LABOUR grandee Peter Mandelson told a journalist to “f*** off” when he was asked about his links to disgraced paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Mandelson, Keir Starmer’s choice to serve as ambassador to Donald Trump’s US administration, is known to have had a relationship with Epstein, who in 2008 was placed on the US sex offenders list for assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
However, emails reported last week, released due to a Financial Conduct Authority tribunal case, suggest that Mandelson kept in touch with Epstein until at least 2012.
In an email sent from the paedophile to then-JP Morgan chief executive Jes Staley in May 2012, Epstein wrote: “Peter Mandelson here at 5 – staying a couple of days.”
Staley replied: “If I get back in time, I will swing by.”
Mandelson forwarded a separate email to Epstein in August 2012, leading to media reports last week that the Labour peer had been in contact with the paedophile until “at least” that date.
The Times reported that emails from Epstein had further suggested that Mandelson previously stayed at his house in Manhattan in 2009 – while the financier was serving jail time for procuring a child for prostitution.
In an interview with the Financial Times, published on Thursday, Mandelson was asked about his connections to Epstein – who was ultimately arrested on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors in 2019 before dying in a jail cell later that year.
The FT reported on an internal JP Morgan report from 2019, filed to a New York court in 2023, which said that “Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government”.
George Parker, the FT’s political editor, then reported that Mandelson had told him to “f*** off” when he asked about the connection.
“We are on our way north, on a high-speed Avanti train, when I ask Mandelson about his relationship with Epstein,” Parker wrote.
“‘I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell,’ he [Mandelson] says. ‘I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women.’
“An icy chill descends in Carriage J. 'I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?’”
Previously, a spokesperson for Mandelson has said: “Lord Mandelson very much regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein.
“This connection has been a matter of public record for some time. He never had any kind of professional or business relationship with Epstein in any form.”
The socialite, who was labelled “dangerous” by the prosecution during her three-week trial in 2021, was convicted for helping to entice vulnerable teenagers to the financier’s various properties for him to sexually abuse between 1994 and 2004.
Maxwell said at the time: "I believe Jeffrey Epstein fooled all of those in his orbit.
"His victims considered him a mentor, friend, lover. Jeffrey Epstein should have stood before you. In 2005. In 2009. And again in 2019. But today it is for me to be sentenced.”
