496. Mandelson’s Disgrace: How Epstein Poisoned Our Politics

23:52Rory Stewart:Come along. It's extraordinary. You will meet Woody Allen. You will meet a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Larry Summers will be there. He'll write a check for you. Oh, and listen, if you are late for a football match, he's got a private plane and he'll fix it to get you there. But then he's sent to jail. He's sent to jail for trafficking. And the extraordinary thing is that then after 2008, Mandelson continues to stay with him. A lot of these people that we've mentioned, very, very well-known people, continue to go to his parties. Including people like Howard Lutnick, current commerce secretary, who has made a big thing about how he and his wife were disgusted by this guy way back when.

24:34But now we see the email saying, can we come to the island? Can we hang out? Elon Musk endlessly trying to hang out with him.

24:40Rory Stewart:Steve Bannon trying to get us playing. Richard Branson saying, come around to the island, bring your harem with him. So my question is, what is it that they told themselves? Is it that nearly 20 years ago, somehow people could convince themselves, some people, Not Tina Brown, who, to be fair, when she's invited to one of these parties with Woody Allen and Jeffrey Epstein and Charlie Rose is like, what the hell is this? A predator's party. No, I'm not going. You can F off, right? So there are people who already by then are like, excuse me, no. But a number of other people, apparently from a certain generation, are somehow saying, I don't know what they're saying.

25:15Rory Stewart:Maybe they're saying there's some misunderstanding. He slept with a prostitute that got caught up in the law somehow, but he served his time. It's fine now. He's a great finance president. I know that Peter Mandelson said that, you know, he wishes he hadn't believed him. And I guess what he was being forced to believe or asked to believe was that somehow, and this is what predators do, they project themselves as victims. So, you know, somehow the system is working against him, whereas in fact he's got the system in the palm of his hand. And then presumably it helps if at the same time that you're going, everybody else is also going.

25:50That's how great networkers work. People are drawn to them in part because of their network. And this guy had an incredible network.

25:57Rory Stewart:So when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking money from him and also getting him to invest in startups, he is doing this trick of saying to MIT, yes, I'll give you money. But what I really want to do is match fund with other philanthropists. So invite the other philanthropists to the island. I'll match fund that donation. So he's then rebuilding his network after his conviction through his philanthropic giving. and i think they must be saying to themselves at the board meeting when people are like are you sure we should be taking money from this they're saying well but he's also you know talking to the clinton global initiative he's talking to his foundation he's talking to all these other things so we're probably okay they want money for their foundation i think the other thing that's maybe the difference between the uk there's lots of difference between the uk and the us but i think the role of money in their politics and their public life is it plays a far bigger role than it does here and i think people like that get away with a lot more i think the reason why this is so damaging on the political front is because you do have this sense of what what working people kind of think exists which is a sort of global elite that can get away with anything and okay epstein went to jail and he's now dead but this these papers are full of names of people And we haven't seen it all, have we?

27:12Well, I don't think we have.

27:13Rory Stewart:Which is presumably why Trump was reluctant to release the Epstein files and Biden was reluctant to release the Epstein files. I mean, Biden and Trump have been sitting on a bomb that basically detonates under everything. But my guess is, if you were to get hold of the emails of Elon Musk or the emails of Sam Altman and their photographs and things, you wouldn't get sexual predator activity, but you would get all the other stuff that I'm talking about, the peddling of influences, the introductions, the political information. Well, let's take a break.

27:52Rory Stewart:This episode is brought to you by Whoop. And I'm speaking to you, I'm wearing a Whoop device on my wrist at the moment. Politics teaches you fairly quickly that attention is finite. When attention is drawn to the loud and urgent, it's easy to miss the deeper patterns shaping outcomes. And that applies to health as well. You keep going, you meet demands, you get through the day without noticing that the cost is quietly all adding up and taking a toll. Whereas WHOOP exists to bring background picture into focus. This thing on your wrist is there showing you how your body responds to everyday life, to sleep, to recovery, to strain, and how those rhythms and trends emerge over time.

