Mandelson
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The Last Days of Peter Mandelson
A Study in Lateness
1.
There is a well-known story—apocryphal, almost certainly, and therefore perfect—that Peter Mandelson, visiting a fish and chip shop in his Hartlepool constituency sometime in the 1990s, pointed to the mushy peas and asked for "some of that guacamole." Mandelson himself blames Neil Kinnock for inventing this tale, claims it was actually an American student who made the error during a 1986 by-election. But the story persists because it feels true, feels necessary, in the way that certain stories do. It captures something essential about the man: the metropolitan smoothness, the distance from ordinary life, the suspicion that behind the immaculate suits and the feline smile there was someone who had never truly understood the people he claimed to represent.
Kinnock, at Mandelson's leaving do in 1991, solemnly presented him with fish and chips wrapped in the Daily Mirror. "Enjoy the guacamole," he said.
2.
I'm thinking about lateness. Not the kind where you miss your train, but the kind that Adorno wrote about in his essay on Beethoven's late style—a turning away from the world, a refusal of synthesis, a jagged quality that suggests the artist has stopped trying to please. In February 2026, Peter Mandelson is seventy-two years old, and his lateness is of a different order. It is the lateness of exposure, of documents released, of emails that were never meant to be read by anyone but their recipients.
"I think the world of you," he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, the day before Epstein began serving an eighteen-month sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor. "I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened."
Late Mandelson is not serene. Late Mandelson is a man standing in his underwear in a photograph whose context he claims he cannot recall.
3.
His grandfather was Herbert Morrison, deputy prime minister under Clement Attlee, one of the giants who built the post-war settlement: the NHS, nationalisation, the welfare state. Morrison created the London Passenger Transport Board, organised Labour's victorious 1945 campaign, was "Lord Festival" for his leadership of the Festival of Britain. He lost sight in his right eye as an infant, left school at fourteen, worked as an errand boy. His grandson would attend Oxford, work in television, help create something called "New Labour" that his grandfather would scarcely have recognised.
Mandelson has spoken of being "biologically attached" to the Labour Party. "I was literally born into the Labour Party," he said, "and it remained my home, my family ever since."
On 1 February 2026, he resigned from that family.
4.
The Prince of Darkness. It's a nickname that flatters even as it condemns—who wouldn't rather be Milton's Satan than one of the heavenly host? The sobriquet was acquired during Mandelson's years as Labour's Director of Communications under Neil Kinnock, 1985 to 1990, when he became one of the first people to whom the term "spin doctor" was applied. He commissioned Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, to make a party political broadcast promoting Kinnock. It was called "Kinnock: The Movie." Kinnock's approval ratings rose by sixteen points.
The Conservatives still won.
5.
Ozzy Osbourne was also known as the Prince of Darkness, a fact I find oddly comforting. There's something democratic about sharing your infernal title with the man who bit the head off a bat.
6.
In Paul Rhys's extraordinary portrayal in The Deal (2003), Mandelson is a soft-spoken, feline presence who moves through the testosterone-heavy world of Scottish Labour MPs like a figure from another species entirely. After he leaves the room, one of Gordon Brown's allies stage-whispers: "Were those socks yellow?" Brown's cornerman, Charlie Whelan, remarks: "That man smells of vanilla."
It is, of course, not irrelevant that this exotic intruder into the macho world of Westminster is gay. Nor is it irrelevant that his family background is partly Jewish—his paternal grandfather, Norman Mandelson, founded the Harrow United Synagogue. His father, Tony Mandelson, was advertising manager of The Jewish Chronicle and a former officer in the Royal Dragoons. Peter would later marry a Brazilian translator named Reinaldo Avila da Silva, after twenty-seven years together, at Marylebone Town Hall in October 2023.
They have a collie named Jock.
7.
