As a long time reader of The Economist when Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait held political sway, via one of their many their Best Sellers ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ featuring the toxic politics of Bush The Younger, and his masters Vice President Dick Cheney and the long forgotten Karl Rove Mr. 1 % !
The resignation of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, on Sunday brings the Starmer era in British politics to an end. The precise timing and mechanism of the prime minister’s defenestration is unclear. But his authority is shot to pieces, and his government has lost what purpose it had.
There is only one subject on the Labour Party’s mind: Who should replace him? The pros and cons of the two main candidates are endlessly debated. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is a deft media performer. But is that a strength rather than a weakness in the post-Peter Mandelson era, with the party’s former spinmeister now in disgrace? Angela Rayner, the ex-deputy leader, is a charismatic champion of the left. But what about her tax affairs? Al Carns, the armed-services minister and former special-services officer, has made a well-publicized visit to NATO’s northernmost border on Norway’s Russia border. At least this relative unknown is free of political baggage.
But Labour needs more than a new leader. It needs a new sense of direction. The problem with Starmer’s leadership is not simply that he isn’t very good at politics. It is that he has never known what he wanted to do with power. He occasionally flirted with silly ideas — “mission-driven government” one day and reviving the spirit of Harold Wilson the next — only to abandon them. He never had an answer to the basic question: What am I here for?
Ideas are essential to politics because they give you both a sense of direction and purpose. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were successful prime ministers because they knew where they were headed and were willing to make sacrifices to get there. Starmer made up for his absence of ideas by over-relying on political operatives, most notably McSweeney, and their standard tools of spin, manipulation and “out of the box thinking,” culminating in the appointment of Jeffrey Epstein’s “best pal” Mandelson as British ambassador to the US.
Where can the Labour government get new ideas from at this late stage? Not from the Blairite right. The Mandelson affair has reminded us of everything that was wrong with the clique of insiders who ran the country during the Blair era. Not from think tanks such as the Resolution Foundation. Clever policies cannot deliver unless they are linked by a guiding philosophy. And not from the big-spending left, whatever Rayner’s political talents. Liz Truss’s disastrous Tory premiership has limited the slack the bond markets will grant the country.
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Editor: When dose it become utterly transparent that Blair and his cadre, not to speak of whole of the British Political Class, that made a protraced war against Jeremy Corbyn, while Blair nourished the political ambitions of an utter mediocratiy of Starmer! Yet some how the greater of too evils is the very definition of what Stamer manifested?
Robert Colevile in the Sunday Times of Saturday February 07 2026, 11.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
Editor: The once reguilar reader of The Economist will be surprised by the comments of Adrian Wooldridge, who now writes for Bloomberg Opinion on the question of Mandelson’ and Starmer’s political trajectories
The challenges for Prime Minister Keir Starmer are piling up. He now faces another blow to his leadership, as further details about ties between Britain’s former Ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein emerge. In his latest Bloomberg Opinion piece, Adrian Wooldridge argues that the fall of Mandelson may be an opportunity for systemic reform, with politicians and the press corps needing to break the habit of manipulating the country from on high and think about the long-term national interest. Adrian Wooldridge joins Stephen Carroll and Anna Edwards on Bloomberg radio to discuss.
Reader I will treat the these paragraphs as the comments of Adrian Wooldridge and not of his fellow travelers!
The Epstein files threaten to topple the government. Not Donald Trump’s in Washington, but Keir Starmer’s in London. The British prime minister huddled with Labour MPs yesterday in a desperate effort to quell a party rebellion over his disgraced former ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, and his frequent appearances across the 3.5 million pages released by the US Justice Department. Starmer issued a public apology to Epstein’s victims and said “sorry” for believing Mandelson’s assurances about the nature of his ties with the deceased convicted pedophile. It may not be enough. While Westminster is no stranger to sleaze, the explosiveness of the scandal has few parallels in recent British history. Some reach back more than six decades to the Profumo affair, when the then-secretary of state for war’s dalliances with a woman linked to Soviet officials precipitated the downfall of Harold Macmillan’s government. Already weak and unpopular, Starmer looks to be governing on borrowed time, preserved only because his most likely replacements — such as Health Secretary Wes Streeting and former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner — aren’t ready to challenge him. The prime minister faces pressure to fire his chief of staff. Betting odds on Starmer leaving office in the first half of the year have soared. It’s been a shocking reverse for the man who led Labour to a landslide election win barely 18 months ago promising a renaissance of the British left. Instead, he’s battling a resurgence of the populist right, in the form of an antagonistic Trump administration and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. While Trump’s Democratic opponents were hoping the Epstein files would weaken the president, his British ally Farage may be the biggest beneficiary for now. The Brexit campaigner only has to stand back and cheer the ongoing scandal. Little wonder Farage joked yesterday he didn’t want Starmer ousted: “I want him to stay forever.”
