Last Saturday, a friend in Washington emailed to say he had been studying some of the latest 3.5 million pages of Epstein files. A few months ago, I had pointed out here (Notes, 11 October 2025) that much of Epstein’s famous ‘black book’ was just the contacts book of Oxford friends of Ghislaine Maxwell. As their contemporary, I congratulated myself on having been at Cambridge, thus avoiding meeting Ghislaine. So my friend’s message came as a bit of a blow. He rubbed it in: ‘You may be interested to hear that you, yourself, feature no fewer than 40 times.’ His second paragraph, however, kindly explained: the 40 references to me were repetitions or duplicates of one reference, in an email from Peter Mandelson to Epstein on 29 November 2009. ‘Did you read Charles Moore in yesterday[sic] D Telegraph?’ he asks. Woundingly for a columnist’s pride, Epstein never answers that question. But it is interesting that Mandelson mentioned the article: it was about his Achilles’ heel.

At that time, Lord Mandelson was riding high. A year earlier, his old adversary Gordon Brown had tried to shore up his failing government by ennobling Mandelson and bringing him back into the cabinet. In June 2009, he had promoted him further, conferring the resonantly meaningless title of First Secretary of State, as well as making him Lord President of the Council and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and asking him to continue as President of the Board of Trade. (Did any minister ever have such a long list of titles? Did any minister ever enjoy such a list so much?) In September, First Secretary Mandelson had led a rip-roaring trade mission to Beijing and Shanghai and, incredibly, won a standing ovation at the Labour party conference. ‘I know that Tony [Blair] said our project would only be complete when the Labour party learned to love Peter Mandelson,’ he told delegates, ‘I think perhaps he set the bar a little too high. Though I am trying my best.’ Wild cheers.

In July 2009, Peter’s old friend, Jeffrey Epstein, had been released from prison in Florida, having served his jail term for procuring an underage girl for prostitution. In their November communications, both men felt buoyant. The fact that Gordon Brown’s premiership was on the skids did little to diminish Peter’s happiness. Office had diminished his wallet, however. As we now learn, the prohibition on ministers’ outside interests meant that Mandelson’s then partner and future husband, Reinaldo, later wrote to Epstein saying he did not like to ask Peter for money again and so could he have some from Jeffrey to train as an osteopath. Jeffrey produced £10,000.

In November 2009, I discovered, and published here (Notes, 28 November 2009), the story that Mandelson and Cherie Blair had recently spent a shooting weekend with the Rothschild family. One of the guns was Saif Gaddafi, son of the then dictator of Libya (and reported murdered this week). Mrs Blair’s lawyers sent us a strange letter saying she had been with the Rothschilds that weekend but not at the same time as Peter or Saif and – most important – had not shot anything. Mandelson’s government office grandly declared that ‘We do not offer a running commentary on Peter Mandelson’s social engagements’, but did agree he had been present. It absolved him, too, of shooting. He did not seem to mind, however, that ‘he had been rubbing shoulders with the son of the man responsible for the biggest terrorist atrocity ever committed against British citizens’, the Lockerbie bombing.

I followed up my Spectator piece with the Telegraph column to which Peter had referred. It noted that Peter could not keep away from the human equivalents of the ‘colourful exotic birds’ housed in the Rothschild aviary, and was ‘performing feats of social mountaineering so daring that one gets altitude sickness just watching’. He had recently been a guest of the Rothschilds in Corfu, meeting, simultaneously, his Conservative opponent George Osborne and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The column set out the case for Mandelson – his diplomatic skills, his political effectiveness – and the case against – the potential corruption, the attraction to money. It ended thus: ‘Has he driven forward the necessary task of modernising and moderating a party that desperately needed to be able once again to run the country? Or has he pushed our public life into a culture of chicanery, political lies and the circumvention of parliamentary democracy? The answer is, both.’ I still think that is true.

Why did Peter draw this piece to Jeffrey’s attention? If I am reading their shared mood aright, I doubt he did so because he felt precarious. My guess is that both felt invincible. Feasting with panthers, Peter was hungry for more.

In the newly released email exchanges which accompany mention of my column, the friends discuss whether to tell ‘gb’ how bad his situation is, and how ‘tony’ thinks Peter should ‘facilitate, not initiate’ a conversation with Brown. To Epstein’s suggestion that he tell Brown, out of loyalty, ‘the [way the] winds blowing’, Mandelson says no: ‘He will immed[sic] press panic button – highly sensitised to movement of my eyebrow.’ Epstein counters that ‘if you make believe that everythink[sic] is ok, he will lose trust in you.’ Changing the subject, Epstein asks: ‘are you sure the backpressure from you[r] lack of sex is not turning your brain to fois[sic] gras.’ ‘It’s certainly a serious problem,’ Peter replies. ‘Cure coming to London from S’hai next weekend.’ We are not told what this cure is. Could it be Reinaldo, now osteopathically tooled up, returning to sort out Peter’s bad back? Or is Peter talking about something completely different? The following weekend, Epstein enquires: ‘Has the eagle landed?’ ‘Long landing thanks… now going to eat something,’ Mandelson replies. ‘Are you being disgusting?’ asks Epstein.