Mandelson arrested: Will Starmer pay the price?

0:00Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? PayCore's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure. Their unified platform includes payroll, talent management, compliance software, and a lot more, connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need to drive long-term business results. Visit paycore.com slash leaders and go from workflow to workflow. That's paycore.com slash leaders. This is a Global Player original podcast. John, I'm just going to interrupt you because we can now confirm that the Metropolitan Police are saying that Peter Mandelson has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

0:51There is a statement from the Metropolitan Police, an update on the investigation into misconduct in public office offences relating to a government minister. And like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor last week, he was detained in custody for questioning. Only five months ago, Peter Mandelson was standing in the Oval Office of the White House, Britain's ambassador to Washington. The former UK ambassador has now been released without charge, but we are all waiting for the Mandelson files. Will it start and end with him or will it bring down others in his wake? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:42The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. And the arrest was not a surprise, given what had happened to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor last week. And the release of these documents allegedly sent by Peter Mandelson to Geoffrey Epstein, which was the focus of the investigation by Scotland Yard. Which particular documents, we do not know. But late yesterday afternoon from his home in Camden, although I'm sure Peter Mandelson would say it's Regent's Park and not just Camden. He was duly arrested by police in plain clothes, but wearing body cam, quite interestingly, and taken off to a police station where he faced questioning.

2:26And it wasn't until the wee small hours of the morning that Peter Mandelson was released from custody and pending further investigations. He's previously said he doesn't believe he's guilty of criminal wrongdoing. He said he doesn't believe he's broken the law. But once again, this arrest was on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It's exactly the same offence under which Prince Andrew, former Prince Andrew, was arrested last week. And it carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, but it is notoriously difficult to prove. In Peter Mandelson's case, this goes back to emails allegedly shared from government when he was the business secretary, when he was working at Gordon Brown's side and sent to Jeffrey Epstein.

3:19Some, we understand, within a matter of minutes. And the ones particularly under the spotlight are, for example, an email discussing a euro bailout which reached Epstein before it was made public. We understand. Others regarding the sale of UK government assets, again, reaching Jeffrey Epstein before the British public. These are copies of emails which presumably the Met Police are looking to firm up by going to the Department of Justice, looking for the originals and seeing whether it becomes part of a case that they will bring against Peter Mandelson. I have to say, Soaps, I received a message this morning from a friend in the industry who told me that they had received a text overnight from Peter Maddelson.

4:10They then sent the entirety of his message to me. I'm going to read it out to you. You can hear what I understand to be Peter Maddelson's own words at his arrest. this colleague got the message about four o 'clock this morning. Despite previous agreement between police and the legal team over voluntary interview in early March, police arrested me because they claimed the Lord's Speaker received information that I was about to flee to the British Virgin Islands and take up permanent residence abroad, leaving Reynaldo, his husband, my family, home and Jock, his dog, behind me. I need hardly say complete fiction.

4:56The police were told only today that they had to improvise an arrest. The question is, who or what is behind this? That was the message that they received that they forwarded on to me to tell our audience today. The tenor of that sounds as if he's saying that the police somehow broke a deal that they had, that they only arrested him because they had a tip off that he was going to flee. Now, genuinely, none of that makes a lot of sense when you dig down, because why would you flee to the British Virgin Islands, which is presumably part of an extradition treaty with the UK government anyway? But it is interesting, isn't it?

5:41that last line, Peter Mandelson's own words, we understand. The question is, who or what is behind this? Is he fighting the very idea that he should even have been arrested or just the timing of it? I think what you have just read out there, Emily, is utterly jaw-dropping on so many different levels that at four o 'clock in the morning, I don't know who your colleague is, but presumably another journalist, why would you start briefing against the metropolitan police when you have just emerged from being arrested doesn't that just muddy the waters i suppose my other reflection and there's no implication of guilt no charges have been brought against peter mandelson it needs to be underlined and everyone is innocent until proven guilty the criticism always of peter mandelson when he was in government that he was an effective minister he was an effective ambassador But he couldn't stop talking about what an effective ambassador he was and what an effective minister he was.

