sympathy for this guy. You like. The second thing, which is the last thing he'll ever do in public life. The other thing that he gets in contact with him about was from before he got the ambassadorship, when he was lobbying to be elected as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. A post that later went to his rival, William Hague. William Hague. So there is message after message of him contacting ministers and begging them to vote for him in the upcoming election. No shame. There's no shame here at all, is there? One conversation with a minister has already been leaked by the minister themselves.

20:53You'll recall that when the first documents all started to come out, Wes Streeting, who has always suffered from the rumour that he is Peter Mandelson's apt pupil. Yeah, one man's rumour is another man's actual fact. Right, OK. He was his protégé. He's his protégé. So Streeting released all his communications with Mandelson, one of which very helpfully showed Streeting having an argument with him about Israel and saying Israel's gone too far, etc. Which is useful to Streeting just for context because he nearly lost Ilford North at last general election to a Gaza independent. And he would like to be leader of the Labour Party and the Labour Party leans towards Palestine rather than Israel.

21:37What we didn't see, of course, was what Mandelson thought about what West Streeting has said. I love this. Mandelson, in a succession of messages with Pat McFadden, which is by far the most... Never thought I'd say this. The McFadden files are by far the most interesting part of the documents. The work and pension secretary, who is a long-standing Labourite, used to work under both Blair and Brown. Widely considered to be the safest pair of hands in the Cabinet. And at first glimpse, a profoundly boring man. Well, he's very Scottish. Well, that's not saying he's boring because he's Scottish. He's a straight batter.

22:08Yes, exactly. He's a straight batter. He's a night watchman. And he turns out to be a fun gossip. Anyway, Mandelson accuses Wes Streeting of being immature and having a midlife crisis, telling him that he sent Mandy a wild, long, hysterical message about Israel and that he pushed back. I can forward, says Mandy, but it reflects pretty badly on his maturity, in my view. I think Wes is experiencing an early midlife crisis. Well, he won't be the only one after the former health secretary resigned without having got any numbers to replace Dahmer. I mean, that is a midlife crisis, isn't it? A midlife crisis reveals itself in many different ways.

22:49It can be an affair, it can be buying a sports car, or it can be running for Labour leader, which is possibly the most tragic. Well, let's get on to the even more sensational WhatsApp sent to McFadden, who was then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. So effectively sort of de facto deputy PM. And this was reflecting the poor local election results, not the recent ones, but the year before. And this is what Mandelson, who publicly is enjoying life, wants to be US ambassador, is apparently Starmer's bestie, was actually saying to his colleagues. It stems from the top and Keir lacks verve, as does the cabinet as a whole.

23:25People's heads are broadly in the right place, but you need more people who can execute. There needs more dynamism and can-do optimism from the government. More panache. The problem is the government doesn't give a sense of crusading to turn round and change Britain. That's what I mean by panache. Verve. Good that he spelled it out. It does start right from the top, I'm afraid. But you must all contribute more to it by breaking out of the Whitehall system and mould and appearing less like business-as-usual conventional ministers and, dare I say it, behaving in a more Trumpian, risk-taking and daredevil way.

24:03So this is Mandelson both having drunk the Washington Kool-Aid, but also isn't it quite reminiscent, Tim, of the language employed by his former boss, Blair, in last week's essay? Yes. Not that there's necessarily coordination, but they're obviously thinking along the same lines. Mandelson, who adopts this tone throughout of this elder statesman who they need to listen to because he's seen it all before, is of the view that it's about delivery, that you win people over and you win them back from reform by showing government getting on with things and building a dynamic and growing economy. That's a classic Blairite position, and he's very frustrated with Keir's failures.

24:42Here's an interesting discussion from May 2025. Mandy says, I have spoken to Morgan McSweeney a lot this week. Oh, by the way, that's a phrase that appears quite a lot in these documents. Yes, I've spoken to Morgan. And last night I was direct with him. Keir is not leading from the front, and Morgan is not organizing the center as it needs to be. Gordon has it in for Keir and Rachel big time. It's sinister, isn't it? He doesn't seriously believe that Angela, Raina, is an alternative, but she is an instrument of destabilization. I doubt he thinks Ed is fit for purpose, but he is doing to Keir what he has always done to successive Scottish leaders.