In an effort to cut costs, Agence France-Presse (AFP) management wants to reduce the number of expatriate positions by two-thirds. The reform, which would spell the end of staff mobility, would result in the loss of the agency’s network, warns the AFP’s journalists’ association.
Published on February 6, 2026, at 4:45 pm (Paris) 3 min read Lire en français
Today, behind the acronym AFP, which readers find at the bottom of thousands of articles on the web and in the newspapers worldwide, without always fully understanding what it stands for, behind those three letters mentionned in passing during news flashes on radio and television broadcasts, or appearing under the photos that illustrate the news, lies a global network of several hundred journalists, driven by an ambition to offer their clients the fastest and most reliable information possible.
AFP has forged its strength from its unique perspective on the world, enriched by the six languages it operates in. This unifying force is a diverse and shared vision, regardless of the nationality of its journalists.
As a wholesaler of news, AFP sells its wires, photos, videos, live coverage, fact-checks and infographics to thousands of clients worldwide, the vast majority of whom are other media outlets that value our unique perspective, our rigor, and our independence.
AFP is facing financial difficulties, like many media organisations. To cut costs, management wants to undermine its very foundation and strength: the mobility of its journalists throughout its global network. Because it believes AFP can no longer afford this, it wants to reduce by two-thirds the number of expatriate positions that last three to five years.
Shortsighted plan
Only 80 to 90 positions would retain the financial support (housing, schooling for children, travel, etc.) they currently receive, while the others would be subject to significantly less advantageous local conditions (contracts under the law of the country, salaries, social protection, retirement, etc..).
The strength of the AFP network lies in the synergy between local and expatriate journalists: the in-depth expertise of the former combined with the fresh perspective of the latter and their mastery of in-house know-how. Expatriates are a key element in this balance. They help spread the company culture within the offices and protect their colleagues from pressure by local authorities, particularly in countries with authoritarian regimes.
Reducing the number of expatriates by more than two-thirds (from 270 to 80) will dangerously weaken foreign offices and undermine the principle of journalist mobility. How can you believe that drastically reducing their compensation packages will convince as many journalists to go abroad in the future? How can you believe that, in return, local salaries will be increased, given that management has set itself the objective of making savings?
More seriously, by effectively killing mobility, this reform will cause the agency’s network to collapse – a network in which management is also considering merging bureaus, with the risk of becoming detached from the field, at a time when being close to what is happening has never been more important.
We are obviously aware of the financial difficulties that AFP is facing, like all players in the sector. But we believe that management’s short-sighted plan – driven solely by accounting considerations, would lead to our complete demise.
Without a strategy or a vision for the future, the Agency might stabilise its finances, but its integrity and purpose will die. If what constitutes the very essence of AFP is diluted or disappears, what added value will we have compared to our competitors?
The French state helps fund our international network in the name of our public service mission. If we turn our backs on who we are, there is a real danger that this public funding will diminish or even disappear.
As news agency reporters, we work behind the scenes, in the shadow; our names are not in the spotlight. We have only one ambition: to inform, and keep informing; to be on the ground everywhere; to go where others do not go or no longer go.
Today, given the gravity of the situation, we are appealing for the support of all our clients –media outlets, institutions, NGOs, businesses – of all those committed to maintaining the only international news agency of French and European origin in this world where information has become a battlefield.
AFP’s journalists’ association, with the support of all trade union organizations (SNJ, SNJ-CGT, FO, SUD, CFDT, CFE-CGC, CFTC) and employee representatives on the AFP board of directors.