6:45And here we have him sort of seemingly spinning now over an arrest. And you'd think there is a time for silence and letting the wheels of justice turn. Because whatever the grounds for the arrest, the Metropolitan Police have it within their rights to do what they will. whether voluntarily or whether deciding to arrest and who knows what the calculation was of the Metropolitan Police. I find it very odd that Mandelson would think it was a smart thing to do to start a briefing war against the Met at four o 'clock in the morning. For me, it's just the contrast with the pictures you saw of a man leaving the house, plain clothes police officers, but clearly with the body cam, which I think we were all meant to notice.

7:40There was meant to be no mistaking what was going on. But this idea that he had clearly, you know, gone willingly without a fight. There were no handcuffs. There was no sort of, you know, bag over the head. Nobody was, you know, no perp walk. Nobody was pushing his head down. But inside, inside, absolutely raging. And I think what that tells you, for me, I'm hearing in those words, mental kicking and screaming. cannot believe that whatever they had agreed before, or he thought they had agreed before, had somehow been broken, as if they had broken the bond of trust with him by calling him in early to interview.

8:18Now, look, we don't know. We are not privy to the Met Police investigation. We don't know the order in which they work or what they turned up or whether they've just had sign-off from the DOJ over the documents that they were using to go and arrest. we don't know whether maybe somebody did think that he was about to flee the country although as I say why on earth would he go to the British Virgin Islands to evade UK justice it makes no sense but I do think you hear somebody who is quietly screaming it's not fair it's not fair it is not my fault it's not fair this was not meant to happen well we've got to wait for the legal process to turn because they are not going to bring charges against Peter Mandelson unless the Crown Prosecution Service feels there's a pretty good chance of prosecution.

9:08And it is a notoriously difficult charge to prosecute because it's common law, it's not statute, there's no Act of Parliament under which Peter Mandelson has conducted misconduct in public office, allegedly or not. That's not the way this law works. It's based on previous case law. And so it's very hard to prove that there was willful neglect or willful misconduct in that. And the other thing, you're absolutely right, we're right to point out that it's the same potential charge that could be levelled against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as well. The other thing, of course, we're waiting for, we've talked endlessly about the Epstein files, what we're waiting for are the Mandelson files that the government are compiling of the advice given to Keir Starmer before his appointment as our ambassador to Washington.

9:57And what warnings that he was given or not about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. So that is still to come. I suppose the government will say, look, we want transparency, but there's nothing we can do while there's a police investigation going on. We can't release anything that could compromise a police investigation, which takes you back to the kind of era of Boris Johnson and the parties that were being had at number 10 when there was potential information that could have come out. But the MEP said, you can't release any of this because we've got an investigation going on. I suppose the other thing that strikes me is that we are two days out from a pretty seminal by-election.

10:41Gordon and Denton, Greater Manchester, the one that Andy Burnham wanted to fight but now isn't, the one that Labour has every chance, let's be honest, of losing. They may not. They may hold on, but it is tighter than it probably needs to be. And in another world, in a kind of alternative sliding doors world, Peter Mandelson could have been part of the campaign, helping Labour sort out who their candidate was, how they were going to win, who was going to go up. I mean, that was what Peter Mandelson was always brought in to do. He was brought in to kind of, you know, do the calculations, do the back office, try and work out what the messaging was.

11:19That was his spin. You know, his dark arts was all about how do we win in places that don't look very possible. We know that in 2024, he was working alongside Morgan McSweeney to actually ascertain which would be the best candidates for getting Labour, Keir Starmer, an overall majority, which, of course, they did. And now this idea of Mandelson leaving his house, accompanied by police officers, getting into an unmarked car, just as voters are about to go to the polls and decide whether they trust the party of government, is about the worst visual that Keir Starmer could possibly want on the eve of that by-election election.

12:03You know, we talked last week, obviously, about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the fall from grace of having been alongside the king, the favoured son of the late queen, all the rest of it. And the loss of prestige and titles and all the other things that went with being the Duke of York as he was. It was a slow motion car crash for Andrew from your interview in 2019 with him to the arrest last week. Mandelson just five months ago, five months ago, Donald Trump is lording him in the Oval Office. Mandelson is grinning broadly. He's so pleased with life. He's got the mansion on Massachusetts Avenue with the British ambassador's residence.