25:27So accusing Gordon Brown there of undermining the Prime Minister by encouraging potential leadership rivals. Pat McFadden, I don't know what Keir thinks of all this. He has not spoken to me about any of it. Mandy, does he even realise? The PLP, Parliamentary Labour Party, I gather is in a mutinous state. Pat McFadden says, yes, every meeting I have is who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others? They're asking the wrong questions. That's such an admission from McFadden. I mean, how embarrassing for him. Isn't that astonishing? Every conversation is who can we tax to pay more? And what's funny, I mean, I assume Kemi has read this.

26:16Yeah. And I'd be very surprised if she doesn't bring this up. Because this is the Conservative Party's argument that the so-called economics of Rachel Reeves really amounts to digging through other people's sofas to look for pennies to spend on benefits. Exactly. And here we have confirmation. From the work and pension secretary. From the man himself, that that's the only way that Labour regards the economy, as a means to find more money to pay for more benefits. Mandelson had previously described the Prime Minister's core team as, quote, beleaguered and bereft. He was equally blunt in a lengthy email to our old friend Patrick Vallance, now Science Minister.

26:59He was the one with some of the Covid slides, if you remember. Labour has, let's say, two terms to succeed. So far, Keir's team has not prioritised policy, not surprising given how much else had to be rebuilt after Corbyn. And the number 10 policy team is not large or experienced. On a side note, there's another conversation he has elsewhere with Torsten Bell, who is a pensions minister, I believe. Yes. Which is ironic because he looks about 70 years off getting a pension. Also, they want to tax everything that people earn in retirement. They're discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the government.

27:36And Mandy says that the government is screwing up. and Bell replies, which government? And Mandelson says, our government. And Bell says, well, that is definitely true. Everyone seems to think it is someone else's job to get the policy right, which is very odd. To which Mandelson says, as the saying goes, rubbish in, rubbish out. I just want to remind everybody, this man was serving in the government at the time, okay, in a kind of ex officio capacity because he's in Washington as the US ambassador but that is a direct appointment by Keir Starmer that it's almost cost him his premiership. And this is what Mandelson was saying behind his back, which again raises huge questions about Starmer's judgment.

28:23We could have told you this. We could have told you he had relationships with Epstein. We could have reminded you that he was twice sacked from government. We could have reiterated the fact that he was Machiavellian in his operations. But oh no, you knew best. Just to note there that Pat McFadden's spokesperson has spoken and he has pointed out that he has complied with the conditions of the Humble Address. I think that's significant because Tony Diver, the political editor, reported last week that some cabinet ministers had refused to give up their messages on Mandelson. So clearly McFadden has, even though it could be quite detrimental to his own brief.

29:01And he's pointed out that he's had no contact with Mandelson since September 2025 when he was sacked. As with Tony Blair's infamous encyclical, some of what Mandelson says makes sense, that there is an absence of policy. That's what he was talking to Bill about. Absence of experience. Yeah, there's an over-aliance upon infrastructure, thinking you've just got to build the roads and lay the lines and everything jumps out of it. But he really does stick the stiletto in when it comes to talking about Starmer himself. He mocks his granular competence and wishful thinking. Mandelson wrote to Patrick Vallance saying that he thinks he operates in an intellectual vacuum.

29:41Mandelson wrote to Patrick Vallance, I feel that Keir's government is trying to achieve a similar thing all over again to what was done in New Labour. But I am not aware of any granular attempt to work out how better to do so based on previous experience. Yes, this is basically him saying everybody else is irretrievably stupid. And if it wasn't for me and my ideas. Although, let's just remind ourselves, because we were reminded in an Andy Burnham interview with The Observer at the weekend, that Peter Mandelson was the person who once, in Hartlepool, mistook mushy peas for guacamole. And I think we should be mindful of that as we continue through these documents, Tim.