The American reader of The Economist’s ‘our review of American History’ in short self-serving pithy paragraphs, and presents it’s self as a ‘review’ instead of a more complex and nuanced History ! In sum this is propaganda, aimed at an auidence whose actual asquentenceship with American History is minimal at best. Even if they are American: The Women and Men who trade in the Business of Markets and other forms of Investments, need a relable source of carefully packedged ‘History’ provided by Zanny Minton Beddoes and her cadre of undelings. To impress others with a kind of glib knowledge: a self-presentation that demonstrates even an ersatz iteration of mastery, in conversation, is another mode of manipulation. The Economist and its writers have harnesed a kind of ‘History’ via the predations of Madison Avenue!
In a House Of Commons debate about the appointment of Peter Mandelson, SNP MP Stephen Flynn made his feelings clear regarding Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. …
Editor: The first two paragraphs of this execise, in a bubious approximation, of the intellectual giant Bagehot?
In retrospect, the signs were there. In February 2025 Peter Mandelson was asked by the Financial Times about his relationship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The soon-to-be British ambassador to America offered a forthright response. “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”
Exactly a year on, Lord Mandelson has gone, and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is embroiled in Britain’s worst political scandal of this century. The peer lost his job in September, after emails emerged in which he questioned Epstein’s conviction for procuring a minor. On January 30th another tranche of emails revealed an intimate relationship. Lord Mandelson and Epstein giggled about strippers and joked about “a well hung young man”, in between discussing multi-million-dollar jobs post-politics and casually leaking confidential government documents. A political embarrassment has become a criminal investigation. Lord Mandelson’s behaviour raises depressing questions about the past but a more intriguing one about the present. What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?
Editor: Let me engage in a bit of self-serving prestidigitation! The Reader might even conjecture, that I follow the well worn a pastisch of what an ‘actual Bagehot’ might opine?
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“Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR,” a driverless train in east London, which has a pretend control panel for the enjoyment of toddlers. Somehow the Starmer train has still crashed.
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To add insult, former ministers shuffled to the backbenches last year were surprised to learn that Lord Mandelson had offered advice on the reshuffle, in between canapés at the White House. It is one thing to lose your job; it is another to do so at the behest of a man who will go down as a 21st-century John Profumo, a Tory minister whose exit because of sex, lies and spies became the benchmark for government-crushing scandal.
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Sir Keir’s failings on Lord Mandelson were common across parts of the Labour Party, which could never resist the charms and talents of the former minister, despite his flaws. More gifted politicians than Sir Keir have fallen prey to them.
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In a rare bout of clear-eyed analysis, Sir Keir saw the damage being done by the Mandelson scandal. He warned his cabinet that “the public don’t really see individuals in this scandal, they see politicians.” For all the prime minister’s failings, he understands the seriousness of the moment, even if he does not himself possess the means to meet it. Sir Keir is correct that the shamelessness personified by Lord Mandelson is a fatal poison for the body politic. But if he truly believed what he said, he too would go.
Editor: The Reader of this essay might even come to the unwelcome conclusion, that David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Kier Starmer represent the utter failure of the whole British Political Class! How telling that Jeremy Corbyn was/is a possible represetative of a politics of reliability, and steadfastness, that even the shade of Bagehot might have found …?
Editor: The regular reader of @NYT recalls the acent of David Brooks to the New York Times cadre of Zionist apologists, via his war mongering ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’! But who can forget the New York Times’ Bret Stephens toxic essay March 21,2023 ? The Final paragraphs of Stephens war mongering chatter is instructive of the perpetual mendacity of the Straussian!
20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War
March 21, 2023
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Then there was the argument that we could have contained Hussein indefinitely through sanctions and other means. Maybe in theory, but not in practice. The human misery caused by the sanctions against Iraq had become a fervent global cause by the late 1990s. They were internationally unsustainable. They were also easily flouted for the regime’s benefit, as the U.N.’s oil-for-food scandal laid bare.
Ultimately, the choice for the United States and our allies in early 2003 wasn’t invasion or containment. It was invasion or, over time, the quasi-rehabilitation of Hussein’s Iraq. This was a Hussein that, as the Duelfer report on Iraq’s W.M.D. noted in 2004, “wanted to recreate Iraq’s W.M.D. capability — which was essentially destroyed after 1991 — after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized.”