In 1971, aged seventeen, Mandelson left the Labour Party Young Socialists to join the Young Communist League, apparently in protest against the UK's support for the Vietnam War and partly because he disliked the Trotskyist Militant Tendency that had won control of the LPYS. He attended the 1978 World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana as chairman of the British Youth Council. There, along with Trevor Phillips and several future Labour cabinet colleagues, he helped frustrate Soviet attempts to push through a distorted resolution on youth in capitalist countries.
Something happened to him between Havana and New Labour. What was it? The usual: Thatcher, defeat, the long march through the institutions, the realisation that principles are luxuries for those who don't want to win. Or maybe just growing up, which is to say, growing tired.
8.
"We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."
He said this in 1998, on a trip to Silicon Valley, shortly after becoming Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Then, aware of the risk of headlines, he added hurriedly: "As long as they pay their taxes."
The addition was supposed to make it better. It didn't.
9.
The thing about scandals is that they come in clusters. Mandelson resigned from the Cabinet twice under Tony Blair—once in December 1998, once in January 2001—each time over money, each time protesting his innocence, each time creating the impression that here was a man constitutionally incapable of understanding where the line was.
The first resignation: an undeclared loan of £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, a millionaire Labour MP whose business dealings were being investigated by Mandelson's own department, used to buy a house in Notting Hill. The house, not the loan, was the problem—or rather, the non-declaration of the loan was the problem—or rather, the whole thing was the problem, the cosy world in which cabinet ministers lent each other nearly four hundred thousand pounds to buy homes in fashionable postcodes.
The second resignation: allegations that he had used his position to help secure British passports for Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja, wealthy Indian businessmen who were major donors to the Millennium Dome. An inquiry later cleared him, but by then it didn't matter.
"I'm a fighter, not a quitter," he declared at his count in Hartlepool during the 2001 election, having held his seat despite everything.
Three years later, he quit.
10.
The European Commission was supposed to be exile. Mandelson became EU Trade Commissioner in November 2004, responsible for negotiating deals on behalf of 500 million people. It was the sort of job that sounds important but carries none of the domestic valence of being, say, Home Secretary. He was out of British politics, or so everyone thought.
But something happened in Brussels. He discovered he was good at the work—the negotiations, the complexity, the multilateral chess of global trade. He had a spectacular row with Nicolas Sarkozy over farm subsidies. He cut aluminium tariffs. He travelled the world. He was photographed on yachts.
Always the yachts.
11.
In August 2008, Mandelson was a guest on the yacht of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminium oligarch, anchored off the Greek island of Corfu. Also present: Nathaniel Rothschild, heir to the banking dynasty, who had arranged the gathering at the Rothschild family villa. Also present, at various points: George Osborne, the Conservative shadow chancellor.
What followed was known as "Yachtgate"—allegations that Osborne had solicited an illegal donation from Deripaska, counter-allegations that Mandelson had granted Deripaska's business interests preferential treatment on aluminium tariffs. Gordon Brown, by then Prime Minister, said Mandelson's dealings with Deripaska had been "found to be above board."
The phrase "found to be above board" has a certain quality. It suggests that boards exist, and that one might be found beneath them.
12.
What nobody knew at the time—what wouldn't become clear for another seventeen years—was that while Mandelson was moving in these glittering circles, he was also corresponding with Jeffrey Epstein.
The financier. The friend of princes. The man with the private island.
The convicted sex offender.
13.
I want to linger on the concept of friendship, because Mandelson keeps using the word. "My best pal," he wrote in a note for Epstein's fiftieth birthday book in 2003, grinning in a bathrobe. The book was compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell. In later years, Mandelson would describe these messages as "embarrassing to see and to read."
Embarrassing. An interesting word. Embarrassment implies a social breach, a faux pas, the wrong fork at dinner. It doesn't quite capture what it means to describe a man who would later be charged with trafficking dozens of underage girls as your "best pal."
14.
In October 2008, Gordon Brown performed one of the most remarkable resurrections in modern political history. He brought Mandelson back from Brussels, made him a peer—Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham—and installed him as Business Secretary.