30:22As for life as an ambassador, we can infer that Keir Starmer was desperate for a political win with the president, that he wanted a photo op that showed that he was leading. and Mandelson was keen to be the person who facilitated that. One way in which they hoped to get into Donald Trump's good books was to present him with a British-style red ministerial box which would have on the front of it a gold crest, Trump's name and the inscription President of the United States. Now this is the kind of thing that if China were giving that, you know they could knock it up in a couple of hours, probably laser print it.

31:00Yes. But the manufacturer required an eight to ten week time in which to create it. The Treasury apparently sat on it, not the box, but the commission, for weeks without actioning it, leaving the embassy panicking that it'll have it in time before the visit. There's then a chaotic sequence of emails back and forth between various agencies trying to get this thing built to ensure the design was acceptable, etc., etc. And Mandelson expressed his horror and frustration with the, quote, incompetence of nobody having, quote, the wit to say anything earlier. He compared the mess to the satire, the thick of it.

31:50Brilliant. Admitting that he himself had, quote, gone tonto on this. Yeah, well, he's fully embracing his inner Malcolm Tucker, that's for sure. Haven't any of these people seen Blue Peter? If you think about it, if Boris Johnson was Prime Minister while this was going on, he'd have knocked up this red box himself, because at the time he was painting buses and stuff, he had all of the crafts, he had all of the arts and crafts for this. I know, couldn't Valerie Singleton help out? Honestly, own Anthea Turner, for goodness sake, and get it done. There's another couple of ditties in there, the fact, and it speaks again to bring the conversation full circle to the tentacles of Mandelson, that he reached out to Louise Haig when she was sacked as transport secretary over the erroneous fraud claim on her mobile phone when she was working in business and said, you know, this is all very unfair.

32:38At every turn, he is greasing the wheels of future relationships, of future people he thinks are going to be in positions of power. And actually, in the case of Haig this weekend mooted as a future chancellor under a Burnham government or all the rest of it. It's just really interesting how he combines this kind of, I don't know, maybe people were attracted to him and shared information. Even somebody as wise as Pat McFadden, a wise old owl like Pat McFadden gets sucked into the mandosphere because he knows where all the bodies are buried. He knows everyone. He's got the gossip. Of course, he's associated with the most successful Labour prime minister in history.

33:19Therefore, he does have value. Mandy is ingratiating. He is charming. He is funny. He's also very good at giving his interlocutors the sense that they understand. He and they alone, against the world, understand what needs to be done. And that's a very attractive thing for a politician. He knows exactly what makes them tick. And it's funny to see him saying one thing to West Streeting and playing up his ego and then deploying that as bitchy gossip to Pat McFadden. I know. It's priceless, isn't it? But OK, so what does all of this mean? Well, no doubt there'll be more threads to pick up on tomorrow.

33:57Yes. And do check out our website because the live blog is being updated by the minute with every cough and spit. I mean, we've tried to summarise what we know in 45 minutes to get this podcast out. To some extent, everyone's sick of Peter Mandelson. Yes. But what's helpful for the opposition is this moves this away from the narrow question of whether or not Mandelson had proper vetting and what the prime minister knew and onto the bigger question about the style of government and the way that they operate. both the obvious internal frustration over policy and why were people having these sorts of conversations with Peter Mandelson and is there anything new that we could find out?

34:35I mean, of course, as reporters, we want to pick up on the various threads that this leaves behind because, as I said, there are so many moments when Pat McFadden says, this is one to talk about on the phone. We can't hear those conversations, but I wish we could. But what we have here is a glimpse into a government that looks amateur. Yes. This is going to be debated now on Wednesday, I've just read, so on that live blog, which is why it's good to follow the Telegraph live blog, because you just get all of the live news straight in your pocket. So there's going to be PMQs on Wednesday, which we hope will be box office.

35:07You'll be in Parliament for that. I'll be here with the popcorn, and we're going to have a debate. So, once again, Peter Mandelson continues to be the gift that keeps on giving to him. Even though he still refuses to share his own messages. We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

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