Paul Routledge says ‘it always ends in tears’ with Peter Mandelson following his removal as UK ambassador to the US over his ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein
It was bound to end in tears, because it always does with Peter Mandelson.
That’s what I said earlier this year to Steve Smith, the journalist profiling Our Man in Washington for BBC Radio. He laughed, but agreed it might be true.
And so it came to pass, because ego-driven Milord Mandy kept on making the same mistake: seeking the glamour of mixing with stinking rich, powerful men.
Big money was his downfall and since I had none, as a Labour Party press officer in the 1980s, he looked down his supercilious nose at me. He was also suspicious of anyone old Labour with strong links to the unions.
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He preferred to schmooze younger, less experienced reporters at Westminster, who he called “my captured castles.” But he soon became a power in the land, and as political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, I wrote an unofficial biography of Mandy (as we all called him).
He told all his friends not to help me, but I quickly discovered he had more enemies than friends. And I knew about his secret house loan, to be his undoing the first time.
Actually, it wasn’t his first sacking. That was in 1978, from his job as a researcher with the TUC. In the bowels of Congress House, I unearthed a document headed: Termination of Employment, Peter Mandelson.
After only 18 months, he was asked to give a month’s notice of resignation: his crime, a side-hustle in politics. And that event set a pattern for the future. Mandy was always on the lookout for something sexier, something with financial opportunities. Naturally, my uncomplimentary book made me an enemy, so I saw little of him personally in the later Blairite era, as short-lived Northern Ireland Secretary before his second sacking.
And when he quit as MP for Hartlepool (having said he wouldn’t) for the lucrative pastures of EU HQ in Brussels, he drifted out of notice, then returned to help Gordon Brown lose the 2010 general election. With Labour out of power, he devoted himself to the acquisition of wealth and influence, a big house in Regent’s Park, hob-nobbing with Russian oligarchs and mega-rich US jet-setters. He had red-carpet-fever.
When his big moment came for the top job in the diplomatic service, I predicted the inevitable disgrace, and waited. It would never come from the job, at which he was passably competent, but from his risque, lubricious private life.
I followed his dodgy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in the media, and pondered whether this would be his undoing. It smelled.
I always had him down as a wrong’un. But I didn’t think the end would come so quickly, or so theatrically, sacked on the eve of his most glamorous public appearance, on the arm of a US President during a state visit to London.
I always said Mandy was a man dogged by success – every time he got sacked from a job, he got a better one. But I think this time the magic roundabout has come to a juddering halt. We will not see him at the apex of public life again.
I stand by my verdict of 1999: “Mandelson has a fatal flaw, a limitless self-belief that may one day prove his downfall.”