Did Peter Mandelson betray Britain to impress Jeffrey Epstein?

0:01Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast. Less than 48 hours after Peter Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party, we are now hearing the breaking news that the Cabinet Office has referred new evidence about Mandelson directly to the police.

0:20Lewis Goodall:We've now learned that Peter Mandelson is to step down from his position in the House of Lords. But that won't change the facts. The constant flow of information between Mandelson and Epstein concerning government secrets 15 years ago. Could this yet prove to be the biggest corruption scandal in Britain for over 50 years? Welcome to the News Agents.

0:50Lewis Goodall:The News Agents. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And the latest news, as we were saying there, is that Keir Starmer has handed police a dossier about Lord Mandelson allegedly leaking highly sensitive information on the economy to Jeffrey Epstein. This follows the news yesterday that the police, the Metropolitan Police, were looking into this. The Cabinet Office has apparently found unredacted versions of emails from the then Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson was Business Secretary in the late 2000s under Gordon Brown, to Geoffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier, and passed them to the police this morning.

1:25Lewis Goodall:Keir Starmer apparently telling his cabinet that the leaks were, quote, gobsmacking, and has asked officials, as Emily was saying, to draw up legislation to remove Mandelson's peerage as soon as possible. This following on from the emails as we were reporting yesterday, an almost stream of consciousness from Mandelson to Epstein when he was the de facto deputy prime minister, among other things, sending Epstein a confidential UK government document outlining 20 billion of asset sales. Mandelson claiming he was trying hard, partly at Epstein's instigation, to change government policy on bankers' bonuses, and telling him about an imminent bailout package for the euro the day before it was announced in 2010.

2:12Lewis Goodall:And it is obvious that this could have been extremely commercially useful information to Epstein for his corporate clients. What is extraordinary is what we are now understanding about the speed at which Mandelson received highly confidential information and literally pressed the forward button on the email, which went straight into Jeffrey Epstein's inbox. And just to put this in context, we are talking about the man who was the business secretary and de facto deputy prime minister right in the middle of the global financial crash. It's stunning. The economy was on its knees at that time. We were all trying to work out what the hell was going on.

2:57Bankers were the pariah of the entire country. Do you remember this was the time we were trying to strip Fred Goodwin of his peerage because of his part he played in the collapse and the scandal. He was the chief executive of RBS. He was the chief executive of RBS, which then became nationalised. Alistair Darling at the time sort of joked, I mean, black comedy, that he was not just the chancellor, but he was a bank manager. He was literally running the country's banks. And in the middle of this crisis, it was a genuine economic crisis where we did not know for how long the world's financial systems were going to sort of rumble on.

3:32Peter Mandelson, we now understand, was passing this highly sensitive, economically sensitive, financially sensitive information to a billionaire who had given him money. and there are two things that occur to me, Lewis. One is we always called Mandelson the master of the dark arts, you know, this prince of darkness, the arch manipulator. He wasn't very smart, actually, was he? He really was not that smart about this stuff when you could trace it all onto an email. And the other thing is how cheap was he? I mean, he's already denied or he said he can't recall receiving the money. But actually, when you think of what he is potentially gifting Epstein, you know, billions of dollars worth of assets and land deals.

4:23And he seems to have got about seventy thousand dollars or pounds in exchange. His husband got another ten, maybe a little bit more than that. It doesn't seem like he had a very good deal unless he was after something even more craven than the money itself, which was the proximity to power. So I do think we have to sort of just breathe for a moment. I mean, you called it the worst corruption scandal for half a century.

4:52Lewis Goodall:Well, I think it has the potential to shake down that way. Obviously, we've got to be careful because obviously nothing has been proven yet. And Mandelson, as we'll discuss, denies that any propriety has taken place. But look, as you say, Emily, I think put it very well at that time. And younger listeners won't necessarily remember this. But, you know, Mandelson was pretty much the second most important person in that government, in the Gordon Brown government at a time, as you say, of historic significance, global economic tumult. and you would think that the de facto deputy PM, the business secretary, might have better things to be doing with his time than leaking a stream of government secrets to a foreign financier who even by that time, certainly by 2009-10, had already received his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor.