28:33Rory Stewart:If you want to better understand how you can feel and live at your best for years to come, head to join.whoop.com slash T-R-I-P and get started with Whoop today. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial so you can try Whoop risk-free and see what you learn.

28:54Now, just a quick pause in the podcast to mention our sponsor, NordVPN.

28:59Rory Stewart:March is the month of forms and figures, tax returns, renewals, end-of-year accounts, transactions containing more of our money and identity than we realise. And as we're doing that, a cyber attack occurs on average every 39 seconds. In the UK, hundreds of cyber-enabled crimes are reported each day, with around£4.5 million lost daily to cybercrime. And this is only going to become more true with AI. We think of security risks as big and dramatic, but increasingly not. They're creeping in through the ordinary, an email that looks plausible, a link that feels routine. That's why I've been using NordVPN to close the gap.

29:38NordVPN encrypts your internet connection, hides your IP address and protects your bank details and passwords so you're not assuming everything online is safe. To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. you'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee the link is in the episode description so good so good so good new markdowns up to 70 % off are at Nordstrom

30:08Rory Stewart:rack stores now and that means so many new reasons to rack because I always find something amazing just so many good brands because there's always something new join the Nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.

30:37I mentioned Bannon. This is the thing. Because what I find really interesting about the reaction to all of this, MAGA and their kind of fellow travelers here, the sort of Farage reform lot, They've been pretty silent about the whole thing.

30:50Rory Stewart:Except one bitter maggot, which is completely furious and obsessed with it. Okay, but I'm talking about the leaders. Like J.D. Vance, who's got a pretty active Twitter finger. He's been silent for five days. This is the guy who said this is going to bring down the left. Trump comes out yesterday and basically just says, we've talked enough about Epstein and there's nothing bad about it for me, which is not true. He and Melania are all over this stuff. And he's broken, though, hasn't he, with Marjorie Taylor Greene, because this is her obsession instead. Why he's broken, I don't know. But let me just give you this one.

31:22There's so much stuff in here. There's an exchange between Steve Bannon and Epstein. Bannon, I'm now an advisor to Front, I think he means the National Front, Salvini and the League, AFD, Swiss People's Party, Orban, Land and Freedom, and Farage. Next May, European Parliament elections. We can go from 92 seats to 200 and shut down any crypto legislation or anything else we want reply

31:49Rory Stewart:roger that so we've got far-right nationalists we've got crypto legislation but what is he actually asking for he's asking for support financial support for their campaigns and probably also introductions to these very shadowy groups that do campaigning the kind of groups that i was talking about came to me with the london merrill thing that are going to do sock puppets things. And that's where his connection to other jurisdictions, intelligence agencies, other campaigns come in. Partly, Epstein is a massive bullshitter, right? So he's endlessly exaggerating his influence, but he will have given Bannon the impression, probably that he's worth 10 times as much as he has, and that he can make politics and campaigning happen all over the world.

32:27And the truth is, Bannon is connected to all those people. It has been helping all of those people. But I think that's one of the reasons why Farage et al have just been pretty much silent about this.

32:35Rory Stewart:One of the interesting things that goes on when you read this is that they're all bullshitting each other. Yeah, for sure. But just to give you a few more, because I mean, there's so much stuff in here. But like, so for example, Epstein setting up a meeting between Peter Thiel, tech bro, libertarian, and the guy that Biden was going to make head of the CIA in 2014. And doing that, not just saying he's doing it, doing that. Thiel comes up a lot in this stuff. Peter Thiel is also the major cornerstone investor in tech companies, employing former CIA staff and working on contracts with the CIA and the Department of Defense to deliver.

