Treason By Any Other Name

Not just sleaze

Let us begin with a universal truth: when a scandal involves a private island, a convicted sex offender, and several thousand pounds winging their way to one’s “partner,” it is generally advisable to have described your relationship with said offender as “distant and minor.” Not “warm and transactional.”

Peter Mandelson, the political Lazarus of UK politics, who has twice resigned and was twice reborn, a man who made Machiavelli look like an amateur, appears to have missed this memo this time. For years, he floated through the Westminster geopolitical stratosphere with the unflappable serenity of a man whose hair never moves, dismissing questions about his pal Jeffrey Epstein as a “vulgar media fixation”. A passing acquaintance, he insisted. A distant figure. A mere footnote in a very long and detailed Epstein address book.

Well, the US Department of Justice dumped several million pages of Epstein’s “footnotes” into the public domain. And these footnotes have footnotes. And those foot…