5:43Lewis Goodall:I think we can see with this story that this has moved on quite profoundly and I think there is a genuine sense of shock even at the heart of politics and the heart of Westminster and number 10 about this story. Look, before, the reason Mandelson resigned was because it became clear that his connection with, his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was even closer than had previously been known. It had been known that they had been friends, that they had had a relationship, but with the documents coming out, the first tranche of documents from the DOJ, we could see that number 10 felt that even they had been misled about the nature of that relationship.

6:21Lewis Goodall:You can argue whether that's true or not. What we're seeing here is of a different order of magnitude. It's not just about that relationship being close. It's not just about it being humiliating or embarrassing or about his judgment and about the kind of taste, frankly, of continuing a friendship with someone like that. And it is a really close friendship. We see from these emails, you know, he's calling him PT and Mandelson is calling him my favourite person and all of this kind of stuff. This takes it to the level of potential serious, sustained government corruption. Because, as I say, what you cannot do, or I think what has shocked people, is the extent to which serious government secrets, serious government plans and government policies were being fed to Epstein, which, as I say, could clearly be commercially valuable to him.

7:12Lewis Goodall:And atop of that, Mandelson having previously apparently received money and even at that time contemporaneously receiving money for his partner for this osteopathy course. And as we know from the emails later, and Mandelson is very clear about this in his interview, which we'll come on to with The Times that he's done, perhaps extraordinarily, where he says, you know, one of the things that Epstein did was help guide him from the world of politics to the world of finance and business after Labour left office. And indeed, there is an email which shows Epstein advising Mandelson about potential board appointments, an appointment at Deutsche Bank where the remuneration was in the millions.

7:51Lewis Goodall:So clearly this was a mutual beneficial relationship where at the very least the perception of potential impropriety is profound. I agree. There are no charges. There are no convictions. so obviously we're going carefully here but the allegations seem to point to something that if it was an ordinary business we'd call insider trading but it's a government you're at the heart of government you have government secrets on your desk every single day you are trusted with them and so it actually starts to look more like something akin to treason I mean that sounds a ridiculous word to use in this day and age but the sense you get is of an almost pantomime villain at this point.

8:36Somebody who is working against the best interests of their country and who would have got away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky kids, right? I mean, not to go too Scooby-Doo, but that is sort of the place that we're ending up at this point.

8:52Lewis Goodall:Well, I mean, just to expand on that, again, because I think younger listeners and viewers will remember, this was a time when, as you say, Emily, the government, the brown government, was trying to exact some form of political retribution on the banks for whom there was enormous righteous public anger at how they behaved in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. One of the ways in which the government tried to claw some of the money back that us, we the taxpayers, had put in and for which we are still to this day paying for those massive government bailouts, about£75 billion, was a banker's bonus tax, a banker's bonus levy, because despite all of that, they were still, for many people, incredibly getting paid bankers bonuses.

9:30Lewis Goodall:And we now know from these emails that Mandelson was advising Epstein, who in turn appears to have been advising the US banking giant, JP Morgan, to put pressure on his own chancellor, Alistair Darling, to, in Mandelson's words, threaten him. And even overnight, people have gone back, Alistair Darling is no longer with us, he died in 2023. But in his memoir, he wrote about how Jamie Dimon, The chief executive of the US banking giant, JP Morgan, rang him, which is clearly partly at least what Mandelson is suggesting, and raised with him, this is a quote from Darling's book, he said Mr. Diamond was very, very angry.

10:09Lewis Goodall:He said that his bank bought a lot of UK debt and he wondered if that was now such a good idea. So he did threaten him. Yeah, I pointed out that they bought our debt because it was a good business deal for them. He went on to say that they were thinking of building a new office in London, but they had to reconsider that now. Now, in the end, J.P. Morgan continued to buy government debt and they still built their new office. But literally we have from Alistair Darling, the horse's mouth, J.P. Morgan went through on Mandelson's advice, albeit apparently vicariously expressed, you know, through Epstein, presumably, possibly.

10:44Epstein was changing the wording in the advice that Mandelson was going to give to Obama. So in other words, he was trying to change what the British government said to the US government about bankers bonuses at a time of heightened sensitivity.

