Peter Mandelson Sold Off Britain to the Super-Rich. He’s Not the Only One

Britain’s political scandals have acquired a peculiar quality. They don’t feel like ruptures in an otherwise healthy system, but small windows thrown open onto the machinery itself. A loan here, a consultancy there, a weekend on an oligarch’s yacht, a minister leaving office on Friday and returning on Monday as a lobbyist for the firms he once regulated. Nothing necessarily illegal. Yet each episode leaves the same impression: that the real life of the British state is conducted elsewhere, beyond the theatre of parliament, in private rooms where wealth and power recognise one another without introduction.

The Epstein-Mandelson affair belongs to this category. It’s shocking because it’s so familiar.

In Peter Mandelson – minister, fixer, envoy, consultant, intermediary between cabinet and capital – one sees the career of Britain’s governing caste in miniature. A stratum that long ago stopped representing the public and instead made politics a form of brokerage: arranging introductions, smoothing obstacles, managing the flows of other people’s money. Mandelson isn’t a deviation from the system. He is its most perfect expression.

As business secretary under Gordon Brown, Mandelson appears to have passed Jeffrey Epstein advance notice of market-moving events: details of a €500bn eurozone rescue deal hours before it became public; a confidential paper outlining £20bn of potential asset sales; and suggestions that Epstein coordinate with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to pressure the government over taxes on bankers’ bonuses. They were the sort of signals on which currencies swing and fortunes are made.

Mandelson’s actions are best understood as the logical expression of what he’s long represented. His most famous line – that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – is often remembered as a quip. In fact it was a doctrine. The role of government was no longer to discipline capital or direct investment toward national development. It was to reassure the wealthy that they would grow ever richer, and to manage the political consequences below.

The phrase is sometimes compared to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s “let some people get rich first”. But Deng’s tolerance of inequality was tethered to a project of national development, productive capacity, and strategic state power. Wealth was a means to secure sovereignty. In Britain, enrichment became the end in itself. Industry hollowed out. Finance swelled. The state stopped building and started selling. Where Deng used markets to strengthen the nation, Britain used the nation to service markets.

This settlement required political engineers. Mandelson was chief among them. He worked to modernise Labour’s language and rewire its loyalties – to make the party safe for boardrooms, pliable to lobbyists, and hostile to any revival of its older commitments to trade unions or public ownership. When Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership threatened that order, Mandelson boasted that he worked “every single day” to remove him. The candour was striking. It revealed what had long been true: that the party’s most senior figures felt more answerable to capital than to organised labour.

After office came monetisation. Through lobbying firm Global Counsel, Mandelson sold what really matters in modern Britain – access. Global Counsel’s client list reads like a directory of corporate power: JP Morgan, Accenture, Palantir, Shell, Nestlé, Anglo American. The firm hired him because he knew the wiring of the British state – which minister to call, which rule to soften, which door would open quietly after hours. 

In other words: how to translate public authority into private advantage.

Nor was Epstein incidental to this story. At the founding of Global Counsel, the financier reportedly provided introductions and business advice, connecting Mandelson to the wealthy networks the firm would later serve. A man who would later be exposed as a child sex offender and human trafficker moved easily in these circles. This isn’t a quirk of British politics. It reflects an oligarchic logic perfected elsewhere.

In the US, wealth and office interpenetrate and elite interests reliably shape policy while public demands rarely do – as two political scientists showed more than a decade ago. Billions flood elections each cycle. Lawmakers trade shares in the very sectors they regulate. Congressional portfolios routinely beat the market. US Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s disclosed investments, for instance, have produced roughly an 838% cumulative return over the past decade – the sort of outperformance less suggestive of genius than of proximity to power. Britain has adopted the same habits with less spectacle and smaller cheques. 

Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.

The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.

While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.

Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital. 

So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.

A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.