Editorial: Mandelson’s rich lifestyle not unique to Labour’s right wing

Peter Mandelson has lit the fuse that will finally blow up the Starmer Labour leadership, although we don’t know quite yet how long the fuse is. Labour’s right wing – all those who were happy to be part of the same faction as Mandelson – are rushing to distance themelves with unseemly haste, from the biggest political scandal in half a century, around the now disgraced Labour grandee.

But leaving aside Mandelson’s personal links with the paedophile Jeffrey Epsten, about which he lied repeatedly, his lifestyle, wealth, secretive factional machinations, slavish support for every Israeli policy and, not least, his use of the labour movement for his own personal enrichment are unfortunately all typical of the outlook of many on the right wing of the Labour Party.

On the specific issue of Mandelson’s relationship with the despicable Epstein, there are not only questions for Keir Starmer to answer, but also for the media in general. It was revealed, by the Financial Times quite recently (in June 2023), that in 2009, Mandelson had stayed in Epstein’s luxury Manhattan flat – worth $70mn – at a time when he was business secretary and effectively deputy Prime Minister.

Questions need to be asked why the broadcasting media did not take this up: that a UK minister had accepted hospitality from a man, who was at the time in prison on child prostitution charges. We can be absolutely certain, that if this bit of dirt had related to any left politician, it would have been all over the BBC and national media.

Starmer shrugged off question about Mandelson in 2024

But just as important, is the fact that the FT story in June 2023, was followed up by the journalist responsible in a press conference in January 2024. Asked if he thought Mandelson, a Labour peer, had “questions to answer” about the Epstein Manhattan flat, Starmer simply shrugged it off. Did Starmer not recall this question, or the original FT exposé when he appointed Mandelson as ambassador to the USA?

It was not known until now that around the same time as Mandelson was enjoying Epstein’s hospitality, he was also sharing very sensitive government economic information with Epstein and his associates. These revelations – of which we would still have no knowledge, but for the fortuitous release of the Epstein files by the FBI – are now the subject of police inquiries, and they will lead, we hope, to serious criminal charges and jail time.

But there is another aspect to the whole Mandelson scandal that needs to be discussed by all Labour Party members and affiliated unions. Until very recently, Mandelson has had the ear of most of the important figures on the right of the party. Mandelson has never been shy in demonising the left or supporting right-wing policies. He was one of the original architects of the Tony Blair ‘New Labour’ project and he was twice brought back from disgrace to hold  high office.

After Jeremy Corbyn had been (twice) elected Labour leader, Mandelson stood up in the House of Lords and said he is “working every day to undermine Jeremy Corbyn”. And so he was, alongside his protégé, Morgan McSweeney, who was first head of Labour Together, and later (up to the present), Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. It has been suggested that McSweeney and Mandelson spoke every other day in the run-up to the 2024 general election, to keep Labour policy “on track”.

Labour Together and its dubious history

[Labour Together is a big issue in itself. It is a right-wing factional organisation – despite the name – that was in receipt of massive, undeclared donations, and for which it was fined (albeit modestly) by the Electoral Commission. It was revealed by Democracy for Sale on Thursday that Labour Together paid £30,000 to put private investigators onto journalists, to find out who had leaked information about its inner workings and its secretive conspiring for the right wing. Morgan McSweeney, according to DfS, had known about this. See Paul Holden’s excellent book on Labour Together, Fraud]

Mandelson has always been prepared to get his hands dirty in the blood and sweat of factional in-fighting and it has also been suggested that he had his own spreadsheet of likely Labour candidates running up to the last general election. Given that the Labour machinery parachuted in so many candidates over the heads or against the wishes of local Labour members, it is highly likely that many of the same right-wing careerist MPs who are now rushing to distance themselves from Mandelson, are only MPs in fact because of his support.

Another important aspect of the scandal is the way in which Mandelson used the labour movement, as an MP, a minister and then as a Labour peer, to enrich himself personally. His first two public disgraces were both over money. The first resignation, in 1998, was over his failure to disclose a secret £373,000 loan from Geoffrey Robinson, who was then a fellow minister. He was brought back to office, but two years later was forced to resign again over allegations that he had inappropriately supported the passport application of an Indian billionaire, Srichand Hinduja.