12:53I mean, life could not have been sweeter. And what we have learned in those emails that he allegedly sent and forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein and the money that was allegedly received back when he in 2003, 2004 and for his partner, too, I think has just cast Peter Mandelson in a completely different light. And, you know, he titled his autobiography The Third Man. In other words, Blair and Brown may have been the public face of New Labour. But Mandelson believed that he was the Blairite before Blair. He believed in Blairism before Blair even knew about it. And he was the guy after the, you know, in the wake of a 1992 general election defeat when Labour lost again, Kinnock lost to John Major, that he was the one who would refashion this party into new Labour and that he would be the one who would take the Labour Party back into government.

13:51And sure enough, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson were the architects of that. And you wonder now, what is the reputation of new Labour today, given Peter Mandelson's role in all of this? I think it's a really live question. And you talk about Blairism and Blairites. where's Blair? We have not heard from Tony Blair. We don't know what this is going to do to the whole shape of Keir Starmer's government from now on, quite frankly, because yes, I think you can say that the Blair project was the most successful in electoral history, you know, three victories in a row, more than any other Labour prime minister has ever had.

14:34And yet in today's money, it feels tarnished. Suddenly it feels like it represents big money, dark arts, spinning, cover-up. I mean, the fact that this is going on simultaneously with an investigation right now over the Labour Together think tank who stands accused of a smear against journalists. Now, we are still waiting for the Cabinet Office report on that. We don't know what that will find. But that, again, has left a nasty taste in the mouth for many people who are looking at it and saying, what was Labour Together? What were you doing? Labour Together was headed up by Morgan McSweeney. It was the vehicle that was meant to get Labour back into power.

15:19It was the vehicle that actually chose many of the candidates that were standing in 2024 that got Keir to this place of electoral success. But now people are saying, well, I don't understand what was going on there. I don't like what I'm hearing. I'll wait for the report, but I certainly don't agree with the idea of smearing journalists who are actually doing work onto expenditure or cash spent or campaign finances. I think it is possible that we may now see a shift in the power balance within the Labour Party, within the parliamentary party. And I think if you take the Keir Starmer Morgan McSweeney project as being a sort of a clearing out of the parts of Labour that they felt didn't represent electoral Labour, electable Labour, then what you are now seeing is possibly the chickens coming home to roost.

16:18In other words, there were parts of the Labour Party that felt very much left out, on the cold, dismissed by the McSweeney project. You know, they weren't centrist enough or they weren't reformist enough or they weren't sort of part of the sort of new shape of Labour under Keir Starmer. And they're now kind of turning around and saying, oh, right. So that's not working out so well, is it? That's not looking great in the light of the fall from grace of Peter Mandelson or McSweeney or people around Mandelson, around Starmer now. Perhaps this is the moment that we say, you know what, you should have listened to us.

17:01Maybe we should have had a place at the table. Maybe we should have had a stronger voice in Cabinet. Maybe you shouldn't have been quite so quick to cut us off. Let's unpick various parts of that. I mean, Morgan McSweeney was the head of Labour Together. But when the investigation was launched into a journalist, it was Josh Simons, who's now a cabinet office minister, who was the person before he was an MP who commissioned that research, whatever you want to call it. And we're still waiting to hear his side of the story. And we need to wait for the cabinet office to understand what on earth was going on.

17:34But your characterisation of the people who are on the outside from Starmer, I think, is not quite right in the sense that Starmer has never been New Labour. He's not new anything. Starmer is Starmer. He's a pragmatist who kind of likes to read his brief. And yes, it's true that there were people jockeying for position around Starmer. And that's part of his problem, I think, as a leader in that, you know, yeah, Morgan McSweeney lent more towards New Labour. but there are other ministers who aren't. There weren't many. The new Labour figures, Peter Kyle, West Streeting. Yeah, except what I'd say is when Starmer's asked, you know, what he has done, the first thing he always says, what he's achieved is I've reshaped the Labour Party.

