It was so startlingly obvious it seemed to snuff out any comment. Lord Peter Mandelson, otherwise known as the sinister Mr Fixit of New Labour from the Blair years, was an intimate of the late convicted paedophile and socially connected financier Jeffrey Epstein. If it was intended as a humorous appointment – Britain’s Epstein familiar ambassadorial representative to Washington attending the court of an administration with another Epstein familiar, President Donald Trump – it was not one to last.

It began at the end of last year, when Mandelson, who seemed to specialise in the art of being sacked, was called upon to take up one of British diplomacy’s most important offices: the ambassadorship to the United States. As a result, he was glowing, brightly telling all that President George W. Bush had dubbed him “Silvertongue.” This same tongue had called Trump, in 2019, a “danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and racist.” Chris LaCivita, who most recently served as senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, thought Mandelson “an absolute moron” – high praise indeed.

Mandelson took it all in his stride. He promised the administration that they would “discover I’m not uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and I’m pro-market and pro-business.” His remit: to keep Trump onside in staying in Europe for reasons of security, forge commercial ties, and limit tariffs on UK exports.

Then came those emails, as reported by Bloomberg. They revealed the extent of Mandelson’s association with Epstein. The Dark Lord was found encouraging Epstein to “fight for early release” shortly after his sentencing to 18 months in prison. He showed signs of infatuation, saying “I think the world of you” a day before the sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor in June 2008 commenced.

More material surfaced. From the U.S. House Oversight Committee came the disclosure of a scrapbook made to celebrate the financier’s fiftieth birthday, with the Mandelson effusion “best pal.” (Trump can also count himself a fellow Epstein enthusiast in the collection.)

The scene was set for yet another sacking. Sir Keir Starmer, the embarrassed British prime minister, was again shown up for his faulty judgment. He had already known of Mandelson’s soiled ties yet remained unmoved. In June 2023, for instance, the Financial Times obtained an internal JPMorgan report showing the extent of the association even after Epstein’s imprisonment. In January 2024, when asked at a press conference about Mandelson’s stays at the home of a convicted sex offender in Manhattan, the Labour leader proved implausibly unaware: “I don’t know any more than you and there’s not really much I can add to what is already out there I’m afraid.”

The new correspondence, however, was seen as “materially different” to information available when the new ambassador made his way to Washington. “Had I known then what I know now,” Starmer stated emphatically, “I’d never have appointed him.” Then came that churning feeling of dissatisfaction from Starmer’s own Labour MPs, whose views he occasionally respects. One of them, Andy McDonald, noted “widespread revulsion that we, by association, being in the same party, are being brought under the microscope for something that [Mandelson] has done.”

Mandelson, for his part, expressed a feeling of “tremendous” regret regarding his friendship with Epstein, and a “tremendous sense of sympathy” for the victims but insisted that he never witnessed or was aware about any wrongdoing when spending time with him. As he told the BBC: “I relied on assurances of [Epstein’s] innocence that turned out later to be horrendously false.” Lawyers representing his best pal “claimed that it was a shake down of him, a criminal conspiracy. I foolishly relied on their word which I regret to this day.” What fabulous, mountainous mendacity.

Some tried to explain the appointment as a symptom of establishment blindness and insularity. In the Spectator, there was a rather apt observation that Mandelson, at least in Britain, “was part of the furniture – the man you loved to hate. It was everywhere implied that this amoral figure, relic of a subtler age, would be able to ‘run rings’ around the various oik populists – chief among them the 47th president.” A less likely, though equally apposite reading, is that Mandelson’s spotty record was exactly what was needed in a Washington distinctly unmoored from any moral compass. The Trump administration, with its venality, its solipsistic universe, its tendency to muddy and contaminate institutions, would have suited “Petie,” as Epstein liked to call him.

The greatest insult of all, and one that Trump inspires on most occasions, is the feigned (or genuine) ignorance of a person he has known or had an acquaintance with. Trump has selective amnesia for those he professes fondness for; he has an elephantine memory for those he hates. As both Trump and Starmer were drooling and slobbering over the Anglo-American “special” alliance in a press conference during Trump’s UK visit, Mandelson’s name did come up. Trump claimed to have never known the fellow, suggesting that Starmer was better placed to answer. Starmer, exploiting the situation, walked it on with his now conditioned response: Mandelson was sacked once new information surfaced about the Epstein link. Mr Fixit was, at least in the metaphorical sense, dead and buried.