He was close to then Lord Peter Mandelson and encouraged Keir Starmer to appoint Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States.
Peter Mandelson arrested amid Epstein fallout
The Metropolitan Police said a 72-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
Emails released as part of the Epstein files in the United States appeared to show the then-business secretary forwarding on correspondence to Epstein, triggering fresh scrutiny of his relationship with the late, disgraced financier. | Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images
Gordon Brown has said he deeply regrets bringing Peter Mandelson into his government, and that revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s influence on UK politics had caused him revulsion.
Writing in the Guardian, Brown said the news that Mandelson was passing information to Epstein while he was business secretary was “a betrayal of everything we stand for as a country”.
Brown said he was at fault for making Mandelson a peer and bringing him back into government in 2008, after Mandelson had quit as an MP to become EU trade commissioner.
“I have to take personal responsibility for appointing Mandelson to his ministerial role in 2008. I greatly regret this appointment,” he wrote, saying that at the time he was told that Mandelson’s record in Brussels had been “unblemished” and he did not know about any Epstein links.
“I did so in spite of him being anything but a friend to me, because I thought that his unquestioned knowledge of Europe and beyond could help us as we dealt with the global financial crisis,” Brown wrote.
“I now know that I was wrong. He seems to have used market-sensitive inside information to betray the principles in which he said he believed, and he betrayed the people who believed in them – and him.”
Mandelson was sacked as Keir Starmer’s ambassador to the US in September after new details emerged of his friendship with Epstein, ties that lasted beyond the late child sex offender’s jailing in 2008.
But the release this week of masses of new documents about Epstein and his contacts showed the closeness of their ties. They also suggested Mandelson had received money from Epstein, and had leaked market-sensitive information to the financier, which is now the subject of a criminal investigation.
In a statement on Friday afternoon, the Met said officers were searching two homes connected to Mandelson, in north London and Wiltshire. Mandelson has been living in a rented property in Wiltshire since returning to the UK.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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