The Real Mandelson Scandal Is China and Russia.

Epstein Is the Distraction.

I am going to say something that will strike some readers as perverse, and I find I cannot help it, because it happens to be true. The least important thing about Peter Mandelson’s security vetting failure was Jeffrey Epstein.

There. Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that a serving minister of the Crown passing market-sensitive government information to a convicted sex trafficker is a trivial matter. It is not. It is sordid, it is almost certainly criminal, and the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into misconduct in public office will, in due course, determine where it leads. I am not suggesting we avert our eyes from any of it. But I am saying, and I say it with mounting exasperation at a political media that has swallowed itself whole, that in fixating on Epstein as the master key to the Mandelson scandal, we have allowed the political class to hide the genuinely alarming part of this story in plain sight.

The genuinely alarming part is China. And Russia.

David Maddox, the political editor of the Independent, established this months ago, and was brushed off for his trouble with four words by No. 10’s then-director of communications Tim Allan: “Vetting done by FCDO in normal way.” As I have written before, I spent years running communications operations and that response, if it truly represented the end of the matter, constitutes a professional failure of almost spectacular proportions. You do not receive an approach from a credentialled lobby journalist alleging that the newly appointed US Ambassador has failed his security clearance on China grounds and file it under “handled.” Not unless you have been instructed to.

But Maddox was right, and we now know he was right. Senior government sources told The Times it was Mandelson’s ties to foreign entities that caused the UK Security Vetting agency to recommend against his appointment as British ambassador to the US, rather than his alleged links to the convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. GB News That is the security services’ own assessment. Not Epstein. China. And Russia.

The China dimension is stark enough. The single largest client of Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel was WuXi AppTec, a Shanghai-listed biotechnology company that paid £2.24 million to the firm. The Pentagon has described WuXi as a company engaged in assisting the Chinese military and urged Congress to add it to a list of companies posing security risks. WuXi was one of five companies of concern targeted by the US Biosecure Act, which banned federal agencies from purchasing biotechnology equipment from the firm. Mandelson, let us be perfectly clear, retained his stake in Global Counsel throughout his ambassadorship. He was simultaneously Her Majesty’s, His Majesty’s, representative in Washington and a shareholder in a firm whose largest revenue source was a company the Pentagon regarded as a Chinese military asset. The mind struggles to identify a more flagrant conflict of interest in the recent history of British diplomacy.

The Russia dimension is, if anything, darker still. Officials noted in the due diligence process that Mandelson had served as a non-executive director of Sistema, itself the majority shareholder of RTI, a defence technology company that produced radar and satellite communications for Russia’s land-based missile early-warning system. RTI’s chairman was Yevgeny Primakov, a Putin ally, former foreign minister, and former spymaster, and Mandelson remained on the board until June 2017, long after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. He also introduced Epstein to Oleg Deripaska, Putin’s favoured oligarch, and was reportedly planning to attend events associated with Russian intelligence-linked networks even after Ukraine. This relationship was first discovered by me in 2005 through a European Parliamentary Question asked by Nigel Farage.
These are not peripheral associations. They are precisely the kind of entanglements that developed vetting exists to identify.

Yet somehow, through the alchemy of a compliant media and the convenient magnetism of the Epstein story, the conversation has collapsed entirely into the sex offender. Epstein is lurid. Epstein sells. Epstein allows opponents to express moral outrage without engaging with the national security architecture that has been quietly, systematically compromised. And it allows the government, a government in which Mandelson was, let us not forget, a central and intimate participant from almost the first day, to present this as a story about one bad appointment rather than a story about systemic failure of judgement at the top of the British state.

Because that is what it is. Mandelson was not some distant figure whose toxicity was unforeseen. He was the mentor of Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff and the operational architect of the entire Labour project. He was, by multiple credible accounts, embedded in Starmer’s political network for years before the 2024 election, shaping strategy, attending to personnel, helping write the playbook for the destruction of the Corbynite left. McSweeney himself played a central role in securing the Washington appointment. This was not an aberration in an otherwise fastidious administration. It was the natural culmination of a relationship that had been central to Labour’s rise.

Which brings me to Philip Rycroft. The government commissioned an urgent review of foreign financial interference in UK politics, led by the former Permanent Secretary for Exiting the European Union. It is, we are told, an important step. I find myself asking a straightforward question: why has the Rycroft review not examined the activities of Lord Mandelson? Here is a man whose lobbying firm took millions from a company the Pentagon classifies as a Chinese military asset. A man who sat on the board of a company producing components for Russia’s nuclear early-warning infrastructure, chaired by a Putin intimate, until three years after the annexation of Crimea. A man who has been at the heart of a governing Labour party that is simultaneously conducting an EU reset, managing a fraught US relationship, and purporting to take the national security threat from hostile states seriously.

If Rycroft’s remit was to examine foreign financial interference in British politics, then Mandelson is not a peripheral case. He is the central exhibit. Yet when the Report came out in late March it was clearly designed to be a political attack on Reform UK. Not a serious study of modern realities.

The media’s fixation on Epstein, sordid though the Epstein story indisputably is, has performed a remarkable public service for those who would prefer the harder questions to go unasked. We are so busy being appalled by the dead paedophile that we have forgotten to be appalled by what the living intelligence services were actually worried about: that Britain sent to its most sensitive diplomatic post a man with deep, documented, inadequately severed financial ties to both Peking and Moscow.

That is the scandal. Not the gossip. The geopolitics.

I note as I write this that some in the media are finally looking into this aspect.

But let’s focus on Nathan Gill and Epstein.