33:15Rory Stewart:And he's meeting the new director of the CIA. So there is a direct commercial interest for Peter Thiel. And the nominated future director of the CIA should not, in a functioning system, be meeting Thiel without officials in the room because of the sensitivity of the procurement contracts. Right. But look at the world that we're in now. I mean, that was in a world where there were kind of rules and there were guardrails. And now we We have a president who says he doesn't need rules and he doesn't need guardrails. He just needs his own morality, whatever that might mean. We then have Thiel essentially, this goes back to my sovereign individual theory of life, essentially saying they need more chaos.

33:52When there is chaos, this is on the international front, America has a better chance of becoming a hegemony. This is him saying to Epstein. He and Epstein have this conversation. I mean, Elon Musk comes over as truly pathetic in these. you know i've had this theory that musk's big you know the guy's smart and he's built himself into you know supposedly the richest guy in the world but he has this embarrassing need to be cool and to be considered funny so he's constantly badgering epstein to know when the coolest party is going to be on the island where they can go there epstein's helping him sort his publicity for tesla epstein was also giving peter mandelton advice on his biography he's just sort of he's into these people at every level all of the time.

34:36Rory Stewart:And he connects more. So the man that I was talking about who he's doing sick jokes about chasing girls in Dubai is also getting in touch and asking whether Mandelson can be on the board of his new company. And then he's reaching out to Mandelson recommending. So he's got something different for everyone. For some people, it is very, very young girls. There are other people in his network who are not interested in that at all. Peter Mandelson is gay. There's no suggestion, presumably, that some of the women he's dealing with are interested in young women. right? They instead are chasing him because they want tiny bits of money for their partner, or they want money for their charity.

35:11Rory Stewart:The third category is people like Elon Musk, who may well not be interested in any of that stuff, but just wants to be at a cool party. Steve Bannon, a lot of what he's texting about is, can I get on your plane? Can I have a free plane ride? The genius of Epstein is to be able to use the ability to offer something different to everyone. I mean, even you ended up in this apartment, right? Yeah, I did, yeah. And you met him. I did. Right. Once. Yeah, no, but I mean, if I was honest with myself, would I, when I was running a Harvard Center 2008, before he was convicted, if somebody had said, oh, you've got to get together with this amazing guy who has these great parties in New York, he could give money to your center, come along with me, I'll take you to the dinner party?

35:59I think maybe the fact that I met him on my own in some very odd circumstances where I just bumped into Ghislaine on a plane and she said, what are you doing tonight in New York and come and meet my boyfriend, that it was one-on-one. Because he, I'm not saying this in hindsight, I said it at the time, he gave me the creeps. Right. Not in any, he wasn't sort of saying, oh, do you want to come and meet some young girls? There's none of that. Right. But he gave me the creeps. Right. Mainly the name dropping. Right. And the sense of being the center of his own universe.

36:26Rory Stewart:Presumably, though, you failed the test in a way also because his name dropping is designed to try to see whether you're prepared to drop names with him. And as he explores these different contacts, are you getting interested? And are you, Alistair, going to say, oh, well, actually, I know this guy and there's a business deal here or here's some gossip from this particular world leader? And the only thing that's interesting when you see, because yet again over the papers today, there's the picture of Peter Mandelson in his underwear. What's with the underwear? Why is he standing in his underwear with a girl in his room?

36:57I wonder whether Epstein was filming everything that went on within his houses. Oh, yeah, I think definitely. So that picture is probably... And Peter's not going to volunteer to have himself his pitch taken.

37:07Rory Stewart:No, no, no. These pictures, if you look at all the pictures that are being released, so many of them have been deliberately got by Epstein because he has something over you. It's no accident that his pictures of Prince Andrew are pictures of him trying to kiss someone or lying over a girl or mandelson in his underwear or mandelson in his bathrobe but but it is also questionable what is the nature of the world in which mandelson is operating that epstein can walk in when he's in his underwear and take a photograph of him now i'm wondering whether it is even a photograph or is it a secret camera whether it's just some sort of cctv i don't know i've got no idea i i almost get the impression because of the way they're looking at them, they're often looking up.

