PM must ask hard questions of Mandelson's Epstein links

Still "a fighter, not a quitter" and ever the spin doctor, Peter Mandelson is getting his defence of his unwise and lingering friendship with Jeffrey Epstein in early.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Mandelson seems to know - maybe tipped off, maybe that feline sixth sense of his, maybe from his own memories - that there is stuff in the Epstein files yet to be released that, as he himself admits, will be gruesome. He told The Sun: “I have no doubt at all that there’s a lot of traffic, correspondence, exchanges between us, absolutely. And we know those are going to surface. We know they’re going to come out. We know they’re going to be very embarrassing, and [we] know that I’m going to profoundly regret ever having met him and been introduced to him in the first place. But I can’t rewrite history.”

Massaging expectations, then, if you'll pardon the expression - and, as it happens, Britain’s ambassador to the US seems to be having quite a good go at rewriting history. In his interview with Harry Cole, Mandelson makes some implausible suggestions. For example, he seems to think that his status as a gay man exempts him from any suspicion regarding what Epstein was up to — “All the time I was an associate of his, I never saw the wrongdoing. I never saw any evidence of criminal activity. I never sought, nor did he offer, any introductions to women in the way that allegedly he did for others.”