11:01Lewis Goodall:But just to build on your point about treachery, Emily, I mean, let's imagine it didn't happen. But let's imagine for a moment that JP Morgan had stopped buying UK government debt. I mean, this was a time when the UK government was even the deficit was even bigger than it is now. partly because we had had to fund the bailouts for the banks. And here we have a situation where we've got the de facto deputy prime minister advising, albeit through an intermediary, apparently reportedly, this particular bank to threaten the UK government, to stop buying his own government's debt, which could have caused a financial crisis.

11:34Lewis Goodall:Honestly, like sometimes, you know, we as journalists sort of try to assure people not to be too conspiratorial. How can you? This would make this would make right even a sort of Marxist conspiratorialist blush. You've basically got a financier, sort of New York based financier who also happens to be a paedophile, ringing up the British deputy prime minister, who in turn is advising him to phone his banker mates to advise him that unless the British government doesn't take away the banker's bonus tax, we're going to stop buying debt. It would make never mind a Marxist conspiratorialist. It would make QAnon blush.

12:05Yeah. I mean, it's got all the kind of ingredients of QAnon, but it is actually centred right in the middle of 10 Downing Street, which I don't think we had in the script. Peter Mandelson gave an interview about 10 days ago, we think, to Katie Balls of The Times, and they had clearly sort of paused before running it. And on Sunday night, when he resigned from the Labour Party, one assumes she must have called him up and sort of updated her copy. and some of the stuff that he's told her that's come out of this interview again just shows this extraordinary dislocation between where he thinks we are at and where potentially we are at.

12:51He tried to explain for example the money that was given to his husband Renato De Silva as a bursary not realising perhaps that most bursaries don't just go sort of directly through email into somebody's bank account.

13:06Lewis Goodall:They're not usually wired directly. I mean, there's usually some criteria and process in my experience. Yeah, I'm not sure we saw that. And I'm not sure that the idea that you then go back and go, oh, this bursary, just call it a loan. The Jeffrey Epstein Osteopathy Bursary Scholarship. Yeah, exactly. We've Googled that one. Yeah, yeah. I just can't find the application process funnily enough. Next year, eh? Yeah. And this interview, I mean, look, we actually said, didn't we yesterday um i think i said that we wouldn't be hearing from mandelson for a while well i suppose it was a good 12 hours and already the reset as he calls it the rehabilitation tour has begun in earnest as you say emily most of the interview done on january the 25th but with an update on sunday and what's very clear from this interview is there is and continues to be as we have seen a profound disconnect between how mandelson sees this story and how the rest of the world and certainly westminster is seeing this story you might say a disconnect between reality and how peter mandelson is seeing this story he says that there would be no point in his just crawling under a rock and going away because it wouldn't be proportionate to try and get i think you know we're sat here like yesterday and today trying to understand the psychology of the man one of our number perhaps has a greater understanding of that psychology than either you or i our own john sople who is still in the asia pacific bureau manning that gainfully yeah and he sent us his thoughts on where peter mandelson's mind might now be at so i've spoken to some of the people that have been closest to peter mandelson for years decades even i've got to say the reaction

14:44Jon Sopel:is sadness, shock, fury, disgust at the position that Peter Mandelson has got himself into and got others into. You know, one person said to me, I feel really sorry for Morgan McSweeney. I barely know the man. But look at where he is now. He put his trust in Peter Mandelson, was assured there was nothing more to come out in terms of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, pushes for him to become the ambassador. And this person said to me, how did Peter Mandelson ever think he could become Britain's ambassador to Washington when there was that sort of baggage that was about to explode, which has done so now, which has damaged the reputation of the Starmer government, let aside what it's done to Peter Mandelson himself.

15:36Jon Sopel:He also says that the issue of the email that was sent to Gordon Brown that Mandelson is alleged to afforded to Epstein, that, frankly, Mandelson wasn't doing that to make money. It was more pathetic than that, in a way, that it was all about approbation, that Peter Mandelson was seeking the approval of, look how well connected I am, look what I've just given you. I know everybody who matters, and here's an email that shows what the government is thinking of doing. And of course, it is that which could now get Peter Mandelson into serious legal jeopardy. But he's not listening to anybody. And apparently all the people that used to be a sounding board for advice are either being ignored or cast aside.

