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McSweeney mentor Mandelson exposed in new Epstein emails

In September this year, Peter Mandelon resigned in disgrace over his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Now, it’s come out that Mandelson was still in contact with Epstein in 2016, which was eight years after Epstein plead guilty to soliciting a minor:


Prince of darkness

While Mandelson’s links were known when Keir Starmer made him ambassador to the US, the British press failed to make a big deal of his appointment. This would later change when new Epstein emails were leaked, leading to much embarrassment for the media:

Arguably, nothing which has come out this year was worse than what we already knew, which was that Mandelson continued his relationship with Epstein after the man’s conviction. Still, it does look horrendous that Mandelson was still chatting with Epstein as late as 2016, especially as he said in September this year that he felt:

utterly awful about my association with Epstein 20 years ago and the plight of his victims

We’re not sure if Mandelson knows this, but 2016 wasn’t 20 years ago.

Given that 2016 was only three years before Epstein’s death, will we discover that Mandelson kept in contact right until the end?

In the leaked email from 2016, Mandelson refers to an ‘Andrew’, with many assuming this must be the now ex-prince Andrew:

Reporting on another new email, the BBC wrote:

new documents, which were released by the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee, include an email from Epstein to Lord Mandelson on 6 November 2015, shortly after the peer’s birthday, saying “63 years old. You made it”.

Lord Mandelson replies less than 90 minutes later saying: “Just. I have decided to extend my life by spending more of it in the US”.

Epstein then replies “in the Donald White House”, referring to the US presidential election due later that week.

Epstein goes on to say “you were right about staying away from Andrew. I was right in your staying with Rinaldo [sic]”, a reference to Lord Mandelson’s now-husband Reinaldo Avilda da Silva.

Lord Mandelson declined to comment on the emails when approached by the BBC.

Importantly, while Mandelson was sacked from the ambassador position, he remains a lord, and as such he retains power over British legislation:

Ultimately, we need to abolish the House of Lords entirely; in the meantime, we’ll settle for them giving Mandelson the boot.

The McSweeney connection

At the point when Starmer made him ambassador, Mandelson was a known associate of Epstein, and he’d already left politics in disgrace twice. Why, then, would Starmer hire him?

For many, the suspicion is that Starmer listened to Morgan McSweeney – the man who currently serves as Downing Street’s chief of staff. In his book The Fraud, Paul Holden writes:

McSweeney is a long-time protégé of Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour who, in February 2017, publicly bragged that he was “working every day” to bring down Corbyn’s elected leadership. That doesn’t sound very unifying. Mandelson has been quoted saying of McSweeney:

“I don’t know who and how and when he was invented, but whoever it was . . . they will find their place in heaven”

He adds:

McSweeney joined Labour in the mid-1990s as a receptionist and then a member of the party’s media operations. During the 2001 election he was given the task of feeding data into Peter Mandelson’s famed Excalibur computer that stored information to be used by the party’s rebuttal unit.

Sordid Labour

The Mandelson-Epstein affair is just one of many scandals which are haunting Keir Starmer’s government. At this point, it’s hard to see how the PM or his chief of staff can remain in position. All we need now is for the Labour MPs under Starmer to collectively grow a backbone, and to stop briefing and start challenging.

Featured image via UKinUSA (Wikimedia) / Number 10 (Flickr) 

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.