Finally, there is the argument that George W. Bush and his administration lied about the intelligence. I think they sincerely believed the (mis)judgments of the C.I.A., which, as the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report concluded, sincerely believed in them itself. “The intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the report noted. But it “was what they believed.” The consequences of this confusion are dangerous.
Critics of the war now make the point that the intelligence fiasco wrecked America’s credibility. It’s true. But no less damaging was the never-ending “Bush lied” charge that, 10 years later, morphed into the “Obama lied” charge when it came to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria or the suggestion that President Biden is lying about last year’s sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline. One conspiracy theory tends to beget another, in ways that are destructive to all sides.
Readers will want to know whether, knowing what I know now, I would still have supported the decision to invade. Not for the reasons givenErnst Jünger at the time. Not in the way we did it. But on the baseline question of whether Iraq, the Middle East and the world are better off for having gotten rid of a dangerous tyrant, my answer remains yes.
Editor: Mr. Stephens is the etiolated version of Ernst Jünger? Thomas R. Nevin book provides vauable insights into Ernst Jünger!
Gavin Newsom has a memoir coming out this month, “Young Man in a Hurry” — another heavy hint that he intends to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. To judge by some of the more fawning media profiles (Vogue describes him as “lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque”), he’s practically already won.
Democrats should be careful whom they crush on. Newsom’s record as governor of California is a Republican strategist’s perfect foil. Among the more salient points:
Editor: Stephens does not wastes valuable time with his wan introduction before the Main Event: Stephens self-presentation as an critic of Newsom’s record of political incompetence, yet the fact that Stephens is a Straussian of a kind, the ‘as if’ at play here is that the reader suffers from the same self-serving political mendacity that afflicts Stephens? The Reader need only look at this L.A. Times essay of September 7, 2018:
How eight elite San Francisco families funded Gavin Newsom’s political ascent
Gavin Newsom wasn’t born rich, but he was born connected — and those alliances have paid handsome dividends throughout his career.
A coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families has backed him at every step of his political rise, which in November could lead next to his election as governor of California.
San Francisco society’s “first families” — whose names grace museum galleries, charity ball invitations and hospital wards — settled on Newsom, 50, as their favored candidate two decades ago, said Willie Brown, former state Assembly speaker and former mayor of the city.
“He came from their world, and that’s why they embraced him without hesitancy and over and above everybody else,” said Brown, who is a mentor to Newsom. “They didn’t need to interview him. They knew what he stood for.”
A Times review of campaign finance records identified eight of San Francisco’s best-known families as being among Newsom’s most loyal and long-term contributors. Among those patrons are the Gettys, the Pritzkers and the Fishers, whose families made their respective fortunes in oil, hotels and fashion. They first backed him when he was a restaurateur and winery owner running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1998, and have continued their support through the governor’s race.
They are not Newsom’s largest donors: The families in total have given about $2 million of the $61 million that donors have contributed to his campaigns and independent committees backing those bids. But they gave while he was a relative unknown, providing crucial support to a political newcomer in the years before his campaign accounts piled high with cash from labor unions, Hollywood honchos, tech billionaires and donors up and down the state.
Now the families appear poised to see their investments pay off.
These donors are mostly liberal, inspired by Newsom’s history as an early supporter of progressive causes, including same-sex marriage as San Francisco mayor in 2004. But some are Republicans, including President Trump’s new ambassador to Austria, who are drawn by Newsom’s background as a small businessman.
The front-runner’s opponents have attacked him for his connections. During the primary, two of his Democratic rivals, Antonio Villaraigosa and John Chiang, painted Newsom as the beneficiary of wealth and privilege. John Cox, his GOP opponent in the November election, reiterated the theme in a new website titled “Fortunate $on.” And an independent expenditure committee supporting the Republican spent a quarter-million dollars late last month on an ad calling Newsom “a child of privilege, his path greased by family and political connections and billionaire patrons.”
Newsom, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this article, has long been tied to San Francisco society.