The two men had been enemies for fourteen years, ever since Mandelson had backed Blair for the leadership in 1994 and Brown had felt betrayed. Now Brown needed him. The government was flailing, the financial crisis was exploding, and Brown required someone with Mandelson's serpentine skills to help navigate the wreckage.
It worked, after a fashion. Mandelson became "First Secretary of State," effectively deputy prime minister. He was the eminence grise, the survivor, the man who always came back.
Tony Blair once said that his project would be complete "when the Labour Party learns to love Peter Mandelson."
Blair set the bar too high.
15.
The kidney stone incident is almost too perfect. In 2008, while Trade Commissioner, Mandelson drank a glass of Chinese yoghurt in front of reporters to demonstrate his confidence in Chinese dairy products following a contamination scandal that had killed six children. Shortly afterwards, he was hospitalised with a kidney stone.
His doctors assured everyone the two events were unrelated. The symbolism, however, was irresistible: Mandelson, brought low by the very substances he had so publicly consumed, his body betraying the performance of confidence.
16.
After Labour lost the 2010 election, Mandelson published his memoirs, The Third Man, at record speed—faster than Blair could get his own book out. The title was a reference to his role alongside Blair and Brown, the shadowy third figure in the triumvirate that had remade British politics. But it also evoked the Graham Greene novel, the Carol Reed film: Harry Lime in the sewers of Vienna, the penicillin racketeer, the man who looked down from the Ferris wheel at the "dots" below and asked: "Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?"
Mandelson was annoyed that people kept making this comparison. He was also the one who had chosen the title.
17.
The years between 2010 and 2024 were a kind of limbo. Mandelson founded a lobbying firm, Global Counsel, with his former special adviser Benjamin Wegg-Prosser. He advised Shein, Shell, Palantir, Alibaba, TikTok. He was criticised for being a member of the House of Lords while running a lobbying operation. In 2021, he was the only Labour peer to vote against an amendment denouncing genocide in Xinjiang.
He rented a cottage from Nat Rothschild on the Stowell Park estate. He made regular appearances on Times Radio. He offered advice to Keir Starmer as Starmer sought to remake Labour in the Blairite image. He stood for Chancellor of Oxford University in 2024 and came fourth out of thirty-eight candidates. William Hague won.
He was, in other words, a fixture. Part of the furniture. A presence who had been around so long that people had stopped asking whether he should be.
18.
In December 2024, Starmer nominated Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States.
It was seen as a bold choice. Mandelson had trade experience, diplomatic contacts, a lifetime of political manoeuvring. He would be dealing with Donald Trump in his second term, and who better to handle Trump than a man who could match him for transactional ruthlessness?
Mandelson had previously called Trump "reckless and a danger to the world" and "little short of a white nationalist and racist." When these quotes surfaced, he claimed he had been describing the views of the British people rather than speaking for himself.
Trump, when they met in the Oval Office, reportedly said: "God, you're a good-looking fellow, aren't you?" He later sent Mandelson a signed note: "Peter, great job!"
19.
The residence of the British Ambassador to the United States is a Queen Anne mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, designed by Edwin Lutyens. Mandelson brought his husband and his collie. He worked on a trade deal to mitigate Trump's tariffs. He was credited with diplomatic triumphs. During Starmer's first visit to the White House, Mandelson arranged for the Prime Minister to theatrically produce a letter from King Charles inviting Trump for a state visit.
It was a classic Mandelson stunt. For seven months, everything seemed to be working.
Then The Sun newspaper published the emails.
20.
"I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened."
"I continue to follow closely and am here whenever you need."
He told Epstein to "fight for early release." He suggested techniques from Sun Tzu's Art of War. He maintained the correspondence after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor.
"Perhaps because I am a gay man," Mandelson later said, "I may have been blinded to Epstein's criminal behaviour."
