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Britain’s new ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, has reacted with a foul-mouth rant when pressed about his friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
The New Labour grandee also accused others of having an “obsession” with his relationship with the disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker.
Lord Mandelson has come under intense pressure in the role even before he crosses the Atlantic to take up the job.
The Independent revealed last month that Mr Trump was considering rejecting Lord Mandelson’s nomination, in what would have been a major diplomatic headache for Sir Keir Starmer.
The peer’s past has come under scrutiny, including his friendship with Epstein who died in prison in 2019.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Lord Mandelson said: “I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women.”
He went on to add: “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all f*** off. OK?”
Maxwell is currently behind bars for recruiting and trafficking underage girls for Epstein.
An internal JPMorgan report from 2019, filed to a New York court in 2023, said that “Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government”, the paper reported.
In the interview, the former Labour cabinet minister also insisted he would deal well with the Trump team because they would find out he was not an ultra-liberal “wokey-cokey” kind.
He said: “Some around Mr Trump see me as they view many in Europe. They see me as a left-wing progressive, somebody who might even be anti-business or somebody who might be following the sort of liberalism they’ve just defeated in America. What they will discover is I’m not an uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and I’m pro-market and pro-business.”
He also revealed that George W Bush calls him “silvertongue” for his negotiating powers.
His outburst over Epstein comes a week after Lord Mandelson claimed that Mr Trump had won “fresh respect” as the peer sought to disown his previous criticisms of the president, including describing him as a “danger to the world” in 2019.
Hours after it emerged that President Trump had approved his appointment, he told Fox News: “I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong. I think that times and attitudes toward the president have changed.”
Referring to his second election as president, Lord Mandelson said: “I think that he has won fresh respect. He certainly has from me, and that is going to be the basis of all the work I do as His Majesty’s ambassador in the United States.”
He added that with the many threats and challenges the world faces, it takes “courage, somebody, sometimes, who’s prepared to be argumentative and, indeed, disruptive, not just take business as usual”.
“Frankly, I think President Trump could become one of the most consequential American presidents I have known in my adult life,” he added.