His father, Bill, was a lifelong friend of Gordon Getty, the son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty — they attended high school together. Bill Newsom later managed the Getty family trust on behalf of Gordon, estimated by Forbes to be worth more than $2 billion in 2018. Bill Newsom was so close with the family that he helped deliver the ransom money after the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson, John Paul Getty III.
Editor: Bret Stephens streches his Straussian Musculature ?
Affordability.
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And in 16 California counties, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Alameda, a six-figure salary can still be deemed “low-income” for a family of three, according to the state’s housing department.
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Poverty and income inequality.
California also has one of the country’s highest rates of income inequality: In 2022, the average income of the top 5 percent was nearly $600,000 higher than the average income of the bottom 20 percent.
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Homelessness.
“California alone accounted for 44 percent of all individuals who experienced chronic homelessness in the country,” according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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Flight.
Last year, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation found that another Californian leaves the state every minute and 44 seconds, the fastest rate in the nation.
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Education.
Cal Matters found that while the state had increased “per pupil spending by 102 percent since 2013, reading comprehension has remained flat while math skills have dropped.”
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Energy costs.
It also has to do with the regulatory burden Newsom has imposed on its energy suppliers, potentially leading to the loss of 20 percent of its refining capacity in a single year.
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Crime.
Result: “Driven by larcenies, property crime jumped after Prop 47 compared to the nation and comparison states,” according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Newsom also opposed a 2024 ballot measure, Proposition 36, that reversed much of Prop 47. It passed anyway — with 68 percent of the vote.
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Wokeness.
Newsom understands that Democrats’ obsession with progressive social justice causes, and the censorious spirit that goes with it, hurt the party in 2024, which is why he has gone out of his way to engage with right-wing influencers on his podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom.”
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Editor: Stephens Under the rubric of Political Kitch.
As the early swooning over Newsom suggests, some voters’ hearts are fluttering over the prospect of his candidacy. Democrats who take the 2028 stakes seriously should stick to just using their brains.
Headline: Starmer gives dossier to police on Peter Mandelson’s Epstein emails
Sub-headline: Prime minister has asked officials to press ahead with legislation to remove Mandelson from Lords as he faces investigation over leaked email allegations
Sir Keir Starmer has handed police a dossier about Lord Mandelson allegedly leaking highly sensitive information on the economy to Jeffrey Epstein.
On Tuesday morning the Cabinet Office sent the Metropolitan Police details about emails from the then-business secretary to the late paedophile financier.
Starmer told his cabinet that the alleged leaks were “disgraceful”, and has asked officials to draw up legislation to remove Mandelson’s peerage “as quickly as possible”. He added that Mandelson had “let his country down”. Legislation which will remove Mandelson’s peerage and titles is expected to be presented within the next few weeks.
A spokesman for the prime minister said an “initial review of the documents” found “likely market sensitive information around the 2008 crash” seems to have been passed on from Mandelson to Epstein.
Downing Street added that “only people operating in an official capacity had access to this information” and that “strict handling” procedures appeared to have been “compromised”.
The police have been sent an “initial assessment” of the emails contained in the Epstein files by the Cabinet Office, with officials giving their opinion that the rules around handling confidential information had been broken. This is designed to help police determine whether the threshold for the offence of misconduct in public office has been met.
Starmer said he was “not reassured that the totality of the information” about Mandelson and Epstein had “yet emerged”.
Scotland Yard is reviewing the allegations that Mandelson committed a criminal offence by leaking Downing Street emails and inside information to Epstein when he was business secretary.
Baroness Harman, a former Labour deputy leader, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the government should push ahead with primary legislation to strip Mandelson of his peerage while reforming the Lords “concurrently”.
She said: “What Peter Mandelson has done is pass a stain over not just this government but over politics as a whole. I’m sure the government are in absolutely no doubt about the seriousness of it. It was in the manifesto. There was a proposal of reform of the Lords. In the meantime I think the prime minister could be advising the King to stop him being a privy counsellor.
“I also think he’s on leave of absence at the moment from the House of Lords having stepped out of the Lords to be our ambassador. It would be good for the Lords to pass a motion to say that he’s not to reapply to come back in.
