05.02.2026

Rotten to the very core

Peter Mandelson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson are just the tip of the iceberg. The latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein material contains more shameful embarrassments for royal houses, governments, tech billionaires and rich and powerful people of all kinds, writes Paul Demarty

With the release of another three million pages of text and photographs related to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, an army of professional and amateur sleuths has predictably swarmed into action.

With a narrowly British lens, there are a couple of big losers. One is, of course, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who simply must have another great heap of embarrassment put on him, like clockwork. Though there is little new in his ‘randy Andy’ antics really, the matter of a series of cash payments to ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, allegedly to cover debts, raises the eyebrows a little, especially in the light of certain other items on the news agenda.

Which brings us to Peter Mandelson, who appears in numerous pictures that are impossible, alas, to unsee, and also a great deal of correspondence with the financier and industrial-scale sex pest, Epstein. Some documents have emerged, implying that Mandelson - or at least his husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva - received $75,000 from Epstein. Elsewhere, private documents from the then-Labour government were forwarded to Epstein, which would allow him to indulge in a little insider trading. Jumping before he was pushed, Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party, but really this is surely a criminal matter. Expect Morgan McSweeney to follow him in the attempt to save Sir Keir.

I am not often to be heard praising the Scottish National Party, but its decision to report Mandelson to the police rather got to the point. Reform UK copied the idea later on January 2. Sir Keir Starmer - obviously embarrassed, but quite plausibly genuinely enraged - handed a dossier of evidence to the Met. By the end of the following day, Mandelson was facing a formal police investigation for misconduct in public office. He has resigned from the House of Lords, and steps are underway to strip him of his title (which requires primary legislation).

His downfall - long overdue - must surely have knock-on effects. Close allies include Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s hatchet man, and Wes Streeting, Starmer’s most likely replacement. That is to say nothing of Starmer himself, who made a scandal out of this by appointing him US ambassador last year. Mandelson has been a mascot of the Labour right continuously since the Blair government, no matter how high the scandals piled up. He is now an extraordinary liability.

Reckoning

Yet none of this is really earth-shattering stuff. That has been a big part of the story, really. Andrew and Mandelson are two of very few Epstein associates to have suffered any serious consequences: Andrew because he is, to be frank, a very stupid man, who dug his own grave with enthusiasm and application over the years; and Mandelson, presumably, because he is a dab hand at making enemies. The Epstein saga is like an overstretched ‘mystery box’ TV series - the revelations pile up, but, on the whole, seem inconsequential. Except for one or two individuals, there is no reckoning to be had. If Mandelson does end up going to jail over this, it seems that he may be the only one apart from Epstein himself and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Much of the overall picture has been plain for many years. Epstein was a phenomenally wealthy, well-connected man. He had his pecuniary interests to pursue, of course, but he also fancied himself as a bit of an intellectual, though from his emails he appears barely literate (or perhaps severely dyslexic). His world outlook was not terribly interesting, but is increasingly typical of tech billionaires - and his own class of hedge-fund people especially. These men believe, and Epstein believed, that they are the true movers and shakers of history, and that these characteristics are heritable (hence Epstein’s mania for impregnating young women and desire to cryogenically freeze his own penis); that technological development must be unleashed and made to serve them; and so on.

Not all attendees at Epstein’s soirees would be on board with this, of course. Noam Chomsky, whose name is badly blackened by this latest tranche of documents, certainly was not; it is not very much the outlook of Steve Bannon either, who is also a recurring presence in all this. My feeling is merely that Epstein and his core group of financial and political contacts found them ‘interesting’. They had bit parts to play, like the intellectuals and musicians invited to the salon of Madame Verdurin in Marcel Proust’s novel, In search of lost time. Just like Verdurin’s downwardly-mobile professors and shifty pianists, they were viewed essentially as consumer objects by the hosts, Epstein and Maxwell.

The trouble is that there were other ‘consumables’ hanging around, too: armies of very young women, procured by Maxwell, and probably by Jean-Luc Brunel (an odious French model agency owner and likely pimp and rapist, now dead), and in due course by some of the girls themselves. This was no hidden thing: Jeffrey, again, was a generous man, who liked to share his good fortune with his friends.

Many of the women allege that they were abused sexually by these friends; all such allegations are hotly denied, and certainly none have been proven to a criminal standard in court. There have been out-of-court settlements, including on the part of Andrew. But, taken together, it seems highly probable that Epstein acted as a pimp, and a pimp of teenagers at that. In one of the new emails, he promises to introduce Mountbatten-Windsor to a smoking-hot Russian 26-year-old - all’s fair between consenting adults, we assume. But for Epstein to have such ‘services’ on hand rather suggests that he was prostituting women as readily as he was writing cheques for thousands of dollars.

