Peter Mandelson's tangled web of deceit casts a malign shadow over our financial system, says ALEX BRUMMER
As a financial writer, I have found myself in the company of several figures caught up in Jeffrey Epstein's network of financial deceit and sexual abuse.
The sordid disclosures this week left me feeling sick to the stomach. One cannot help but feel sorrow for the women treated as vassals by powerful men who thought themselves invulnerable.
The emotion shown by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, when he addressed events at his press event on Thursday, was his finest hour.
Here was a decent public official, beyond reproach, letting it be known of his anger about alleged corruption in the corridors of power.
Bailey was in the engine room of the Bank during the Great Financial Crisis and a critical conduit between Threadneedle Street and the Treasury.
The idea of bankers who brought the world's financial system close to total collapse seeking special favours of the late Alistair Darling via Epstein and Peter Mandelson fills one with loathing. Do these people not have any shame?
Old pals act: Then British ambassador Peter Mandelson with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer
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I was at dinner with a friend, a senior Republican lawyer in Washington, when tawdry details of Epstein's paedophile crimes and abuse of market power first emerged.
The pal was horrified that he shared the same surname as the abuser (no relation). He even contemplated changing his surname by deed poll.
It is pitiful that so many involved in finance didn't feel the same way. In April 2025, on the fringes of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, Chancellor Rachel Reeves held a huddle with the economic press at Britain's sumptuous embassy residence.
Hovering over Reeves was the host, the UK's ambassador, Mandelson. It was extraordinary that such an oleaginous figure, twice sacked by government and name-checked in the Epstein papers, should have been anywhere near the highest levels of power.
Personal encounters with disgraced banker Jes Staley, credited with turning around Barclays' investment-banking arm, were deeply misleading.
He portrayed himself as a family man deeply interested in charitable work.
I foolishly encouraged him to be a guest at a fundraising dinner for the Abraham Initiatives, a Middle East charity fostering relations between Jews and Arabs inside Israel. The then-chancellor Philip Hammond had agreed to be guest speaker.
Staley turned up and wrote a cheque. I had no clue how soiled the donation would be. Staley left office in late 2021 after it was revealed that he maintained a relationship with Epstein – whose money he had managed at JP Morgan.
Later there was an opportunity to informally ask Jamie Dimon, all-powerful chairman of JP Morgan, how it was – given Staley's intimate connection with Epstein – that Barclays ever agreed to employ him.
The answer was shocking. The then-chairman of Barclays, John McFarlane, had rung Dimon for a Staley reference.
The boss of the British bank was so anxious to employ him that he ended the call before Dimon could verbally spill the beans on the Epstein files.
Not that JP Morgan, which debanked Epstein in 2013, emerges entirely with clean hands.
It was Dimon, influenced by Epstein via Mandelson, who sought to persuade Darling not to go down the route of capping and taxing bank bonuses at the time of the financial crisis.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.
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