Disgraced former ambassador wrote he was Jeffrey Epstein the Jewish Mossad paedophile’s “best pal,” but perhaps his most significant ties are with the Jew lobby, Israel and beyond.
By Jody McIntyre: After new, public revelations that Labour Party grandee Peter Mandelson failed security vetting but was appointed ambassador to the United States anyway, figures across the political spectrum are calling for the resignation of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The initial tranche of the Epstein files have already caused a political earthquake within the British establishment. For many years, the media and political class have willfully ignored the relationship between the convicted Jewish paedophile and Mandelson.
But photographs of the man who revelled in the nickname, the “Prince of Darkness,” standing in his underpants may have proven to be the straw that broke the back of Starmer’s Labour government.
Mandelson’s long-time protégé and Israel lobby favorite Morgan McSweeney has already resigned in disgrace after insisting on his mentor’s appointment as US ambassador last year, even in the face of British security service warnings.
And the Mandelson scandal only seems to escalate. In February, he was spectacularly – yet briefly – arrested by police on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The same month, Andrew Mountbatten-Windor, the former prince and another Epstein accomplice, was also arrested and is being investigated for the same reason, after emails in the latest Epstein releases suggested that both men handed over sensitive government information to the convicted pedophile and likely Mossad intelligence asset.
In April, continued questions about how Mandelson came to be appointed ambassador despite failing security vetting threatened Starmer’s tenure as prime minister.
Loyalty to Israel
The Mandelson-Epstein relationship goes back decades.
Ian Maxwell, the brother of Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, revealed in a September 2025 interview that Mandelson worked in their father’s Mirror Group headquarters in the 1980s as a consultant.
Their father was Robert Maxwell, himself a former Labour MP and – according to investigative journalists Martin Dillon and Gordon Thomas – a key Mossad asset.
After his body was found floating in the sea, Maxwell received an Israeli state funeral attended by the Israeli president, prime minister, and at least six serving and retired intelligence chiefs.
Not bad for a British newspaper owner.
In the early 1990s, working in Labour headquarters, Mandelson enjoyed a salary paid by Brian Basham – Ghislaine Maxwell’s public relations adviser. According to Ian Maxwell: “Epstein was always interested in having interactions with people with influence and Peter Mandelson was certainly influential.”
By the time Tony Blair won the 1997 general election, Mandelson was in the cabinet.
The relationship endured. Newly released files reveal an email sent by Ghislaine Maxwell to Peter Mandelson on 14 September 2002. Maxwell writes: “Clinton … will do what you want at the conference.” Two weeks later, former US president Bill Clinton addressed the Labour Party conference in Blackpool.
Leaked documents show that Jeffrey Epstein funded Friends of the IDF and the settlement-financing Jewish National Fund, toured Israeli military bases, and was visited in his New York apartment by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak over 30 times.
However, as with media coverage surrounding Epstein that so often refuses to acknowledge his most obvious foreign link, the British press are determined to convince us that “bad luck” Mandelson’s biggest mishap was offering to help his “best pal” Epstein obtain a Russian visa.
My research suggests that the media are hiding a bigger story: Peter Mandelson has a history of service and loyalty to the Israeli state.
Epstein’s UK source
In June 2024, less than a year before his inexplicable appointment as US ambassador, Mandelson addressed an event at the Israeli embassy in London to celebrate “Israel Independence Day,” also known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which saw the wholesale displacement, murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s indigenous population.
Mandelson, who once admitted endeavoring to sabotage Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party “every single day,” said at the embassy that he now believed that the “overwhelming majority” of the Labour Party had an “unwavering” belief “not only to Israel’s right to exist, but its right to defend itself against those who want to extinguish the state today.”
Mandelson also referred to former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as his “hero,” a man famous for ordering Israeli soldiers to break Palestinians’ bones.
Mandelson went on to burnish his credentials in defending the settler state from anti-Zionist critics. He recalled that, “in the 1980s I became increasingly aware of the need to defend Labour’s support for Israel from ultra-left militants and forces both inside the Labour Party and outside. Those who had climbed on and who were pushing the ‘Zionism is racism’ bandwagon that had initially been created by the United Nations General Assembly.”
Mandelson presented himself that day as a British statesman standing up for an “ally,” but his actions tell a different tale. After the 2010 UK general election, as Labour leader Gordon Brown attempted to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Mandelson, who was First Secretary of State at the time (a position senior to other ministers in British politics), was feeding sensitive government information to Epstein, likely an Israeli spy.