16:25Jon Sopel:And Peter Mandelson is doing all of this by himself without really realising just how parlous his position has become. not in terms of reputation alone, but now in terms of legal exposure. There is something to be said about this whole rehabilitation attempt, which is a kind of mission creep that I noticed at the beginning of the year where he was popping up on broadcast interviews and he might do a few minutes on the Epstein relationship and sort of, yeah, I'm going to confront that. And then the conversation would just swiftly turn And it would be, well, what do you think about Trump's plans in Greenland?

17:09What do you think about foreign policy? What do you think about the man himself? What about Trump? And I think it is a big mistake to try and elide things when you've got somebody at the centre that seems still actually not to have answered the questions. And I remember being asked years ago by a sort of junior journalist who just secured an interview that she really wanted to do well. And it was with a French political figure in the arts world. And she said, but the trouble is, Emily, there are these kind of rape allegations. Should I should I do the rape allegations first? And then it's meant to be about the art stuff.

17:43Or should I do the art stuff first and then talk about the rape allegations? Or how would you do it? And I went away and I literally just had to sort of sit in a dark room and think. And I came back and I said, you can't. You can't pivot from talking about rape allegations to talking about like their philosophy or their art or the book they've just written. You can't do it before. You can't do it after. It doesn't work. and I think obviously we're not talking about rape allegations so I should make that very clear but in the Peter Maddelson case either you're doing an accountability interview because you're trying to get to the bottom of what was happening or else frankly you're just ignoring it and asking him about Greenland but the two do not sit well together it doesn't work and I think that is on us as the media to take the issue of the Epstein files seriously enough not to slip into that slightly lazy oh well let's have your commentary on the Labour Party now

18:36Lewis Goodall:And I think Mandelson, as we're saying from that interview, clearly it feels very magazine-y, which is a sort of slightly old thing, because there's sort of pictures of him in his kitchen and everything like that and so on. And clearly it's a very interesting, perhaps revealing sense of where he is at the moment. I'm not sure it's done him many favours once again, which is perhaps a bit of a pattern of his recent interventions. But there's so many threads to this that are unravelling almost minute by minute. I noticed some reporting just in the last few minutes from Steve Swimford, the political editor of the Times, saying that he's been told that Lord Mandelson, when he was a government minister, used his private BT internet email address to correspond directly with the most senior people in government, including Gordon Brown.

19:17Lewis Goodall:Everyone had initially thought he forwarded government emails to his BT account and then passed them on to Epstein. In fact, two senior government sources have told him he was corresponding with ministers and officials using his BT Internet account. The messages went directly to his BlackBerry and he sent them straight on to Epstein. The email address is now defunct. The cabinet office has no way of retrieving the messages on it. And that sounds like an absolutely extraordinary security. Well, you know what it sounds like? It sounds like something that was serious enough for the head of the FBI, James Comey, to sort of stop, as it were, an election in its tracks in 2016 to talk about Hillary Clinton's email usage.

19:56Lewis Goodall:And the point about that now is it will inherit this investigation the Cabinet Office had launched that inherently limits the extent of the investigations they can do. For example, a cabinet office has told, today told police, the emails in Epstein cash show evidence that market sensitive information was being passed to Epstein. But without the Epstein files, and this is the crucial point, the cabinet office itself, the UK government would have no record of it as a result of the way that Mandelson conducted his email communications. So we are, and again, yet another layer of weirdness to this story.

20:29Lewis Goodall:We are finding out about what could be our own government, our own prime minister, you know, finding out about what could be one of the most remarkable corruption scandals, as we say, in the last 50 years. But we are only finding out about it. Indeed, we could only ever have found out about it as a result of the DOJ investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Department of Justice. In a moment, we will be going further afield and looking at some of the other people that are mentioned in the Epstein files and also answering some of your questions as to why there hasn't, there isn't more focus on Donald Trump at this point.

21:20Jon Sopel:It's about doing patriotic things. Welcoming the leader of the opposition, leader of the Conservative Party, Kerry Batenau, back to the studio. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davey. The news that matters from the UK and around the world, and why it matters to you. Listen on our free Global Player app or the LBC app. LBC, leading Britain's conversation.

