AT a stretch, the ructions roiling Britain’s ruling Labour Party could partially be attributed to a dead butterfly miraculously flapping its wings halfway across the planet. After all, the departure of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is the consequence of McSweeney’s close relations with Peter Mandelson.
The latter left his post as ambassador to the US last year after details in documents related to the influential American paedophile Jeffrey Epstein made Mandelson’s position untenable. More revelations have led him to resign from the House of Lords and the Labour Party, whose fortunes he was determined to guide in an increasingly reactionary direction. He was reluctantly sacked twice from Tony Blair’s cabinet, but re-employed by Gordon Brown.
After Jeremy Corbyn unexpectedly was elected Labour leader by an overwhelming majority of the party’s membership, Mandelson dedicated himself to undermining the lately neoliberal organisation’s relapse into social democracy. He redoubled his efforts after Labour’s vote in the 2017 poll shot up to 40 per cent, denying the Tories a majority. The ludicrous moral panic over ‘antisemitism’ was redoubled, amid efforts to undermine the Labour leadership’s relatively progressive agenda.
The efforts, backed by a Blairite majority in the parliamentary party, paid off. Yet, in the humiliating defeat Labour purportedly suffered in 2019, it received substantially more support than in the Starmer ‘landslide’ of 2024, based on less than 34pc of the popular vote. The incumbent prime minister’s record unpopularity is then not surprising, but he has exacerbated it by pursuing socioeconomic policies far removed from the neo-Corbynite agenda he laid out when seeking the leadership.
Starmer’s fall might not mean much.
This duplicity, too, can be traced to McSweeney, who was following the directions of Mandelson. McSweeney is often erroneously described as Starmer’s consiglieri. In fact, it was McSweeney who, presumably under Mandelson’s guidance, picked Starmer as the ideal candidate to ingratiate himself with Corbyn and his allies, then pretend he would continue to pursue the social-democratic agenda, and eventually betray every ideal he purportedly stood for, while banishing from the party as many outspoken opponents of Israel’s genocidal tendencies as possible. The victims included not only Corbyn but also many anti-Zionist Jews.
Had Epstein been alive, he would no doubt have applauded. His links with Israel, Mossad and Ehud Barak in particular have been widely publicised. His network of contacts (or customers) ranged from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and India to various European countries. Norway’s crown princess is under scrutiny, and former French minister Jack Lang has been humiliated. Yet neither Lang nor Indian tycoon Anil Ambani, and perhaps not even Emirati DP World CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem appear to have formed the kind of relationship with Epstein that Mandelson did.
Given he was an American, Epstein’s closest contacts were in the US, ranging from Donald Trump to other politicians, CEOs and a bunch of academics that included Larry Summers and, less expectedly, Noam Chomsky. The latter’s extended engagement with a convicted paedophile is particularly depressing, and his wife’s apologia comes across as just another cover-up. Chomsky’s reputation as a polemicist has thrived on lending a sceptical ear to official pronouncements at home and abroad. For someone with a sharply questioning mind to be taken in by a convicted criminal, no matter how well-connected or rich, suggests idiocy rather than naiveté. Knowing what they stood for, why on earth was Chomsky so eager to establish contacts with Barak or Steve Bannon?
In Britain, the Mandelson affair is arguably secondary to Epstein’s disturbing relationship with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his wife, with King Charles declaring he would cooperate fully with the police, and his heir singing from a similar hymn book. Yet the likelihood of the former prince Andrew being imprisoned for statutory rape remains dim.
That reflects the impunity that all too many of Epstein’s admiring associates continue to count upon. His victims — mostly in their teens, and some even younger — tend to get short shrift. Most of the predators with whom he shared his passion for underage ‘discoveries’ remains undiminished, despite the emerging evidence. It remains to be seen how swiftly Starmer might follow some of his closest colleagues, even though much of the UK media considers it only a matter of time. Even if he goes, though, there’s no guarantee his replacement will be any better.
Furthermore, the fact that impunity might be limited in the UK does not necessarily imply that Epstein’s tentacles will hinder the continued pursuit of power and pelf anywhere else in a world increasingly unhinged from empathy and reality.
Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2026