“I think it could be done concurrently. It could be that under the current procedure the government bring in a bill to strip Peter Mandelson of his title of being a peer but at the same time the government bring in through the Lords changed processes to actually modernise the rules.”
The Liberal Democrats said that they would be prepared to work on a cross-party basis to pass a “simple” act of parliament to strip Mandelson of his peerage.
Karin Smyth, a health minister, told Times Radio: “We don’t have a majority in the Lords, which is why … it needs to be approached on a cross-party basis. Legislation on these sorts of matters actually gets quite complicated on the sort of criteria and the rules and how that’s done.”
Smyth said everyone was “learning and seeing shocking levels of emails” from Mandelson, who “was not forthcoming”.
Asked if it reflected poorly on Starmer, Smyth told Times Radio: “This is a shocking state of affairs. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But at this time, a couple of years ago, Peter Mandelson was very active in all aspects of public life.”
Smyth also said the peer’s interview with The Times, in which he said he wanted to “reset”, showed he was not taking the allegations seriously. Smyth told Sky News it reminded her of “men that have been involved in similar sorts of behaviour” who “seem to not be able to recognise their own self”.
Harman said she had long believed Mandelson to be untrustworthy, but “could never have believed” he would leak information while a cabinet minister.
She said: “I was of the view that Peter Mandelson was untrustworthy from the 1990s, but he was appointed by Tony Blair, he was appointed by Gordon Brown, and appointed again by Sir Keir Starmer.
“But even I, who had a view that he was untrustworthy, I could never have believed that, Gordon Brown having appointed him to the cabinet, that he would sit in that cabinet and leak information whilst the government was struggling to protect the country from the global financial crisis.”
Brown, who was the subject of several of the leaks, said the information in the Epstein files was “shocking” and called for the government to investigate.
Downing Street earlier said it had asked the cabinet secretary to conduct a review of “all available information” about Mandelson’s contacts with Epstein during his time as a minister.
Mandelson has resigned from the Labour Party over the documents, which suggest he was paid $75,000 by Epstein. He said he had no recollection of the payment. Mandelson confirmed that his husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, was given $10,000 by Epstein to cover the cost of an osteopathy course.
In an exclusive interview with The Times after quitting Labour, Mandelson said: “The decision wasn’t easy but I feel better for it as I need to reset. I am a New Labour person and always will be wherever the current party situates itself. But I think I want a sea change. I want to be an outsider looking in and not the other way round.”
The documents appear to reveal the extent of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein. In 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, they suggest he passed on a memo from Nick Butler, a senior adviser to Brown, which suggested the government should sell off assets to pay down debt incurred from bailing out Britain’s banks and also apparently discussed plans for potential tax cuts.
Epstein immediately responded “what salable [sic] assets”. The reply was land and property. Later that year Brown announced plans to sell £16 billion of assets including the Dartford Tunnel and Channel Tunnel Rail Link.
In another exchange it appears that Mandelson forwarded an email sent to Brown’s secret Downing Street email address by Baroness Vadera, one of his closest economic advisers and a minister. The memo exposed divisions at the top of government over the handling of the financial crisis.
In April 2010 Mandelson appears to have sent Epstein a note about a meeting between Alistair Darling, then the chancellor, and Larry Summers, who was then the US treasury secretary. The next day he sent details of a meeting between himself and Summers, including banking regulation.
Days before Labour was lost the 2010 election, Mandelson apparently confirmed details of a planned €500 billion bailout of the euro, telling Epstein it “Sd be announced tonight”.
He also seemed to give Epstein warning of Brown’s resignation as prime minister, claiming he had “finally got him to go” hours before the news became public. On Monday, Brown said he had written to the cabinet secretary last year asking him to investigate the “disclosure of confidential and market-sensitive information from the then business department”.
Butler, whose memo was seemingly passed to Epstein, said Mandelson was guilty of a “disgusting breach of trust” that was “presumably intended to give Epstein the chance to make money”.
Meanwhile the former US president Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, have also agreed to testify in person before Congress as part of its investigation into Epstein. They made an 11th-hour offer to appear before the oversight committee after the House prepared to vote to hold them in contempt.
For months, the Clintons had refused to testify, describing the subpoena by the committee’s Republican chairman as “invalid and legally unenforceable”.
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