Politicians ‘don’t live how we live’, voters tell me. The Mandelson scandal won’t change their minds | John Harris

2026-02-08 - 13:35

Whoever succeeds Keir Starmer will have an almost impossible task: convincing voters that politicians will serve the people, not themselves Keir Starmer’s side of the ever-unfolding Jeffrey Epstein scandal clearly centres on one big decision, the twisted calculations that must have led to it, and a question that is not going to go away: between late 2024 and early 2025, despite knowing that Peter Mandelson had maintained his friendship with Epstein after the latter’s conviction for what US law calls soliciting prostitution from a minor, why did Starmer and his inner circle still conclude that he was the right man to be the UK’s ambassador in Washington DC? There is a very important contextual element of the story, which began to surface at the end of last week, about the absence of alarm – in both politics and the media – at the appointment at the time it was made, suggestive of an amazing collective amnesia about details of the Mandelson/Epstein relationship that had been made public. But even so, that doesn’t detract from the awfulness of what the prime minister and his people did, which sits at the heart of the story like an incurable headache. They surely know it, and so does everyone else: presented with a due diligence report based on a vivid account of what Mandelson had been up to (much of which was well known anyway), they apparently took his denials at face value. Despite warnings to the contrary – from, we now hear, the-then foreign secretary David Lammy and Starmer’s then-deputy Angela Rayner – they gave Mandelson exactly what he wanted. John Harris is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...