18:17He says that. He means I took it away from Corbyn. Post-Corbynism. Exactly. So I agree with you. He's not a new Labour figure, but he's definitely hailed as a victory. The idea that he kind of shed Corbynism, the hard left, whatever you want to call it, from the shape of his party now. I think he does own that. I think he has to own that. Yeah, but I think that, you know, if you look at the people who were central figures in New Labour, they looked at Rachel Reeve's first budget and the 2p increase on employers' national insurance, and they thought, what on earth are you doing? You know, how are you going to encourage growth?

18:51How are you going to encourage business if you're saddling them with more costs? And I think an awful lot of the policies that Keir Starmer has tried to pursue are the absolute antithesis of what a new Labour government would have done. Well, I think that's why he looks so lonely, because actually he tried to bring in new Labour characters like Tim Allen, like Mandelson as ambassador, and that hasn't worked. Jonathan Powell, who is there still. Jonathan Powell, I think, has been honestly the one sort of success. The direction of foreign policy, I think, has really worked on the whole for Keir Starmer.

19:21I think that has been a success. But broadly, he's thrown out the Corbynites and he's kind of lost new labour for all the problems we're discussing now. And that shape in the middle is actually quite small, I think. I think it's quite a lonely place now because, as you say, we don't know what the ideology really is. It's not McSweeney, it's not Blair, it's clearly not Mandelson, it's not Corbyn, it's not... I don't know. Yeah, there is a lack of ideology. But the fundamental problem, I think, and maybe it's related to the lack of ideology, is that Keir Starmer is really bad at politics. There is no attempt to win over backbenchers.

20:00You look at the climb downs that there have been, or U-turns, whatever you want to call it, that have taken place under Starmer. Where was there the attempt to bring the unions on board, to bring the Labour backbenchers on board? And the fact of the matter is that Keir Starmer today has put out a letter to MPs saying, I'm going to govern differently now. I need to listen to your views in the framing of policy. No shit, Sherlock. Of course you do. Of course you need to carry these people because you cannot just expect them to be voting fodder in the House of Commons anymore. You need to get them on board.

20:33And I think that this is where the Starmer project has fallen down so catastrophically, is that, yeah, there is a lack of a sort of sense of ideology and a sense of direction. That's part of it. But they've also been very bad at execution of the policies that they've had. And that's why they keep you turning. Yeah, look, I've heard a lot of this, this idea that, you know, he's not nice enough to the backbenchers. He's not nice enough to the Labour Party. I sort of feel like, honestly, the problem with the country cannot just stand or fall on whether he's nice enough to his MPs. I think you're putting that first.

21:07And I'm saying, no, the key is know what you want to do. And those MPs will follow you. They'll want to come towards you. You shouldn't need to be explained. You shouldn't need to have to find them in the tea rooms. If actually what you're doing makes sense to everyone. If it doesn't make sense, that's when you lose your friends. If you have a sense of purpose, then people will come and they will gather around you. I mean, Blair didn't have that problem because people understood what he stood for. Now we might be unpicking it. Now the sort of shine has come off Blair. But actually at the time we understood, we knew it was education, education, education.

21:39It was the causes of crime. Right. It was the stuff that married up a kind of capitalist, almost a conservative approach to, you know, taxation and wealth and wealth creation with a labor sort of minimum wage with sure. Exactly. With a welfare state. You know, we got that. And I think that meant that he didn't have to sort of scrabble around trying to find support. they were there. They were like, yes, we want to do this. If you don't have the top line of your story, then you end up in the tea room. Yes. And there has been a profound lack of narrative. I tell you what I heard the other day, which is interesting.

22:16Zoram Amdani's press team came to Downing Street to explain what needs to happen. And they said that in Zoram Amdani's calendar of events and all the rest of it, 80 % of it is outreach, communications, is TV clips, is radio clips, his podcasts, 80 % of what you're doing is about communication. And I think that's anathema to Keir Starmer. I don't think he does communication very easily. He'd much rather be reading the details of a policy document and then trying to figure out what is the right way to do it. I don't care about communication in the sense that, I mean, I actually think... But I think in today's world, you have to command.