21:44Jon Sopel:The News Agents. So this might be a week where we keep bringing you sort of bombshell updates. And one came last night, courtesy of the Clintons, both Hillary and Bill, who have now agreed to testify before Congress. and why this is important is because there was quite a lot of pressure put on particularly Bill Clinton who appears many times, thousands of times in these newly released Epstein files and is documented in many of the pictures at Epstein's side and who invited Epstein we understand at least 17 times when he was president to the White House and as far as we understand was a regular passenger on the private jet that Epstein owed, although didn't.

22:32There is no evidence he was actually on the island itself. But there has been a lot of pressure from all parts of Congress in the US, actually, on getting Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to testify to Congress. And for a long time, the Clintons resisted because they said this is weaponisation. This is Trump trying to change the story. This is just a sort of lawfare where he's trying to put Democrats in the frame rather than, you know, answer the questions that come directly to his door. And actually, I think there has been a growing chorus of Democrats who've said, you know what? It's really important that we have the moral high ground here, that we don't say because they're our own, because they're Democrats, we don't want to hear from them.

23:21We do. And one of them was Jamie Raskin, friend of the news agents who's been on the podcast before, saying, yeah, you know what? I really want to. I will subpoena them if they don't agree to testify. And I think there was a growing chorus from Democrats saying this is the right thing to do. If we're going to ask Trump to testify, if we're going to ask Republicans to testify, then yes, we want the Clintons to be on that stand, too.

23:43Lewis Goodall:Yeah. Although, I mean, it's worth saying you can well understand why they might want to talk to Bill Clinton. The Hillary Clinton connection or bringing her in feels a little bit more puzzling. I think she doesn't have to do it in person. No, but it's clear. You're right. This is where the sort of politicisation of it clearly does come in to some extent, which is that some politics always there in Washington, of course. But, you know, apparently Hillary Clinton says that she's never met, even spoken at any point to Epstein, which perhaps also begs some interesting questions. But nonetheless, one of the questions that we've got from a few listeners, viewers is where Trump kind of sits in all of this and some puzzlement as to why it is, given that Trump does appear so many times in the Epstein files, Although we should just sort of caveat and preface everything by saying, of course, just appearing in the files certainly does not imply or prove certainly doesn't prove any guilt or impropriety.

24:30Lewis Goodall:But it is true to say New York Times has identified more than 5 ,300 files containing more than 38 ,000 references to President Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and other related words and phases. That's just in the latest batch that we've seen, the few millions that we've seen released by the Justice Department. Obviously, there has been a great deal of attention on Trump, not least because he initially appeared so reluctant to see these files published. And because it is certainly true that he had a close relationship with Epstein, certainly before the early 2000s. I think it is really interesting to consider why it is that he's not a more prominent figure.

25:10Lewis Goodall:Some of it is, I think, more prominent in the coverage. rather than the files. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, it's a fair question. I think there's loads of things going on with that. Some of that I think is kind of like boringly logistical. One of the reasons clearly someone like Mandelson is coming under such intense pressure is because there is this lengthy, extensive email chain between him and Epstein. Even though Mandelson actually appears in far fewer overall files and references. It's just easier to read. It's a paper trail. A paper trail between an extraordinary kind of connection in terms of, as we've said, like a stream of consciousness almost between the two men on occasion and Trump there isn't there's no emails he doesn't seem to email there isn't a single file which includes a direct communication between Trump and Epstein and indeed few of the files even take back to the early 2000s which is when they had their closest relationship most of the files contain are about a period where it appears that the relationship between Trump and Epstein no longer existed or certainly no longer existed in the way that it did.

26:09Lewis Goodall:It is true to say that Trump is one of about half a dozen prominent men about whom the FBI files in the documents include, quote, salacious information. That's according to an email one FBI official wrote to a colleague last year. Some of that information, some of the more stuff that's particularly sort of lurid online, contains tips submitted through the FBI's National Threat Operations Centre in West Virginia. Some of those tips do include accusations about Trump, very serious accusations about Trump. But it's also true to say that that information has not been verified. And basically, not least because of the fact that Trump is highly litigious, as we know, it's true to say, I think it's fair to say that a lot of media organisations will be more reluctant to air those accusations and air those things, partly because the information itself is pretty unverifiable, but also because of Trump's own behaviour.