Who is Lord Mandelson? Is he gay, does he have a husband - as UK ambassador to US sacked over Epstein links
Sir Keir Starmer appointed Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the United States without fully vetting his links to Jeffrey Epstein.
Lord Mandelson was stripped of his position as ambassador to the US amid fresh scrutiny over his years-long friendship with the convicted paedophile. The prime minister initially defended the Labour peer but removed him from his post on Thursday after newly seen emails revealed he sent messages of support to Epstein even as he faced jail for sex offences in 2008.
The Times has now reported that Downing Street and the Foreign Office were aware of the emails on Tuesday - a day before Sir Keir gave Lord Mandelson his backing at Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs). In a post on X, Conservative leader Ms Badenoch wrote: "Looks like the Prime Minister and Labour MPs spent the week lying to the whole country about what they knew regarding Mandelson's involvement with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein."
She continued: "If No 10 had those emails for 48 hours before acting, it means he lied at PMQs and ministers lied again about new additional information. These are yet more errors of judgment.
"The Prime Minister has very serious questions to answer. The only way to clear this up is full transparency about who knew what, and when."
Sources said Sir Keir was not aware of the contents of the emails when he told MPs he had "confidence" in Lord Mandelson. A media enquiry outlining details of the messages between Lord Mandelson and Epstein was sent to the Foreign Office on Tuesday, and passed on to Number 10.
Sir Oliver Robbins, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, asked Lord Mandelson about the emails on Tuesday, but did not receive a response until the following day. Sir Keir is understood not to have been aware of the contents of the emails until Wednesday evening.
Under mounting pressure on Saturday, Whitehall sources also attempted to pin the blame on the Foreign Office, questioning why its in-depth vetting had not uncovered the emails. One senior figure told the BBC that the “developed vetting” process “ought to have been completely forensic, but they must have used the wrong lens”.
But the Business Secretary defended the appointment process, and denied that Lord Mandelson was announced as the ambassador before security checks were completed. Peter Kyle told Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “The Cabinet Office did an independent inquiry into the appointment, as they do in every public appointment of this nature, and the information that was presented to the Prime Minister.
“The second process was obviously a political process where there are political conversations done in No 10 about all the other aspects of an appointment of this nature. Now both of these things turned up information that was already public and a decision was made that based on Peter’s singular talents in this area, that the risk of appointing knowing what was already public was worth the risk.”
Who is Lord Mandelson?
Given the job in December 2024, he was the man Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer tasked with building links to the incoming Trump administration. He began working for Labour in the 1980s, when the party was at its lowest ebb, suffering successive defeats to Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives.
The painful 1992 defeat - when Neil Kinnock's Labour were unexpectedly beaten - spurred Mandelson in his belief that the party needed to modernise if they were ever to get back into government. In 1994, he played a pivotal role in getting Tony Blair elected as party leader.
In 1997 Mandelson was given the job of minister without portfolio and then trade secretary. In 1998, he was forced into the first of his government resignations when it was revealed he had received a secret loan of £373,000 from his ministerial colleague Geoffrey Robinson.
Less than a year later he was back in government taking on the position of Northern Ireland secretary. He lasted in that job until January 2001, when he quit over allegations of misconduct over a passport application for the Hinduja brothers. An inquiry later cleared him of wrongdoing.
Two years later he quit as an MP to become the EU's trade commissioner. When Brown became prime minister in 2007, another comeback in British politics for Mandelson looked unlikely.
But in a shock move, a beleaguered Brown, suffering low polling ratings, appeared to bury the hatchet and appointed his former friend as business secretary, making him a peer at the same time. Mandelson was tasked with reinvigorating the government, which appeared to have run out of steam after a decade in power.
After Labour lost power, Mandelson started international lobbying firm, Global Counsel, where he was able to continue amassing influential contacts in business and politics. According to Pink News, Mandelson is gay. He was outed in 1998 by gay journalist Matthew Parris.
Speaking to The Sun’s Harry Cole Saves the West, Lord Mandelson said: “I regret very, very deeply indeed carrying on that association with him for far longer than I should have done.” Lord Mandelson went on to say that “perhaps because I am a gay man” he may have been blinded to Epstein’s criminal behaviour.
Lord Mandelson is married to Reinaldo Avila da Silva, the couple wed at Old Marylebone Town Hall in 2023. At the time of their wedding, Lord Mandelson was 70 and Reinaldo was 51.