History is being rewritten. The story we are told is that an evil man called Peter Mandelson, pursuing his own interests, went rogue to collaborate with a serial abuser of girls and women, undermining the good work of people seeking to defend the public interest. All this is true. But – and I fear many will find this hard to accept – it is only half the story.
The much harder truth is that Mandelson’s disgraceful dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were less a betrayal of his brief than an unauthorised extension of it. In 2009 – just as, we now know, Mandelson was passing sensitive information to Epstein – I argued that the government department he ran, called Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Berr), “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.
