Across the political board, people are taking great pleasure in the downfall of Peter Mandelson, not least in his own Party. The word schadenfreude was invented for moments like this.

With the partial release of the Epstein files, his reputation now lies in tatters.

He has resigned from the House of Lords and is facing criminal inquiries and potentially even a public inquiry. It’s all a huge fall from grace for the so-called Prince of Darkness.

But in many ways, it was a fall you could see coming a long way off. The thing about Peter Mandelson is that he always seemed a fairly unlikable character, and many people could not understand how he managed to claw his way to the top and, more importantly, keep coming back after every scandal and setback.

From the Irish News:

Ray Bassett, an official under Bertie Ahern’s government who went on to serve as joint secretary to the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference in Belfast, said he found the former secretary of state “vain and full of his own self-importance”.

He told The Irish News that Mandelson was “overrated” and saw his role as secretary of state as “a stepping stone to his ambition of becoming foreign secretary”. Mr Bassett recalled how soon after 1999’s publication of the Patten-led Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland’s report, Lord Mandelson succeeded Mo Mowlam as secretary of state.

“We’d been used to working with Tony Blair, Mo Mowlam and Paul Murphy, whose style was very different from their Tory predecessors,” he said. “But we found Mandelson a bit of a throwback. He was very stiff and as a consequence there was not nearly as open or as good a relationship with Dublin.”

He remembers how when moves were afoot to codify Patten into legislation, the newly-installed secretary of state “jeopardised the entire peace process because he was keen to curry favour with unionists” and that his “first instinct” was to reject swathes of the recommended police reform, which the former diplomat believes would’ve been a “disaster”.

Mr Bassett recalls Mandelson as “having no interest in anybody who wasn’t important enough for him”, such as loyalist representatives like David Ervine.

“He always believed he was the cleverest man in the room and while he was an intelligent man, he wasn’t as bright as he thought he was, and on top of that he was fond of bad-mouthing Mo Mowlam, which didn’t go down well with those of us who knew and respected her,” the diplomat said. “I always found Mandelson vain and full of his own self-importance – and boy did he love having Hillsborough Castle at his disposal.”

Talking with some people this week about his time in Northern Ireland. No one has a good word to say about the guy. People use words and phrases like cold, condescending, aloof, smug, full of his own self-importance and patronising. As they say in Belfast, you couldn’t like him if you reared him.

As this journalist put it, when you were talking to him, he was a type of guy who was always looking over your shoulder to see if there was somebody more important in the room to talk to. That is, if he deigned to talk to you at all.

Mandelson was always a ticking time bomb. There have been rumours about him for over 30 years, and it’s stunning how he managed to not let any of it stick until now.

It will do Tony Blair’s already tarnished reputation no good, but it will be interesting to see how it affects the current Labour government, which is already hugely unpopular with the public.

The Labour government needs a reset, and I can’t see Keir Starmer hanging on for much longer.

The question I keep coming back to is what was so alluring about Jeffrey Epstein that he was able to ensnare so many political, business, and entertainment figures? The global elite could not get enough of the guy.

He must have had an amazing ability to find people’s weak spots and work out what they wanted to hear.

From the photos of him, he looks like a complete creep, but he must have some strange charisma to be able to pull off his staggering web of influence.

Interesting times indeed.

Brian O'Neill

I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.

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