The Great Betrayer
What would you call a senior Government minister who leaked sensitive government documents to a hostile power? A spy? A traitor?
So here’s a jolly thought for you: if it weren’t for the anachronistic nonsense that is the House of Lords, stuffed with peers appointed on the whim of a here-today-gone-tomorrow prime minister, Peter Mandelson would not have been in a position to sell out his colleagues — and his country.
He was back in government in 2009 — having previously been forced to resign not once but twice — because Gordon Brown, who couldn’t stand him, thought that with his experience both as an EU Trade Commissioner and as a wily political fixer, he would bolster a struggling government in the aftermath of a near-fatal global financial melt-down.
But Mandelson was no longer an MP, and British political practice dictates that Government ministers must be a member of one or other houses of parliament. So hey presto: by the stroke of a pen, the Prince of Darkness, aka Peter Mandelson, is transmogrified into Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham.
Sorted. And no one could have been better pleased than Jeffrey Epstein, by this time a convicted sex offender but still nursing his network of rich and powerful men. He already had a bona fide British Prince on his books, and now he had a British Lord to go with him.
Even better, the Lord was in effect the Number Two in the UK government. Not only did he know how that government was planning to recover from the financial crisis — something that was of immense interest to the powerful bankers and financiers who were also part of the Epstein circle — but he was more than happy to share that information in real time.
What would you call a senior Government minister who leaked sensitive government documents to a hostile power? A spy? A traitor?
Is what Mandelson did any different? Did he stop for even one nano-second to ask himself whether what he was doing might damage the national interest? Or was he so pathetically desperate to impress Epstein that it never crossed his mind?
It is hard to think of a greater political scandal since the days of John Profumo, who was forced to resign as Secretary of State for War in 1963 over an affair with Christine Keeler, who had also had an affair with a Soviet naval attaché, or a greater betrayal of his country since Kim Philby, the senior MI6 officer who was unmasked as a Soviet agent earlier the same year.
And none of it would have happened if we had done away with the House of Lords. So perhaps Keir Starmer will now put an end to it once and for all and consign their Lordships and Ladyships to the dustbin of history where they belong.
Or perhaps he won’t.
I completely agree Robin. We need an elected second house, combined with a scrapping of the current system which promotes seamless flows from politics, civil service and armed forces into jobs and incomes as “advisors” or “lobbyists”.
What I find most shocking in this and similar cases is how cheaply the British establishment can be bought.
One of the more obvious horrors of some recent governmnents is that rather than seeking advice from the Cabinet and the Civil Service, or even listening to their MPS, they have relied rather too extensively on a secretive clever spiv (cummings, mcsweeney. Previous PMs such as Wilson had what got called "kitchen cabinet" advisers. But recent PMs have appointed nodding dogs. Wilson, Macmillan, even Thatcher - had people near their equal in their cabinets and, according to my political/Civil Service friends, did ask and sometimes take the advice of these frequentlly very well informed people. Starmer is like Johnson, thinking he knows it all.