It's a remarkable sentence. I've read it many times and I still don't entirely understand what he means by it.
21.
On 11 September 2025, Keir Starmer dismissed Mandelson as Ambassador. The Foreign Office cited the emails as showing that "the depth and extent of Lord Mandelson's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is materially different from that known at the time of his appointment."
Mandelson issued a letter to Embassy staff. "The circumstances surrounding the announcement today are ones which I deeply regret," he wrote. "I continue to feel utterly awful about my association with Epstein twenty years ago and the plight of his victims."
He accepted Starmer's decision, he said, because he had "no alternative."
Trump, asked if he had sympathy for Mandelson, claimed not to know who he was. "I don't know him, actually." This was demonstrably false—they had met multiple times, there were photographs—but Trump has always understood that denial is its own kind of power.
22.
There followed a strange interregnum. Mandelson returned to the UK. He went on leave from the House of Lords. He wrote columns for the Spectator, gave interviews to The Times, appeared on Sunday morning television. He seemed to be attempting a rehabilitation, as he had done so many times before.
The Epstein files kept coming.
In late January 2026, the US Department of Justice released another tranche: more than three million pages. Among them were bank records showing that Epstein had transferred $75,000 to accounts linked to Mandelson and his husband between 2003 and 2004. There were emails showing that Epstein had paid £10,000 for Reinaldo da Silva's osteopathy course in 2009. There was a photograph of Mandelson in his underwear, standing next to a woman whose face had been redacted.
Mandelson said he had "no recollection" of the money transfers.
23.
But it was the leaked documents that destroyed him.
On 13 June 2009, while serving as Business Secretary—effectively deputy prime minister—Mandelson had allegedly forwarded to Epstein a confidential Downing Street memo written by Nick Butler, special adviser to Gordon Brown. The memo proposed £20 billion in asset sales and revealed Labour's tax policy plans.
In December 2009, Mandelson allegedly told Epstein that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon should "mildly threaten" Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, over a proposed tax on bankers' bonuses. He was "trying hard" to water down the policy, he wrote.
Gordon Brown, informed of these allegations, issued a statement calling Mandelson's actions "inexcusable and unpatriotic." He said he had provided information to the Metropolitan Police.
24.
On 1 February 2026, Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party. He wrote to the general secretary, Hollie Ridley, explaining that he did not wish to cause "further embarrassment."
On 4 February, following pressure from Starmer, the Speaker of the House of Lords announced that Mandelson would retire from Parliament effective the following day.
The Metropolitan Police announced they had launched a criminal investigation into alleged misconduct in public office.
The European Commission said it would examine whether Mandelson, during his time as EU Trade Commissioner, had breached its code of conduct.
Starmer told his cabinet that Mandelson had "let his country down" and that his failure to remember $75,000 in payments was "gobsmacking." He should no longer be a member of the House of Lords, the Prime Minister said, or use the title.
25.
What is a title, anyway? Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham. It sounds like something from Tolkien, these layered honorifics, these county boundaries that mean nothing to anyone who doesn't collect stamps. A life peerage cannot ordinarily be removed—the last time it happened was during World War I, when aristocrats who sided with Germany had their titles stripped. But Mandelson could retire, which is what he did, though the title would technically remain his unless Parliament passed legislation to take it away.
His grandfather Herbert Morrison had been Baron Morrison of Lambeth. The elevation to the peerage had come near the end of his career, a consolation prize after losing the Labour leadership to Hugh Gaitskell. Morrison died in 1965, the same month the London County Council was abolished—the body he had led with such distinction in the 1930s, creating the Green Belt, unifying the transport system, building a vision of municipal socialism that his grandson would spend his career dismantling.
26.
I keep returning to the mushy peas. The story works because it captures a truth about New Labour that its architects never fully grasped: that you cannot triangulate your way out of class. Mandelson could rebrand the party, commission films about Kinnock, deploy focus groups and rapid rebuttal, but he could not make himself belong in a chip shop in Hartlepool. The performance was always visible. The socks were always yellow. The smell was always vanilla.
