Could Mandelson face jail time over Epstein ties? – The Latest

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:13If I knew then what I know now, he would never have been anywhere near government. It's a kind of a moral misjudgment as much as it is a sort of a political misjudgment, and that's why it's a really difficult thing for them to carry. It feels like it opens a window on the kinds of contact that are possible between very rich people and very influential people and ministers. It doesn't feel like Mandelson is the powerful person here. It feels like Epstein is. The political scandal surrounding the Labour grandee Peter Mandelson and his relationship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein deepens, with pressure now right at the heart of Keir Starmer's government.

0:48From the Guardians today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Ha.

0:57I'm joined by Archie Bland, the Guardian's head of National News. Thanks so much for being with us in the studio, Archie. So, I mean, the scandal surrounding Lord Peter Mandelson is building a political scandal, but also a corruption scandal. We knew some detail of the relationship between Mandelson and the disgraced paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. But there is now new information, new photographs, new evidence of financial transactions between them. and crucially the alleged sharing of confidential Downing Street information and market sensitive information from Mandelson to Epstein. Tell me what we know.

1:37So we've really developed a more complete picture of the nature of their relationship, I would say, since the release of the latest tranche of the Epstein files on Friday. And it's worth remembering that this is just one sliver of a much wider scandal that is fundamentally related to the sexual abuse of women and girls. But within the specific UK context, what they appear to show is Peter Mandelson being in contact with Jeffrey Epstein with confidential government documents right at the point at which they were shared with him. We don't know how Epstein acted on those. Almost minutes or seconds later after he'd received that email, it would be forwarded on to Jeffrey Epstein.

2:19and very problematically for Mandelson as he faces questions on this, much of this was done from his personal BT internet account, email account it seems. Yeah and it's kind of in the weeds but it is certainly very unconventional that a minister would be able to be using their private email account because of course what that means is that there isn't a record of it available at the other end of the telescope. And what it looks like as you go through these emails is that this kind of sharing was almost reflexive and that it appears to have been with an eye on Peter Mandelson's future, with an eye on the kind of relationships that would matter for him as he came out of government, and with an eye on how he could be useful to those he considered to be his friends.

3:04But also these emails around the 2009 period, right at the height of the response to the financial crash the previous year when the Labour government was then grappling with the renationalisation, effectively of the banks. It was a hugely sensitive time to be sending information on to a US financier. It was. And, you know, people might quite naturally think, first of all, that shouldn't have been the focus of the business secretary. But it's also possible. We don't know whether Epstein acted on this information. It was market sensitive. And the interests of an American financier are not the same, to state the bleeding obvious, as the interests of the British public and the British state.

3:46politicians will tell you and I'm sure they're right that this kind of behaviour is extremely unusual but at the same time it feels like it opens a window on the kinds of contact that are possible between very rich people and very influential people and ministers and what's apparent when you look at this is that it doesn't feel like Mandelson is the powerful person here it feels like Epstein is. Yeah I think that's exactly right I mean as you say the most important part of this story is the hundreds of survivors and victims of Jeffrey Epstein who were trafficked, abused as sometimes underage children, as young women.

4:22But it does also speak to this issue of power and influence, doesn't it, that Jeffrey Epstein was this dark centre of, that he wielded that influence through contact with powerful, influential people for whom he offered money for information that would pursue his own ends. And that speaks to something that is historic to Jeffrey Epstein, but something bigger. Yeah, and it feels like it's part of, yes, money, but also a kind of a tier of wealth at which what becomes important to you are the favours that you can do for other people and that other people can do for you. A kind of a favour economy, if you like, where your ability to have somebody on the hook, to have some kind of leverage is what's really valuable to you.

5:04And I'm not talking now just about Peter Mandelson, But across so many examples here, what you become aware of is that Jeffrey Epstein knows things about people that they may prefer do not become public. And that that is both a kind of a sign of the closeness of their relationship. But it is also something that hovers in the background and means that that relationship has to stay close for those people. And when you think about all of the people who stuck by Epstein after he was convicted and all of the people who defended him for many years after that, You look at these emails and you can see a kind of a basis for some of why that might be the case.

