Mandelson was a man reliant on favours and that is an existence that requires you to pick your friends carefully - David Behrens
Nothing about Peter Mandelson’s response to the fallout from his duplicitous private life rings true. Even his voluntary “retirement” from the House of Lords was a sham: the Lords is where you retire to, not from.
No politician – not Boris Johnson, not Jeremy Thorpe, not even John Profumo – has ridden the rollercoaster of scandal longer and more often than Mandelson. Yet no matter how much dirt was hurled his way, he brushed it off as casually as a speck of lint from his lapel.
He was still trying to brazen it out as the spotlight shifted from what he did in Washington to why the heck he was sent there in the first place. But let’s look beyond the party politics and consider the sheer guile of the man and what it tells us about the company he kept.
Mandelson had “no recollection” of the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein giving him $75,000 or of having his picture taken in his underwear in Epstein’s Paris flat. The events were as insignificant to him as buying lunch might be to you or I.
He could not deny knowing that his friend was a sex offender, for the whole world knew it. As long ago as 2008 Epstein had admitted procuring a child for prostitution and had served 13 months in prison as part of a controversial plea deal.
Yet the documents we have seen in the last week, the ones that stripped Mandelson of his trousers and his dignity and may yet cost the PM his job, are more recent.
They reveal that in the years between Epstein’s first incarceration and his presumed suicide, his wealth and largesse gave him access to a whole strata of society in which his paedophilia simply did not matter or was somehow excusable.
And it’s all very well for his associates to bleat, as some have this week, that their “thoughts and prayers” are with his victims; they were thinking only of themselves when they made their Faustian pacts with him.
Mandelson was not the only one to do so; far from it. Epstein’s friend Andrew Mountbatten Windsor hit rock bottom on Tuesday when he left his mansion under cover of darkness for a life in exile, holed up in the King’s grounds. His grovelling ex-wife Sarah Ferguson had apparently offered Epstein her services as a glorified housekeeper.
And the Crown Princess of Norway, whose son is on trial for rape, corresponded for years with Epstein, asking at one point whether wallpaper of “two naked women carrying a surfboard” was appropriate for a 15-year-old’s bedroom. How could you possibly have that conversation with a convicted paedophile without being sensitive to the morality of everyone around you?
But I detect a pattern here, a disposition within that societal strata, that justifies turning a blind eye to sexual offenders and their victims when there is self-benefit to be had. We saw an example only last week, and it was much closer to home than Jeffrey Epstein’s Paris penthouse.
The Church of England has an appalling record of closing ranks around wayward clerics instead of reaching out to those they have abused, and in a grotesque coincidence of timing it was slamming the door in their faces on the very day its first female Archbishop of Canterbury was confirmed in her post.
The Church ruled that although “some mistakes were made”, there was no need for a disciplinary hearing over its dealings with David Tudor, a priest it allowed to remain in post even though he’d had sexual relations with two teenage girls, was barred from being alone with children and had paid compensation to an abuse victim.
Its verdict that “the threshold for misconduct was not met” sent a message that protocol was more important than punishment. If you believe that, you really have surrendered the moral high ground.
And while a priest might say there is good in all of us, including David Tudor and Jeffrey Epstein, that is not reason enough to embrace those whom all others would ostracise.
Peter Mandelson might be reflecting on that this weekend but I doubt it; self-awareness has never been one of his qualities. Perhaps you remember one of his earlier falls from grace, in which he went to extraordinary lengths to conceal his sexuality when it was compromised by an interviewee on TV.
He called in a favour from his friend the Director-General, and the BBC promptly ordered that “under no circumstances whatsoever should allegations about the private life of Peter Mandelson be repeated or referred to on any broadcast”.
What wouldn’t he give to have that edict reinstated now? But Mandelson was a man reliant on favours and that is an existence that requires you to pick your friends carefully. If those friends repulse everyone else, you should probably take the hint.