Impunity

The general air of befuddlement on the part of Epstein’s friends, as the scandal has dragged ever onwards, is unmistakable. The explanation that springs to mind is pretty simple: these men move in circles in which, along with the high-end champagne and artisanal vol-au-vents, female flesh is more or less available on tap. Billionaires and their favoured political proxies enjoy a measure of impunity in such matters. Indeed, Marx and Engels referred to a similar phenomenon in the Manifesto almost two centuries ago (although it was altogether tamer in its content):

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women, which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the communists. The communists have no need to introduce a community of women: it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

When details leak out to the public square, things are quickly hushed up by the application of large amounts of money. There is simply no playbook for a scandal of this sort that cannot be buried, one that has become a political third rail.

If there is a political lesson in all this, it precisely concerns this impunity, illuminated by its momentary failure as if by a lightning flash. There are other politically relevant details, but these are not central. For example, it is clear that Epstein had close links to the intelligence world, American and Israeli, and indeed perhaps had done so from a very early stage in his life (he was hired, despite woeful lack of qualifications, to teach at the elite Dalton prep school by sometime Office for Strategic Services agent Donald Barr).

Yet there is nothing terrifically surprising about close links between the secret state and the business elite. Otherwise, what would Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo have to write about? Indeed, Marxist theory has wrestled with the question of the state and its relationship to class power as long as such a theory has existed - as has a great deal of bourgeois social science.

The questions posed by such research, and the answers proposed to those questions, are all somewhat abstract - they must be, in order to be any use. Any relationship between state and capital must, to be sure, ultimately find expression in specific, singular relationships between individual people representative of those institutions. Theory does not obviate the need for historical research into these singularities - nothing else could verify or refute theory, after all. But historical research - especially of the ‘parapolitical’ style - cannot substitute for theory.

Over-interpretation of Epstein’s intelligence links has led to a regrettable renewal of conspiracy theorising on the left, on a scale unseen since the heyday of 9/11 trutherism. It is a temptation because we are confronted, precisely, with a conspiracy of very powerful men; but we must confront also the possibility that it is no grander a conspiracy than it appears to be - a matter of back-scratching and mutual favours among the elite, a small and squalid affair in the end. What if Epstein’s interest in Mandelson is no more than it appears to be this week: an opportunity to make a quick buck off secret documents from a well-placed friend? What in Epstein’s personality demands we believe it is anything more?

There are, of course, really high-political conspiracies - think of Operation Gladio, Propaganda due and all that, for example. But even these can only be properly understood in relation to the class struggle, the system of subordination between countries called imperialism, and so forth (or some alternative set of higher categories).

Despair

To suppose that world history really is just a tissue of elite conspiracies is question-begging: so how did the elites get to be elites, anyway? Turtles all the way down? But it is also a counsel of despair. There can be no way out of such a succession of plots by the powerful: any attempt results in a new elite, with depressingly familiar appetites.

This is amply demonstrated by the ineffectual character of the Epstein revelations. Yes, interest in the case may have been successfully exploited by Donald Trump; but, of course, he is implicated too, and now he tries to squash it. The Democrats exploit it now to embarrass Trump - and will forget it if they regain power, because it implicates the Clintons and many influential donors. With this conspiracy laid bare, we finally have a test case for what happens if the truth of such a plot is finally unveiled, all the names named. And the answer is … nothing of much consequence. It is fun to see Mandelson squirm, but he is no great man of history, and will be replaced by other fixers and operatives in bourgeois politics. Andrew’s downfall - despite republican wishcasting - will not bring the house of Windsor down with it.

Conspiracy obsession is a messianism without a messiah. The day will come when all is unveiled, but what then? Who acts on the consequence of the unveiling? It may seem preposterous that anyone could have thought that Donald Trump would clean this up, but he was the available man on horseback, and some such agent is required to make good on the promise of liberation. For Marxists, the agent of change is the working class; but it can achieve its destiny only if it knows that the conspirators, as much as their victims, are subject to laws beyond their control - in short, only if it abjures conspiracy theory as an explanatory mechanism per se. Rather, conspiracies are objects to be explained.

We must face the likely reality that, but for future scholarship and perhaps a few more random defenestrations of embarrassing figures, the Epstein saga is essentially played out. What is still on the table is the future - a future that, absent the destruction of the power of the bourgeoisie, is certain to involve more naked corruption and unpunished depravity of the same sort.