I met an unknown Peter Mandelson sometime in 1976. Charles Clarke, then President of the National Union of Students, and later a Minister in the Blair Government, introduced ‘Peter’ to me as ‘Labour Party Royalty’. He was the grandson of Herbert Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister in the post war Labour Government.

Mandelson was both supercilious and ingratiating – a clue to how he would operate in the future. I recall someone present shrugging and murmuring – ‘grifter’. I asked her what it meant. ‘Conman’ she said. Astute intuition.

Mandelson became an MP in 1992 and was at the centre of policy development alongside future Prime Ministers’ Blair and Brown. He managed Labour’s 1997 election campaign. It produced a landslide victory. He was rewarded by Blair as Minister ‘without portfolio’.

’New Labour’ broke from traditional Labour. The Party embraced ‘modernisation’ and neo-liberalism in a way even Mrs Thatcher would have been wary of. Mandelson himself said he felt ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’.

The Labour Government was lucky. China was just coming on stream and the global economy picked up. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown repeatedly boasted he had ended ‘boom and bust’. Increased tax receipts led to improvements in public services.

Blair developed an almost messianic zeal that the liberal free market order could conquer the world. Neo-liberalism disguises itself as a mission of ‘civilisation’, justifying unrestrained capitalism and maintaining the US ‘rules based’ world order behind a mask of human rights and ‘democracy’.

Blair sought to ‘manage’ capitalism, not to change it. Most tellingly, he saw the ‘partnership’ with the USA as being central to the future of Britain. He told his Ambassador to the US, Christopher Meyer, to ‘get as far as you can up George Bush’s **** and stay there’. He imagined an Anglo-American world order. The result was Iraq.

Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s recently sacrificed Chief of staff, began his Labour career working for Mandelson. McSweeney established ‘Labour Together’ funded by pro-Israel Zionists to promote the right wing in the Labour Party, protect Israel and get rid of Corbyn. It weaponized antisemitism to drive Corbyn and his supporters out of the Party. The pro-Israel lobby is among the most powerful and well-resourced lobbies in the western world. It worked.

Like the good pupil he was to Mandelson, McSweeney then went on to organise Labour’s successful landslide 2024 election campaign that returned Kier Starmer as Prime Minister. Mandelson, the cunning ‘Prince of Darkness’, was then rewarded as British Ambassador to the USA – to ‘manage’ the mercurial Trump. Both had someone in common – Geoffrey Epstein.

When Mandelson’s links to Epstein were fully exposed, he was obliged to resign. In turn his protege, McSweeney, was sacrificed for making the ‘mistake’ of nominating his old boss Mandelson for the Ambassadors job.

McSweeney was Mandelson’s protege. Blair and Mandelson were/are joined at the hip. That’s why there’s not a squeak out of Blair now. To defend him, Blair would become even more the object of derision than he already is.