22:55Yeah, but who? Who do you talk to? Do you talk to the 6 o 'clock news or do you talk to podcasts or do you go on Joe Rogan or do you write your piece? I mean, the point is, it's so fractured. You could spend your entire time doing everyone. But Mamdani calculates that's what he has to do. And he's doing very... Mamdani's just got a city, to be fair. And he ran against people that were truly crap. So I'm not, you know, I'm not minimising what he's achieved. I think it's amazing. But I think he had an easier task. What I would say about the Starmer thing is there are so many policies. And I feel guilty about this sometimes because we don't get round to talking enough about the policies that Labour has espoused.

23:29We don't get round to talking about the 500 ,000 children they've removed out of poverty. We don't get round to talking about the new railways that they've set up for Wales. We don't get round. I mean, we are going to talk about SEND and the changes to special educational needs with Bridget Phillips in a moment. But there's a lot of the policy stuff that we actually don't get round to talking about because it's both sort of small and too frequent. Right. It's not like you have one moment and everyone goes, wow, it gets lost like the digital ID card. right that should have been a moment where everyone kind of went great finally this is happening but it was kind of lost and then it disappeared and then people can't remember if it ever came or if it was just a proposal or if it was a bad idea or a good idea there's almost too much and it's not well presented i suppose yeah no i suppose the huge difference you know we've talked a lot about new labour in the blair project and where we are today back in blair's day he would do the six o 'clock news or the ten o 'clock news and would get seven or eight million viewers he'd do an op-ed for The Sun and get five million readers.

24:30It was much easier to reach the population than it is today, where, as you say rightly, Emily, that, you know, do you talk to the newspapers? Do you do a podcast? Do you do this? Do you do that? Because the whole thing is so fractured and diffuse. But part of Keir Starmer's problem is that he hasn't known what he wants to communicate and doesn't know how to communicate it. And that was Blair himself who said everything changed with a smartphone. As soon as you've got a smartphone, the whole of politics has changed. And I think we are still relearning how to be successful in this age. Well, in a moment, we'll be speaking to the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, and some of these problems.

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26:17The News Agents well we're joined in the studio now by the education secretary bridget phillipson welcome thank you very much for coming in we spent the first half of this podcast talking about peter mandelton and the arrest and i know there are very limited things that we can say because there's an ongoing police investigation now but kiev starmer had said that he would release a two-page report on what he was told about appointing peter mandelton what he knew and when when are we going to get that? So we do intend to publish that and we made that commitment through the process in Parliament.

26:53We just have to be guided by the police as to what we can and can't release as you'll understand you mentioned the live police investigation but we do understand the need for transparency and do want to honour the commitments we made in Parliament. How much damage do you think this whole affair has done to the reputation of this government, the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the ambassador then having to be sacked and then learning what we've learned? So if Keir Starmer had known now what he didn't know at that point, where Mandelson did mislead him, didn't provide all of the information, he would never have been appointed as US ambassador.

27:26Of course, he was sacked as soon as it became clear the full extent of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. It is frustrating to me that the Prime Minister ends up caught up in all of this when this relates back to things that took place years and years ago, long before Keir Starmer was ever even an MP, back when he was taking action on things like violence against women and girls. Because obviously the root cause of all of this is Jeffrey Epstein and the appalling abuse that young women and girls experienced. Bridget, can I just read you something? This was sent to me by a colleague. She received it from Peter Mandelson at four o 'clock this morning.

28:00These are his words. Despite previous agreement between police and the legal team over a voluntary interview in early March, police arrested me because they claimed the Lord Speaker received information that I was about to flee to the British Virgin Islands and take up permanent residence abroad, leaving my family behind me. I need hardly say complete fiction. The police were told only today that they had to improvise an arrest. The question is who or what is behind this? Can I just ask for your response to that? I can't comment. I know none of the details as to what has happened and decisions around arrest and the nature of arrests are for the police.