37:49Rory Stewart:He's come in and sort of surprised them and taken a little picture of them. But that particular one, isn't it? It's like, literally, it looks like somebody's briefing or dictating. I don't know in a weird way what's more creepy, hidden cameras, or the idea that actually you've created a world where everybody's in a permanent state of undress and your host can walk in and out taking photographs of you. Can I finish with a big politics point, which is how do we protect our democracies against this, right? We've got There's hundreds of MPs on low incomes, some of them very insecure, struggling to get jobs when they leave.

38:22Rory Stewart:They are perfect prey for wealthy, well-connected men who can offer them board positions, invite them to parties, put them on private planes. we have to think about what it is with laws structures incentives culture which stops this happening again and again and again because we've only seen this because epstein happens to be the most famous sexual predator in the world who killed himself otherwise we'd never seen any of this right madison would have got away with this for the rest of his life And my guess is there are dozens, dozens, dozens of people involved in very, very odd relationships of this sort.

39:04Rory Stewart:And that's why I think that although Keir Starmer is a very honorable man, he should not actually even have been taking favors like glasses, clothes for his wife, etc. because as soon as you get into these relationships however innocent they seem somebody's got something over you you know once they've bought close your wife they can always pick up the phone and you've got to pick up the phone no i think you've got to be very very wary of it a lot of people are not i'm afraid i think it's partly the influence of american politics american politics has a massive influence on all of us all of the big democracies and it is driven by money it's driven by the lobbyists it's driven by and what we're seeing now with trump is a level of open admitted boastfully embraced corruption that is almost unthinkable but with the reason why i find you said you're going to make a political point the reason why i find this politically so upsetting and so difficult is because it just it feeds into this idea they're all at it.

40:06They're all the same. It plays into that kind of anti-politics agenda. And the truth is, I hope people get the message that actually know we're not all the same. We're not all driven just by money. We don't all see a link between connection, network, and policy decisions. We're not all insider traders. But it's terrible. It's terrible for politics. And the thing about Trump. I mean, Trump just brazenly yesterday says, oh, people fell up and talk about Epstein. There's nothing bad about me. There's loads of stuff that's bad about him. But he managed to drown it out. This week alone, he's the most mentioned person in the files.

40:47He's had this big crypto thing going on with the Emiratis, which is, again, no previous president I don't think would have done. He's suing the IRS for, is it,$13 billion because they put out his tax returns. is suing the comedian, Trevor Noah. They've arrested Don Lemon for turning up a protest, and he's announced the closure of what was once the respected Kennedy Center, which is now the Donald J. Trump Kennedy Center. This is the Steve Bannon flood the zone with shit. And nobody knows where to look. And I think the success, this is what the American media and American polities really need to look deep into themselves for.

41:30They've allowed something to be created where scandal is no longer scandal. It's just a story and it lasts half a news cycle.

41:40Rory Stewart:It's a scary, bad world. I wonder actually whether we may not be underestimating the damage this will do to Trump because Marjorie Taylor Greene famously has broken from Trump around this issue. I think the MAGA base has made the Epstein files, I'm not talking here about the leadership, I'm talking about the base has made the Epstein files right at the heart of their whole ideas of conspiracy theories, politics, child sex rings, etc. And of course, there's a bit of this which actually seems to be a real life version almost of a kind of QAnon conspiracy where genuinely powerful wealthy people are involved in abusing underage girls.

42:21Rory Stewart:So I think it will damage Trump. It's probably the one thing for his base that he's done, more actually than what ICE has been doing, more than what he's been doing in terms of domestic civil liberties. Given that their whole movement is about an out-of-touch billionaire elite class that's above the law and is abusing underage children, I think this is a big problem for him. even though Trump has sort of just weighed this latest batch away in that way that he has, and he's helped to do that by lots of the media. I think you're right. I think there's a lot in here that provided the American media doesn't just play his game, I think has the potential to do him damage.

