by Bishop Ceirion H Dewar, TCW
PETER Mandelson has resigned from the Labour Party and stepped down from the House of Lords following his exposure in the web of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Documents released by the US Department of Justice reveal payments allegedly totalling $75,000 (£55,000) from Epstein to Mandelson and his partner in 2003 and 2004. A photograph places Mandelson in Epstein’s Paris flat, in his underwear, a detail his spokesmen dismiss with feigned ignorance.
Mandelson denies recollection of the funds, questions the authenticity of the documents, and offers apologies to victims whose suffering he claims to regret. Yet as a serving minister, he stayed in the American financier’s properties while Epstein was serving jail time for child sex offences, maintaining contact with Epstein post-conviction, advising on early release and affirming loyalty with words such as ‘your friends stay with you and love you’. This is not association by accident: it is complicity by choice. That was not all. Mandelson repeatedly leaked confidential documents to Epstein while serving in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, including plans for a multi-billion-pound EU bailout, Mr Brown’s resignation and the potential sale of government land and property. A criminal investigation has been launched.
Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister and leader of the party Mandelson once shaped, sacked him as Ambassador to the United States in September when earlier links surfaced. Now, with fresh revelations, Starmer has responded to calls for Mandelson to forfeit his peerage and to testify before the US Congress. Disciplinary proceedings are under way; Mandelson’s resignation pre-empted expulsion. Opposition leaders – Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey, Stephen Flynn – demand inquiries and full accountability.
The scandal unfolds not in isolation but as a symptom of deeper decay. Scripture speaks plainly to such matters. ‘Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm,’ warns Proverbs 13:20. Mandelson walked not with fools but with a monster, one whose exploitation of the vulnerable echoes the ancient sins of power unchecked. Tradition, from the Church Fathers to the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment, demands that public men embody virtue, or at least its semblance, lest the polity crumble. Duty binds the statesman to the common good. Order requires that rot be excised before it poisons the whole.