After he left office, Mandelson – like so many former Labour MPs and ministers – set up his own public relations and lobbying company, to use his many contacts and ‘friends’ in the Labour Party, to make piles of money for himself. Global Counsel, was the lobbying firm he co-founded in 2010. It counts among its clients the secretive and dangerous (for democracy) IT/service company, Palantir.

£240m contract without competitive tendering

A year ago, according to the Financial Times, Mandelson, by then US ambassador, led Keir Starmer in a visit to the company’s office in Washington. A short time later, Palantir was awarded a £240mn UK government contract without any competitive tendering. “Downing Street has refused to say”, the FT adds, “whether Sir Keir Starmer knew Palantir was a client of Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm” at the time.

It is not a case of “one rotten apple”, as so many on the Labour right wing are trying to argue. Mandelson’s connections with Epstein may be singular to him, but the lifestyle, the lobbying on behalf of big business, the hob-nobbing with billionaires, the tax-dodging and, above all, the personal enrichment, are the ‘norm’ for so many former Labour MPs.

Mandelson’s latest scandal, for example, includes him apparently “forgetting” the gift of £75,000 from Epstein. This ‘Labour’ peer, trousers a sum of money twice what most workers earn in a year, and it is just so much pocket-money to be overlooked. And still – until he became such a huge embarassment – Labour’s right-wing indulged him, met with him, listened to him, feted him, and conspired with him against the left.

But is Mandelson so much different to other former ‘Labour’ ministers? Tony Blair, thanks to his public relations firm, which works for dictatorships like the government of Kazakhstan and Gulf states, is a multi-millionaire, loved by Trump, Netanyahu and the like. There are many ‘lesser lights’, ex-Labour MPs and ministers who have also “emancipated the working class, one by one, starting with themselves”.

Take Alan Milburn, for example. He was made Health Minister in the first Blair administration, in 1997. In that role, he drove through many PFI deals on hospitals, with the result that the cost of building every new hospital was paid for afterwards many times over. The NHS today is still suffering from the river of money flowing out to the private PFI sector.

And what happened to Milburn afterwards? He joined the big financial firm, Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) as chair of its UK Health Industry Oversight Board. The aims of this body are to drive through privatisation in various elements of the NHS, so we have another former Labour minister, working against the interests of the public sector and the labour movement.

How many Labour ministers get dodgy donations TODAY?

And if we come to the present day, we have to ask how many ‘Labour’ ministers are in receipt of money – to their private parliamentary offices, of course, by lobbyists and NHS privatisers? The answer is…too many.

The website Every Doctor reports that between 2023 and 2025, the office of Wes Streeting, now Health Minister, benefitted from £224,575 in “private health care related donations”. The office of Yvette Cooper, Foreign Secretary, received £165,439 in similar donations during the same period.

And so it goes. Labour MPs are still today receiving dodgy money from private businesses and individuals, without any discussion, consultation or, in most cases, even the knowledge of their Labour members or those who voted for them. Many of them – as Tony Blair and Mandelson demonstrate perfectly – live a lavish lifestyle far above what most workers can even dream about.

Those Labour MPs who are on the right of the party, who suppress dissent and expel dissidents, who were best pals with Mandelson until two weeks ago, who manoeuvre, conspire and organise against the left, do what they do for one reason only: they have no political arguments or justification for their outlook or policiies.

They have no claim to being the political representatives of working people – for all their fine words – they are the political and ideological representatives of capitalism.

Labour members and affiliated unions, therefore, should not be looking at the Mandelson scandal and only demanding Starmer’s head – that is a given. They should be demanding that systems are put in place to make sure that Labour representatives really represent the majority of the population – working class people – and not just see it as a career for themselves.

No more “meal tickets for life” for Labour MPs

Labour members should demand as a minimum that every single election, locally or nationally, is preceded by an open candidate selection, democratically managed and run by local members. There should be no more meal tickets for life. Labour MPs should live on the wage of a skilled worker, and give any excess back to the party. There should be no ‘private office’ donations for any Labour MP, and no second jobs.

Peter Mandelson’s rich and trouble-free lifestyle is utterly alien to the experiences and traditions of working class people. His outlook, wealth and wheeler-dealing are foreign to them. But the problem is that the Mandelson manner is institutionalised on the right wing of the labour movement. It is high time it was rooted out.

[Feature photograph is from Wikemedia Commons, here]