43:05But I think on your bigger point, I think this is so damaging for politics everywhere. because your question about how do we deal with corruption if you have what is seen and what is styled as the leading democracies of the world in america's case so drowning in this stuff uh you know where we talk about billion dollar campaigns or even local campaigns you are so dependent on going out to the people with the money who then want something in return so i think unless we do get away from the way that money controls politics, then we're all going to drown with this stuff. Because the truth is, American politics is so dominant in all of our lives right now.

43:46Rory Stewart:So first thing we could do is campaign finance reform. I mean, what I found when I went from running as a local constituency MP to trying to run for mayor of London, where I needed to try to raise a million, two million for a race, is suddenly you become very, very aware of how compromising that is, trying to get people to write you checks of 10, 50, 100 ,000. so campaign finance reform Tories shouldn't be funded by the very wealthy Labour shouldn't be funded by the trade unions we should do what Malinowskis is doing in South Australia who's funded by Iranians he's offered with some church warden with links to Kazakhstan that's why he was in Dubai or somewhere getting more money on crypto and are living in Thailand etc absolutely so campaign finance reform number two I'd like MP's salaries and pensions to be increased so that they're less tempted to get involved from this dubious stuff.

44:34Rory Stewart:And you would combine that with very, very strict rules, very strict rules on what jobs they can take within three years of leaving parliament and make sure that they're properly paid and rewarded so they're not tempted to bend those rules. And then I'm afraid absolutely, and this again is something that Farage has done again and again, come down like a ton of bricks on people like Farage and Boris Johnson who don't properly declare these trips, this connection. I mean, what is the Lebedev party story with Boris Johnson other than an exact version, minus the underage girls, of the Epstein story?

45:11Rory Stewart:Glamour, film stars, celebrities, party, networks, connections, money, intelligence, connections, compromise, and finally ending up in the House of Lords. So I would love to see maybe Keir Starmer, because this is in his wheelhouse, making cleaning up politics part of his business. But you don't clean up politics, I'm afraid, by continuing to reduce MPs' salaries to their pensions. You just create more and more desperate people who are going to get greedier and greedier. Not all of them. I mean, there are figures like Jeremy Corbyn, who I suspect is not on the make. Let's be fair, there are a lot of MPs who are not bent.

45:50There are a lot of MPs who are not into the

45:53Rory Stewart:saint. He did very well, didn't claim his expenses. But I saw Peter Madison in 2011, 2012 going around handing his business card out to people. I saw people in my own party moving on and getting jobs. I saw this whole question of what are you doing putting MPs on your board? What's it about? What are they bringing to the party? Well, they're not bringing great expertise and private equity. The only thing they're bringing is connections, lobbying, et cetera. So cleaning that all up, so important. I think we've kidded ourselves for a long time that because we're not as bad as America, we're not a corrupt country.

46:34No, we're not as corrupt as America. Our politics is not as bad as American politics. But there's another example where we just turned blind eye. You mentioned the Lebedev trip with Johnson. We still don't know what that was about. I mean, why is Lebedev in the House of Lords. Why did Roman Abramovich end up owning Chelsea? I mean, Bill Browder was genuinely shocked that the British establishment, of which at that time I was a part, allowed this stuff to happen. So I think you're right. I mean, look, we said this when Labour were in opposition, I think cleaning up our politics, making people feel that democracy means something, I think it's an urgent political challenge.

47:13And, you know, if you're Keir Starmer, there he goes off to China, has a pretty successful visit comes back, does a statement in the House of Commons and what was he had to talk about yesterday? Epstein-Mandelson corruption in politics got to clean it up ok and tomorrow we're back with question time we're going to talk about Iran and we're going to talk about Hungary election coming up there we're going to talk about the upcoming by-election in Manchester and a very interesting special election that's just happened in Texas with a massive swing against the Republicans. See you then.

47:47Rory Stewart:See you then. Bye-bye.

47:55Rory Stewart:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.