On 9 May, just three days after the election, Mandelson appears to inform Epstein of covert talks between Brown and the Liberal Democrats. Their relationship is so close that Epstein feels able to give the second most senior figure in the British government political advice, saying, in reference to the Conservatives: “why not let tories govern.”
Then, on 10 May, at 9:07am, Mandelson tells Epstein: “Finally got him to go today.” Hours later, Brown resigned as Labour leader.
In light of Mandelson’s historic support for the Israeli state, however, perhaps his role as Epstein-informant came as a natural progression.
Mandelson and ELNET
In January 2024, politicians from 22 European countries traveled to meet with Israeli president and genocide inciter Isaac Herzog and military spokesman Peter Lerner, a London-born “commander of IDF social media activities.”
The delegation was led by Peter Mandelson, at the time a Labour member of the House of Lords, Britain’s unelected upper chamber. It was taken to Kfar Aza, a settlement near Gaza. The group also had dinner with Gideon Saar, who became Israeli foreign minister just two months after the visit.
The Mandelson-led trip was paid for by ELNET, a shadowy lobby group that refuses to reveal its donors, but names the Israeli foreign ministry as one of its “partners”. Past attendees of their events include former Conservative UK prime ministers David Cameron and Rishi Sunak. ELNET’s UK branch is led by ex-Labour MP Joan Ryan, a former chair (and now honorary president) of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and vice-president of the All-Party Britain-Israel Parliamentary Group.
Ryan was also a key figure in the struggle to overthrow Corbyn, as well as a close ally of fellow LFI supporter and now Labour’s “Safeguarding Minister” Jess Phillips.
In one of ELNET’s online briefings, Mandelson told Lerner: “The [Israeli] government might be better off if it listened more to the IDF … If you can pass on that one.”
Another ELNET briefing was attended by John Woodcock, now the Starmer government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, a position he was appointed to by former Conservative PM Boris Johnson in 2020.
Woodcock resigned from Labour in 2018 while being investigated for sexual harassment. He described Mandelson’s appointment last year as “an inspired choice.” Like ELNET chief-executive Joan Ryan, Woodcock is a former chair of LFl, and accepted a trip to Israel funded by ELNET while preparing a government report into Palestine protests in the UK.
The year before Mandelson’s delegation, ELNET took a group of Labour Party advisers on a similar trip. The 2023 delegation included an adviser to then shadow minister and long-time LFI supporter Wes Streeting – now health secretary – who has been frantically deleting Mandelson-related posts from his social media, but whom he previously described as a “legend” who should not be considered “guilty by association”.
Perhaps due to the closeness of their relationship, Streeting has gone further than most Labour parliamentarians in attempting to distance himself from Mandelson. In a recent interview with Sky News, Streeting even released a selection of WhatsApp messages between himself and Mandelson to show he had “nothing to hide,” and rejected the suggestion that the messages revealed an “intimate relationship.”
However, rather than clear his name, the release may have implicated him as an accessory to genocide. The most telling revelation came when the WhatsApp conversation turned to the Gaza genocide. Streeting tells Mandelson: “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes. Their government talks the language of ethnic cleansing and I have met with our own medics out there who describe the most chilling and distressing scenes of calculated brutality against women and children.”
This was a genocide which his own Labour Party supported, by flying RAF flights over Gaza to provide intelligence for the Israeli state. Starmer’s government and Wes Streeting specifically had refused even to call for a ceasefire for the first few months of the slaughter. But now, in private talks with the “Prince of Darkness,” a Labour minister was willing to acknowledge the illegality of the Israeli assault on Gaza.
Knowing about crimes but ignoring them anyway is becoming a feature of the Starmer administration.
Israel connections
Mandelson’s ties with Israeli government officials go back a long way. In 2005, when acting as EU Trade Commissioner, he met the Israeli finance minister, one Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rupert Murdoch, the media baron whose initial endorsement of Tony Blair paved the way for New Labour’s – and Mandelson’s – rise to power, is a close friend and suspected financial backer of Netanyahu. In 2023, Peter Mandelson said that during the Blair years, “upsetting Rupert was definitely a no-go area.”
