No Man Is An Island

In fairness to Starmer it’s not as if he could’ve known that Peter Mandelson, a man he appointed as Ambassador to the United States, had previously been forced to resign from government after it was revealed he’d failed to disclose accepting £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, a man who was later suspended from the Commons after it was revealed he’d failed to disclose accepting £200,000 from Robert Maxwell, a man whose embezzlement of pension funds was investigated by the DTI which was overseen at the time by Peter Mandelson, a man who was forced to resign from government on a second occasion after it was revealed he’d used his position to influence a passport application decision on behalf of billionaire Srichand Hinduja, a man who was being investigated for accepting bribes to secure the biggest arms deal in Swedish history and who was also a sponsor of the Millennium Dome, a project that had been the responsibility of Peter Mandelson, a man who had previously urged Tony Blair to give the go-ahead for Fujitsu to supply the Post Office with their Horizon IT system, an accounting software that led to 900 subpostmasters being wrongly convicted of fraud, with thousands more falsely accused, sacked, or forced to repay money they had not stolen, and the suicides of at least 13 people.

Neither could our Prime Minister have been aware that in 2005 it was revealed that Peter Mandelson, a man who’d been appointed to the role of European Commissioner, had spent New Year’s Eve partying on a yacht with Paul Allen, the man who co-founded Microsoft - a company being investigated at the time by the EU, nor that he had also accepted free use of a yacht from Diego Della Valle, the former owner of ACF Fiorentina who was later convicted of match fixing and whose luxury shoe company had directly benefitted from tariffs on Chinese footwear imposed by Peter Mandelson, a man who attended a party on a yacht held by the billionaire Nathaniel Rothschild and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a man whose aluminium company Rusal had directly benefitted from tariff cuts imposed by Peter Mandelson, a man who by 2014 owned an £8m mansion in North London while also renting a cottage in Wiltshire from Rothschild, a man who lost a libel case with the Daily Mail after they’d described him as the “puppet master” of Peter Mandelson, a man who pushed for the addition of strongly criticized regulatory measures to The Digital Economy Act immediately after spending time at the Corfu villa of DreamWorks founder David Geffen, a man whose business interests directly benefitted from the inclusion of these measures, and following letters in which Mandelson spoke of his “power to direct OfCom” with Universal Music CEO Lucien Grainge, a man whose business interests also directly benefitted from the inclusion of these measures and was named in disturbing evidence presented to the Sean Combs investigation but that’s a story for another day.

And there’s simply no way Keir Starmer could have prior knowledge that companies such as TikTok and Shell, and the UK’s private water industry were the corporate lobbying clients of Global Counsel, co-founded by Peter Mandelson who personally secured meetings for them with senior ministers, and was also advisor to Asia Pulp & Paper who practice illegal logging in Indonesia to such an egregious extent that even multinationals like Tesco and Kraft have boycotted them, and was also on the board of directors of Russian banking, property, defence, and money-laundering conglomerate Sistema, on a reported £200,000 salary, all while sitting as a member of the House of Lords, where he was the only Labour peer to vote against denouncing the Xinjiang genocide of Uighur Muslim citizens.

But even if the leader of the Labour Party had known all these things prior to making him HM Ambassador to the United States, he could hardly have been expected to know that Peter Mandelson was a close friend and frequent guest of the child sex offender, serial rapist, and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the aforementioned Robert Maxwell, a friendship he maintained after Epstein’s plea-deal conviction for soliciting children as young as 14 for prostitution, encouraging the p**dophile party organiser to “fight for early release”, and accepting around $75,000 from Epstein (via Mandelson’s now husband Reinaldo da Silva) to lobby ministers for an amendment to a policy on banker’s bonuses, because it wasn’t on Mandelson’s Wikipedia page at the time of his appointment, unlike everything else I’ve detailed here. Give the guy a break.