…
Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.
The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.
While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.
Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital.
So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.
A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.
Privacy for your ‘guests’: Mandelson’s email to Epstein recommending exclusive villa
Original article by Simon Lock republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Redacted email deciphered by TBIJ shows former politician suggesting holiday home for convicted sex offender
Peter Mandelson emailed Jeffrey Epstein after his release from house arrest to recommend a holiday home where the financier could host his “guests”.
Mandelson said he had found a villa in Italy that Epstein could use, offering “privacy with accompanying rooms for your ‘guests’” – with quote marks around the word guests.
It is not clear who this was in reference to. Epstein’s connections among the global elite included bankers, royals and Middle Eastern sheikhs.
The email was published this week by the US government as part of the Epstein Files cache. Its sender has been redacted but we were able to identify it as coming from Mandelson.
A spokesperson for Mandelson said: “Lord Mandelson regrets, and will regret until to his dying day, that he believed Epstein’s lies about his criminality. Lord Mandelson did not discover the truth about Epstein until after his death in 2019. He is profoundly sorry that powerless and vulnerable women and girls were not given the protection they deserved.”
The email chain is from August 2010, a month after Epstein had been released from house arrest following his conviction for child sex offences.
In the message in question, Mandelson tells Epstein that he is due to arrive back in London from “Myk”, shorthand for the Greek island of Mykonos, at the end of August. He goes on to say: “Found you a great place to stay on the Amalfi coast near to Positano. Zeferelli home converted into beautiful suites and privacy with accompanying rooms for your ‘guests’.”
While the identity of the sender is blacked out in the published file, other emails from the same period confirm that Mandelson travelled at that time to Mykonos, which he also referred to as “Myk” in separate emails. The email in question was sent from a Blackberry, Mandelson’s favoured method of communication at the time.
The redaction in the files leaves some parts of the email address visible, and we were able to match it with an address used by Mandelson (see video below).
The conversation with Epstein took place during a period of frequent contact between the pair following Mandelson’s exit from frontline politics after Labour’s election defeat.
The men discussed job opportunities for Mandelson, including with mining giant Glencore, investment banks Lazard and Deutsche Bank, and his own advisory firm, Global Counsel.
The house Mandelson refers to in the email appears to be Villa Treville, an exclusive 16-suite luxury hotel located on a clifftop overlooking the Gulf of Salerno.
There is no evidence that Epstein ever visited the villa.
Villa Treville as it appears today
Lead image: Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein pictured together. Credit: Department of Justice / ZUMA Press Wire / Shutterstock
Reporter: Simon Lock
Enablers editor: Eleanor Rose
Deputy editor: Katie Mark
Editor: Franz Wild
Production editor: Alex Hess
TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
Original article by Simon Lock republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
CONFIDENTIAL – STRICTLY NOT FOR PUBLICATION: Ipso has asked us to circulate the following advisory:
Ipso has today been contacted by a representative acting on behalf of Peter Mandelson.
Mr Mandelson’s representatives state that he does not wish to speak to the media at this time. He requests that the press do not take photos or film, approach, or contact him via phone, email, or in-person. His representatives ask that any requests for his comment are directed to [REDACTED]
We are happy to make editors aware of his request. We note the terms of Clause 2 (Privacy) and 3 (Harassment) of the Editors’ Code, and in particular that Clause 3 states that journalists must not persist in questioning, telephoning, pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist, unless justified in the public interest.
Please do not hesitate to contact me to discuss any Code issues on [REDACTED] or out of hours on [REDACTED].
[IPSO official]
13.15pm Don’t know why this was not displaying properly.
Morning Star Editorial: Mandelson, Trump and the plutocracy: end rule by the rich
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mandelson-trump-and-plutocracy-end-rule-rich
President Donald Trump (left) gets a reaction from Britian’s ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson (right), in the Oval Office of the White House, May 8, 2025, in Washington…
The Mandelson scandal is about Starmer and McSweeney and Labour, but it is also about Donald Trump.
The US president who orders the illegal seizure of a Venezuelan tanker carrying oil to Cuba and says casually when asked what happens to the oil, “I guess we’ll keep it.” Who follows up his mob-style kidnap of the Venezuelan president with a round table of oil execs to decide how to divide the spoils.
Whose so-called peace initiatives, from Congo to Ukraine, are protection rackets in which Washington hints at possible security in return for signing over your natural resources.
Whose special envoy is property developer Steve Witkoff and whose special adviser — playing a key role in discussions on the future of Gaza and holding a seat on the so-called Board of Peace that Trump hopes will usurp functions of the United Nations — is another property developer, his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
US governments have always acted, often illegally and violently, to further the interests of the US capitalist class.
But no US government has blurred the lines between state policy and personal enrichment of the president and his cronies as this one has.
Trump wants the US to “move on” from the Epstein files. No wonder: he features in them heavily. But if we don’t want to be ruled by well-connected sociopaths who see ordinary people and entire countries as their playthings, we have to move on from our “special relationship” with Trump.
Even after the outrageous assault on Venezuela, and the threats to annex Nato member-state territory in Greenland and Canada, Britain assisted an illegal US seizure of a Russian-flagged tanker in the Atlantic and Starmer has offered support for an equally illegal prospective assault against Iran.
This weekend’s Adelante! conference will debate the extraordinary threat Trump poses to the whole of Latin America and to global peace and justice.
Don’t let the powers that be box off the Mandelson scandal. Down with the plutocrats and the sleaze. End the culture of impunity that says some people and some states are above the law.
Force every politician to face it: until we break with Trump, we are complicit in unspeakable crimes. And people have had enough.
I recommend the original article at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mandelson-trump-and-plutocracy-end-rule-rich
