Mandelson’s weakness for big banks shows how the UK has become prone to moles and grifters

As a journalist who deals with top businesspeople and politicians as part of the job, I grew accustomed to the requests. Bankers, fund managers and investors wanted to know anything I had gleaned from chatting with ministers and their advisers – literally anything, no matter how incidental.

Sometimes they would ask specific questions: was X mentioned, did Y come up? Occasionally, if they got wind that I might be meeting ministers – say, at a party conference or a set piece like the Mansion House dinner – they would try to prime me to raise a particular subject. It was obvious what they wanted: to learn something, to get ahead, to steal an edge, to make a killing. I never did. But I always knew the game they were playing.

Peter Mandelson, who is set to step down from the House of Lords, must have known too. Of course he did. You do not ascend as high as he did, glide along the corridors of power or sit in on the most sensitive meetings without understanding how valuable information can be. When he was not full-time politicking, he ran his own business communications consultancy. He had clients; his friends had clients. He counted chairs and CEOs among his pals, alongside his political colleagues.

He knew all right. He understood that much of what he was hearing was confidential and commercially significant. It could move markets; people and companies would act upon it. Advance notice was enormously valuable. It enabled profit – and accordingly, it carried a price.

To pretend otherwise, to deny and obfuscate, is to do Mandelson – the ultimate Westminster, Whitehall and media sophisticate – a disservice. His entire career was built on manipulation: of the message and of the situation. If anyone understood what was at stake, it was he.

Mandelson sat at the heart of government, serving as business secretary and as the prime minister’s effective right-hand man. What he was seeing and hearing mattered. There he was, in the room, while affairs of immense magnitude – the banking crisis, the rescue of the banks and the government’s subsequent reparation – were being discussed. Files detailing next moves and plans crossed his screen. And, as these most recent Epstein files seem to show, he passed them on.

It is shocking and brazen. All the more so because Mandelson was not naive. He had been caught out twice before and resigned over the very issue of his dealings with powerful business figures. Yet here he was again, apparently cosying up to wealthy contacts, earning their trust and regard and, as the payments to his partner suggest, their reward.

It is also shocking because his apparent behaviour amounted to a gross act of betrayal – a level of corruption rarely witnessed in British politics. Forget cash for questions; this was big-time and global, reaching the peaks of the City and Wall Street. Mandelson was, perhaps, benefiting some of the biggest names on the planet and, in doing so, betraying his colleagues.

The banks seem to have had a mole – a spy – in Downing Street. Extraordinary and utterly shaming. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, two decent and honourable men, were striving to save the financial system, struggling to stop banks collapsing, grappling to prevent contagion and a domino effect that could have plunged the world’s markets into meltdown. And alongside them sat Mandelson, reportedly tipping off Epstein and the banks, keeping them one step ahead.

Brown is famously thoughtful and cautious – scarred by experience, he learned long ago to tread carefully. He is following due process by writing to the Metropolitan Police commissioner asking that they investigate. He would probably not stoop to contacting Mandelson directly and letting rip; he would not wish to say something in anger that might later haunt him. But he could be forgiven if he did.

From the very beginning – from the moment Brown struck his pact with Tony Blair at the Granita restaurant in Islington, only for Blair to renege and refuse to stand aside – Mandelson was working against him. Then, as now, Mandelson briefed on why Blair was the superior choice of leader.

Brown put aside his misgivings because he believed in Mandelson’s worth. He offered him the chance to rehabilitate and rebuild. Mandelson seems to have repaid him by serving those who mattered more.

Alistair Darling, as chancellor, bore the brunt. He had to withstand threats from well-informed bankers as the government moved to tax bonuses. In his memoir, Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11, Darling recounts a conversation with Jamie Dimon, the head of US banking giant JP Morgan: “Mr Dimon was very, very angry … he said that his bank bought a lot of UK debt and he wondered if that was now such a good idea. I pointed out that they bought our debt because it was a good business deal for them. He went on to say they were thinking of building a new office in London but they had to reconsider that now.”

In the files, Mandelson seems to write to Epstein: “Treasury digging in but I am on [the] case.”

A subsequent email shows Epstein asking whether Dimon should call Darling. Mandelson apparently replied that Dimon should “mildly threaten” him.

Darling died in 2023 and cannot tell us what he would make of this now. We can only imagine. For his sake, for Brown’s – and for our faith in public office – the police must intervene.