Murdoch still has influence in the UK. Last year, Mandelson’s protegé Morgan McSweeney sat next to Murdoch at a state dinner hosted by King Charles for US president Donald Trump. Just as he had insisted on Mandelson’s appointment, McSweeney, the Israel lobby’s “man in No. 10,” had successfully lobbied for Murdoch to be invited, notwithstanding the fact that the Australian media mogul’s Wall Street Journal was being sued by Trump at the time over an article the newspaper ran about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Mandelson also met with Ehud Olmert on the 2005 trip, who was Israeli trade and industry minister at the time and would later become prime minister. Olmert is another convicted fraudster, having been sentenced to six years in prison in 2014 for accepting bribes and obstruction of justice while in office.
And then there is Ehud Barak, apparently Epstein’s favored Israeli prime minister. In 2013, Epstein instructed Barak to get Mandelson to oversee the sale of the largest Israeli fuel firm at that time, Paz Oil Company. Mandelson replied: “Am interested in Paz. Also in how Israel is planning to transport its offshore field gas to Europe and elsewhere.”
The same year, Mandelson asked Epstein to connect him to Barak for help with a background check on an Israeli “political consultant” named Asaf Eisin: “Can you ask Ehud whether he knows/thinks of this Israeli guy living in London.”
Meanwhile, in February of 2013, Epstein had suggested that Barak consider working with Palantir. By 2015, the “tech firm” specializing in dystopian, AI-powered military and surveillance systems had opened a headquarters in Tel Aviv, from where they play an active role in Israeli military operations.
In 2018, Palantir hired Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel, in a bid to win UK government contracts. When Mandelson was appointed as US ambassador last year, he officially ended his involvement with Global Counsel, but retained shares in the company.
Palantir’s UK operations have skyrocketed since, and they now hold $905 million worth of UK government contracts, including deals to handle data from Britain’s national health service, its Home Office and the Ministry of Defence. There is also a $20 million contract with AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, the company that designs and manufactures British nuclear warheads.
Few qualms
On an investor call last year, Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp said that “we are dedicating [Palantir] to the service of the West and the United States of America.” He added that it was sometimes necessary “to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”
In February 2025, in a meeting facilitated by Mandelson, Keir Starmer visited the Palantir headquarters in Washington DC, while they were still a client of Mandelson’s Global Counsel firm.
The British government now refuses to reveal what was discussed at the meeting.
Mandelson has rarely had qualms about defending shady or even criminal individuals, especially when it comes to promoting the interests of the Israeli state.
In a 2010 interview, Mandelson said he “didn’t think twice” about speaking alongside Benjamin Netanyahu at a “huge rally in Trafalgar Square.” He reminisced about his father, a long-time advertising director with the Jewish Chronicle who “became very militant and really emotional when Israel was under attack. In a sense it was the same for me.”
Mandelson also referred to his “friend” David Alliance, who passed away last year, and who was a central donor of the Liberal Democrats Friends of Israel lobby group.
In November 2023, he dismissed calls for Starmer, then opposition leader, to back a ceasefire in Gaza as “ridiculous”.
And as far back as December 1998, addressing the annual dinner of the British-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Mandelson waxed lyrical about “Israel as another Silicon Valley in the making.”
After losing Morgan McSweeney, and embroiled in a mess of his own making over the Mandelson appointment that might yet see him forced to resign, Starmer is running out of people to blame.
In a desperate last attempt to salvage his image, the prime minister has agreed to publish government communications with Mandelson. But the release of the Mandelson files will be overseen by Kevan Jones, also known as Lord Beamish, a former Labour parliamentarian nominated by Starmer for a peerage in 2024.
Jones is a parliamentary supporter of Labour Friends of Israel, and has accepted LFI-funded trips in 2003, 2014 and 2015, with travel and accommodation costs in some cases recorded as being paid for directly by the Israeli foreign ministry.
In other words, Jones is not a neutral adjudicator.
In addition, the government has already qualified its release of Mandelson communications on national security grounds. When questioned in Parliament in early February about his knowledge of the Mandelson-Epstein relationship, Starmer suggested that the release of the files would be limited to protect the interests of the United States and an unidentified “third country.”
“[T]here are very sensitive issues of security, intelligence and trade that cannot be disclosed without compromising the relationship between the two countries [the UK and the US], or a third country,” he said.
It seems almost certain that this mysterious “third country” is Israel.
Mandelson and McSweeney may be gone – for now – but the Israel lobby, it seems, continues to dictate the actions, or perhaps inaction, of Starmer’s government.
Jody McIntyre is an investigative journalist whose work can be found at jodymcintyre.substack.com. He stood at the 2024 UK general election, receiving more than 10,000 votes.
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