Lord Peter Mandelson once memorably said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Indeed over three decades at the top of British public life, he has shown a penchant for relaxing intensely in the yachts, homes and holiday pads of the super-wealthy.
When the Labour peer was made ambassador to Donald Trump’s White House, he promised to “stay below the radar” – but the merest glance at his past record showed that to be a highly unlikely prospect.
The original spin doctor, once branded the “Prince of Darkness”, Mandelson was an important figure in the rehabilitation of the Labour party in opposition from the mid-1980s, helping to shape its pitch to the public, alongside the young Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
With a keen eye for political nous, he gave Morgan McSweeney, now Keir Starmer’s powerful chief of staff and one of the architects of the general election victory last year, one of his first jobs in the Labour party.
But Mandelson has always “flown close to the sun” as one former colleague put it – in particular, cultivating the company of the kind of wealthy power-brokers Theresa May called “citizens of nowhere”.
He is fond of reminding journalists who reproduce the “intensely relaxed” remark that the full quote included the caveat, “as long as they pay their taxes”.
But it is unclear whether he ever checked the fiscal contributions of his mega-rich friends – including “best pal” Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Mandelson is seen lounging in a white bathrobe in a photograph that emerged this week.
Money was ultimately at the heart of Mandelson’s two resignations from Tony Blair’s Labour government, in 1998 and again just three years later.
His first exit, from the role of trade and industry secretary, concerned an undeclared £373,000 loan he had taken from wealthy colleague Geoffrey Robinson to buy a London house, while the pair were in opposition. Robinson, a successful businessman, stepped down from the post of paymaster general alongside Mandelson.
At the time, Mandelson said: “I should have been open about it – and in so doing I would have protected myself from the appearance of a conflict of interest. I didn’t and I have paid a very big price for it.”
Brought back into the fold as Northern Ireland secretary, Mandelson submitted another resignation letter in 2001 when it emerged that he had contacted the Home Office in 1998 on behalf of billionaire Indian-born businessman Srichand Hinduja, who was seeking British citizenship.
Hinduja was a £1m donor to the high-profile Millennium Dome project in North Greenwich, south-east London, which Mandelson was then overseeing. There was no suggestion Mandelson himself benefited from Hinduja’s largesse.
In his next public role, as the EU’s trade commissioner from 2004 to 2008, Mandelson continued to pal around with the wealthy and powerful.
His friend Nathaniel Rothschild, of the banking dynasty, lost a libel case against the Daily Mail in 2012, over a trip Mandelson had taken with Rothschild to meet the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in 2005.
The paper had reported that Mandelson and Rothschild were part of a group that flew from the champagne-fuelled Davos summit in Switzerland to Moscow and on by private jet to Siberia. There, amid temperatures of -30C, the group watched an ice hockey match and partook of a traditional “banya” sauna session, in which participants are hit with birch leaves.
Rothschild insisted the trip was “entirely recreational” and that the aluminium magnate Deripaska’s desire to meet the man responsible for EU trade policy was, “because Mandelson was an interesting and highly intelligent and, you know, fantastic guy”. The judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, disagreed, ruling that idea was “quite unrealistic”.
The connection between Mandelson and Deripaska came under scrutiny in 2008, after Gordon Brown shocked Westminster by giving him a peerage – and a third shot at being a cabinet minister.
Just two days later, a Sunday Times story – which it subsequently emerged had been briefed by the then shadow chancellor George Osborne – claimed Mandelson had “dripped pure poison” about Brown, after the pair had met on Deripaska’s yacht, moored close to Rothschild’s family villa in Corfu.
An infuriated Rothschild, who had known Osborne since the pair were at Oxford together and was irked that private conversations had become public, subsequently claimed the future chancellor had sought a donation to the Tory party from Deripaska – something Osborne denied.
At the time, much of the public scrutiny of this unedifying scrap fell on Osborne; but it underlined the continuing close relationships between Mandelson and the jet set.
After Labour lost the 2010 general election, bringing an end to Mandelson’s ministerial career, Ed Miliband was asked at a leadership hustings whether there was a place for him in his shadow cabinet. “All of us believe in dignity in retirement,” he replied.
But while he did step back from frontline politics, far from retiring, Mandelson opted to exploit the earning power of his formidable contacts book and long experience of media management.
With Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, a close ally from the New Labour years, he founded a successful policy consultancy, Global Counsel, of which he is understood to be in the process of selling his shareholding. Its past clients have included the Qatari Free Zones Authority, the Chinese fast-fashion brand Shein and social media platform TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Before taking up his post in Washington, Mandelson had advocated closer links with China. The Guardian raised questions earlier this year about Global Counsel’s connections to a group called the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, which experts believe is a Communist party influence operation.
At the time, Mandelson said: “I have more important things to deal with just now than your propaganda and I am making no comment.”
The ambassador’s easy familiarity with the rich and powerful appears to have served him well in Washington – Trump gushed about his “beautiful accent” when the UK-US trade deal was announced in May. And Mandelson is an adept host at the endless official drinks parties in the spacious, Lutyens-designed embassy residence.
Yet despite his value to Starmer, some senior Labour figures believe that after the latest revelations about his closeness to Epstein, Mandelson could yet be forced into an extraordinary third resignation.
