#newlabour

Freshly disclosed U.S. congressional documents show that Lord Peter Mandelson remained in touch with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as late as 2016 — years after the disgraced financier’s first prison term.

The correspondence, released by the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee, reveals an exchange between the two men in November 2015. Epstein wrote to Mandelson saying, “63 years old. You made it,” referring to the peer’s birthday. Mandelson responded within 90 minutes: “Just. I have decided to extend my life by spending more of it in the US.” Epstein replied, “In the Donald White House,” hinting at the U.S. election taking place the following week.

The emails suggest a friendship that persisted well beyond what was previously known. Until now, their last documented interaction was in 2010, when Mandelson — then serving as business secretary — sought Epstein’s advice on a banking matter.

Mandelson, a central architect of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” project, has faced mounting scrutiny over his relationship with Epstein. He was removed from his role as the UK’s ambassador to Washington in September after further details of their connection emerged. The government said it had not been aware of the “depth” of the relationship at the time of his appointment.

Earlier reports from Bloomberg showed that Mandelson had written to Epstein in 2008, encouraging him to “fight for early release” before his sentencing for soliciting a minor. Another message sent a day before Epstein’s imprisonment read: “I think the world of you.”

Mandelson has maintained that he deeply regrets his association with Epstein, who died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. “I never witnessed any wrongdoing,” the peer has previously said, insisting he had been “deceived by Epstein’s lies.”

Reading William Blake’s A Poison Tree, I am struck by how precisely it captures the emotional architecture of betrayal — and more specifically, the slow, poisonous tragedy that was Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Blake writes of a man who is angry with his friend. When he speaks openly, the anger dissolves. But when he withholds it — when he nurtures it in silence, with false smiles and repressed fury — it festers. It grows. It becomes lethal. “And I sunned it with smiles, / And with soft deceitful wiles.” That is Blair in a line: grinning, hand on shoulder, promising unity while consolidating control. That is the premiership he stole.

Brown was never permitted to speak his wrath. He was the “friend,” sidelined, pacified, strung along. The agreement — if we can still call it that — was clear: Blair would lead first, then Brown. But time passed, and Blair stayed, endlessly reinventing himself, seduced by power and war and celebrity. And Brown, loyal and silent, became the man under the tree, watching the apple of power ripen under Blair’s control.

The tragedy, as Blake suggests, is not just personal. “In the morning glad I see / My foe outstretched beneath the tree.” But Blair never fell — not really. He stepped down into a lucrative afterlife of speeches and consultancy, his reputation wrapped in spin and sanctimony. It was Brown who inherited the poisoned garden — the broken party, the unspoken fury, the ruins of New Labour.

The Poison Tree is not just a poem about wrath. It is a poem about what happens when friendship is betrayed, and when one man — convinced of his own destiny — chooses personal glory over collective honour. Blair’s legacy, like Blake’s apple, gleamed bright. But it was bitter to the core.