Mandelson’s Epstein Scandal Could End an Era in UK Politics

Peter Mandelson has engineered numerous political resurrections since his first resignation, from Prime Minister Tony Blair’s fledgling Labour government in 1998. But there is no engineering ingenious enough to come back from the Jeffrey Epstein affair. The police are looking into the question of whether Mandelson broke the law of the land in providing the pedophile financier with market-sensitive information during the financial crisis, but nobody in the country doubts that he broke innumerable moral laws.

The broader question is whether the Age of Mandelson is disappearing with Mandelson himself. For the former member of the House of Lords was more than a common-or-garden operative. He was a leading architect of a political regime and a political sensibility that dominated Britain from the 1990s onwards, enjoying the fawning support of most of the journalists who are now excoriating him.