5:36And who are now claiming they really didn't know him that well at all. And, you know, they cut contact with him as soon as they realised what he was up to. But in terms of Lord Peter Mandelson, I mean, he has now been referred to the police. The cabinet office uncovered some further documents that were handed over to the Metropolitan Police, who will be investigating him for misconduct in public office. That is serious, right? I mean, the maximum prison sentence that could carry would be life imprisonment, but that's usually when it's applied to things like the Official Secrets Act. But nonetheless, a jail term is not impossible.

6:10Meanwhile, there's the political response. We're speaking as PMQ's Prime Minister's Questions is just coming to an end. Keir Starmer has stood up to say, had I known about the nature of Peter Mandelson's relationship with Epstein at the time that he was appointed as US ambassador last year, it would never have happened. He's promising full transparency of the process by which that was reached. But this is hugely embarrassing for Starmer and for his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, right, who is being reported to have been quite influential in that appointment of Mandelson. Yeah, and more than embarrassing, because it becomes a question directly of their judgment.

6:49We should say that Peter Mandelson says that he was deceived by Jeffrey Epstein. and he says that he did not act in any way that was in opposition to the British government's position, that essentially what he was trying to do was be supportive of the UK at all times. But nonetheless, what Keir Starmer has said today is that he was lied to by Peter Mandelson and that the government was lied to by Peter Mandelson. Morgan McSweeney certainly appears to have been instrumental in that decision to make him the ambassador. The problem is, for Labour and for Starmer in particular is that Peter Mandelson has been really close to lots of senior people in this government for a very long time and the fact that they took the decision that notwithstanding his visible links to Epstein, his previous resignations over financial matters from governments in the past, that they believed him to be the right choice to do this job isn't just a matter of embarrassment, it's a matter of serious political misjudgment and misjudgment is almost too abstract and kind of technical sounding a thing.

7:52It's a kind of a moral misjudgment as much as it is a sort of a political misjudgment. And that's why it's a really difficult thing for them to carry. But one that is particularly painful for Keir Starmer, who said he wanted to eradicate this sort of sleaze and scandal from politics to clean it up and that they could trust him, his government and his moral judgment. I mean, he was faced by Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition today in the Commons, who was really going quite hard on what Starmer knew last year, but also calling for a full disclosure of that process. Starmer has said, and Number 10 is saying, there will be a release of the documents related to the appointment of Mandelson as US ambassador, but there will be some documents held back in the interests of national security.

8:39So that will create, won't it, a bit of a storm? Well, there's always an ambiguity about what national security means in this kind of context and who is making the decisions about the redactions and we don't know what we get until we get it. I would imagine it's relatively unlikely that there will be an excruciating smoking gun here where there is somebody in government who decides knowing the full gravity of Mandelson's failures and believing him to have lied that they decided to go ahead anyway. I think this is probably more likely to come down to just the question of whether it was plausible to believe what Peter Maddelson said at the time, given his long and dubious track record as a minister in the past.

9:20It certainly is. And for others involved in this, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly, of course, Prince Andrew, who we're told has been moved from his Royal Lodge mansion in Windsor to his new home in exile in Norfolk last night. He is facing another, Thames Valley police are saying they're taking a second look at the one case brought against him that's been given new light after the release of the files on Friday. Is there, if you combine his case with that of Lord Peter Mandelson, a sense, a growing sense of some real accountability of those who had links to Epstein, who so far seem to have broadly escaped proper accountability?

10:03It's complicated. I think there are clearly in the UK with these very prominent cases, real signs of accountability. It's also the case that with lots of these emails, a necessary kind of suffix on what we report about them is that they are not in themselves evidence of criminal activity or suggestion of wrongdoing. And there are also lots of names in those files that are still redacted. There are names on emails that appear to be redacted that's really hard to understand why they are redacted when they appear to be a very clear indication of of wrongdoing. So I think it's very hard to believe that people will ever feel that there has been a kind of a true and broad accountability for what Epstein and the people around him did.

10:43But certainly it feels like we're a little bit closer to that today than we were a week ago. It does. Archie, thank you so much. Thank you. That's it for today. Thanks again to Archie Bland, The Guardian's Head of National News. And thanks to you for listening to this episode of The Latest, the new evening edition of Today in Focus. Today in Focus, we'll be back with you tomorrow morning with an episode speaking to one of Epstein's survivors. We'll be back tomorrow night. This episode was presented by me, Lucy Hoff. It was produced by Bryony Moore. The senior producer was Ryan Ramgobin and the lead producer was Zoe Hitch.

11:22This is The Guardian.

11:30of