A summary of today's developments
The first set of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US was released by the government today. MPs ordered the government last month to release tens of thousands of documents relating to the 2024 appointment after questions over how Mandelson was vetted and what was known about his links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A due diligence report by the Cabinet Office on Mandelson’s appointment found there was a “general reputational risk” over his relationship with Epstein. The due diligence report drawn up in December 2024 before his appointment noted a series of reports detailing his links with Epstein, including that Mandelson had “reportedly stayed in Epstein’s house while he was in jail in June 2009”.
Mandelson was offered a highly classified briefing from the Foreign Office as US ambassador before he finished the formal vetting process. The documents suggest that the Foreign Office may have begun to brief Mandelson on classified information after his appointment – but before he was formally vetted at the highest levels.
Mandelson asked for more than £500,000 severance pay but got £75,000. The documents state that negotiations began with Mandelson requesting a pay out for the remainder of his four-year salary costs of the fixed term appointment. “This would have amounted to £547,201.”
Chief secretary to the prime minister, Darren Jones, said Mandelson “should never have been appointed”. But in his defence of Keir Starmer, he said the Cabinet Office due diligence report “did not expose the depth and extent” of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein.
Jones described Mandelson’s request for more than £500,000 severance pay as “inappropriate and unacceptable”. He told the Commons that the final pay out that was agreed “was to avoid even higher further costs involving a drawn-out legal claim at the employment tribunal”.
The Conservatives claimed the prime minister “knew all he needed to know” when he appointed Mandelson, describing it as a “bad choice”. Shadow Cabinet Office minister Alex Burghart, who delivered the party’s response to Jones’s statement in the Commons, said it was a choice that “we can now read about in black and white” in the documents.
National security adviser Jonathan Powell found the appointment process “weirdly rushed”. The documents summarised a phone call between Powell and Mike Ostheimer, the general counsel to the prime minister, on 12 September 2025, in which “Jonathan Powell found the appointment process unusual of Lord Mandelson weirdly rushed”.
Mandelson suggested using Nigel Farage to “better UK connections with the Trump administration”. Mandelson was quoted in the documents as saying: “He’s [Farage] a bridgehead, both to President Trump and to Elon Musk and others … National interest is served in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways.”
According to the documents, Jonathan Powell expressed concerns about the appointment of Peter Mandelson with Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s former chief of staff. He said he believed Starmer “may have had a couple of political conversations” about Mandelson’s links to the disgraced financier. Powell also claimed Philip Barton, the most senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, also “had reservations around the appointment”, the BBC reported.
Chief secretary to the prime minister, Darren Jones, said the government hopes all of the files requested into Mandelson will be released in one more final batch. He told the BBC the remainder still have to go through checks with the Metropolitan Police and the Intelligence and Security Committee, but they are working as “quickly as we can”.
Four months after Peter Mandelson was sacked as UK ambassador to Washington over his links with Jeffrey Epstein, he sat down for a primetime BBC interview. A less hubristic individual would have long since slunk away into the shadows.
But despite all the condemnation and humiliation surrounding his departure, Mandelson seemed intent on maintaining a public profile. “Who knows what’s next?” he told Laura Kuenssberg. “I don’t know what’s next. I’m not going to disappear and hide – that’s not me”.
For some inside Downing Street, those words sounded as a warning – or even a threat. Peter Mandelson still knows where the bodies are buried and could cause the government – and Keir Starmer in particular – a whole lot of trouble. A man scorned, and all that.
But even were he to take a vow of silence – and he does at least appear to be keeping a lower profile since the police launched their investigation – the prime minister’s decision to appoint Mandelson in the first place is still causing problems that could yet turn into another political storm.
The release of the first tranche of Mandelson documents – only agreed after the Conservatives forced the government’s hand – was always going to be a risky moment for Starmer, as it once again turned the spotlight on his decisions.
Mandelson doesn’t come out of it well. One of the most eye-catching – but perhaps unsurprising – revelations was that the former ambassador was offered a severance payment of £75,000, after initially asking the Foreign Office to pay him more than £500,000.
There is little from Mandelson himself in the documents beyond his request that he be allowed to arrive back in the UK “with the maximum dignity and minimum media intrusion”. Again, unsurprising for a man so focused on his own reputation.
The real danger for Starmer is not how Mandelson emerges from the documents, but that the focus is once again on his own decisions. The Cabinet Office’s due diligence report was littered with red flags about the risks of the appointment.