And yet—and this is the complexity that any honest account must reckon with—the people of Hartlepool elected him, repeatedly. In 2001, after both resignations, after all the scandals, they returned him to Parliament with an increased majority. They knew what he was. They voted for him anyway.
It was only in 2024, twenty years after he'd left the seat to become Trade Commissioner, that Hartlepool elected a Conservative for the first time in its history.
27.
Geoff Dyer, in The Last Days of Roger Federer, writes about the particular melancholy of watching greatness fade—not the sudden injury or the dramatic collapse, but the slow attrition, the moment when you realise the player you're watching is no longer the player you remember. Late style, he suggests, can be a form of transcendence, a stripping away of ornament to reveal something essential. But it can also be simple diminishment, the embarrassing truth that time makes fools of us all.
Mandelson's late style is neither transcendent nor diminished. It is, instead, exposed. The emails were always there, the payments were always made, the friendships were always maintained. What changed was that we could see them. The performance continued long after the audience should have left.
28.
There's a moment in one of the email chains when Epstein mentions that he has spent an hour with "Rinaldo"—Mandelson's partner—and Mandelson responds: "You now see the problems. I cannot talk to him about these things at all, he won't listen."
What were "these things"? What couldn't Reinaldo hear?
I don't know, and perhaps it doesn't matter. What strikes me is the intimacy implied—the level of access Epstein had to Mandelson's domestic life, the ease with which a convicted sex offender could occupy space that should have been private. The boundary had been dissolved, and Mandelson seems not to have noticed, or not to have cared.
"Remind him that to avoid a gift-tax filing it must be a loan," Mandelson wrote, when Epstein was sending money to his partner.
29.
In November 2011, Mandelson emailed Epstein: "Need a Lord on the board?"
Epstein replied: "An interesting visual."
I've thought about this exchange more than I probably should. What boards? What visuals? What was being offered here—legitimacy, access, the patina of British aristocracy applied to whatever enterprise Epstein was running? Mandelson was by then out of government but still a peer, still connected, still able to open doors.
"An interesting visual." It sounds like something an art dealer would say about a problematic painting—the kind where you love the composition but worry about the provenance.
30.
Mandelson dedicated his life to the Labour Party. He said so in his resignation letter, and there's no reason to doubt him. The party was his inheritance, his identity, his home. He watched it lose elections throughout his childhood and adolescence, watched it tear itself apart in the 1980s, and he decided—with others, but perhaps more single-mindedly than others—that it must be remade. New Labour was his project. The 1997 landslide was his vindication. Everything that came after—the wars, the spin, the intensely relaxed attitude towards the filthy rich—was the logical consequence of choices made in the name of electability.
What he never seemed to understand, even at the end, was that the choices had costs. That the networks cultivated, the friendships maintained, the dinners on yachts and the weekends in Corfu would eventually surface. That the man in the bathrobe, grinning for Epstein's birthday book, was always going to be seen.
"My project will be complete," Tony Blair said, "when the Labour Party learns to love Peter Mandelson."
The party never learned. And now, in his seventy-second year, Mandelson has been expelled from its embrace—not by the left-wing critics who always distrusted him, not by the unions or the Militants or the true believers, but by documents released from a dead man's files. The exposure came from America, from the Department of Justice, from the very country where he had hoped to end his career in glory.
He is still Peter Mandelson. He still has his mansion in North London, his cottage on the Rothschild estate, his husband and his collie. He will not, one imagines, suffer materially. But the title is tainted now, the comeback impossible. The Prince of Darkness has run out of shadows to hide in.
Late Mandelson stands in his underwear in a photograph he claims not to remember, in a location he claims not to recognise, beside a woman whose face has been redacted to protect her from association with him.
This is not how it was supposed to end.
But then, it never is.
February 2026
