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When King Charles hosts Donald Trump for the state banquet at Windsor Castle next week, the dignitaries should know better than to mention Jeffrey Epstein. Inevitably, however, Epstein’s ghost will hang over proceedings, the pedo-Banquo at the feast.
The royal family will entertain the President, though the Duke of York will (surely?) stay away. He no longer works for the crown and everyone knows why. Trump, meanwhile, will still be batting away suggestions that in 2003 he contributed a puerile drawing to Epstein’s 50th “birthday book” – a strange compilation of messages for the sex criminal, lovingly assembled by Ghislaine Maxwell.
Then there’s Lord Mandelson, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States, who is supposed to accompany Trump for some of the trip. The Prince of Darkness apparently features prominently in the soppy-yet-pervy birthday book, which Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have cunningly released online. “Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!” Mandelson allegedly scribbled, alongside an image of himself in a bathrobe sitting opposite the fully dressed rapist.
“Petie,” as Epstein called him, has long said he regrets ever having met the financier. “It’s an albatross around my neck,” he said this week, referring to the fact that he apparently continued the friendship after Epstein was imprisoned for a child-sex offense in 2008. But expressions of regret won’t stop the attacks coming.
On Tuesday night, in the wake of the birthday book bombshell, the Telegraph reported that, in 2010, Epstein helped Mandelson broker a £1 billion ($1.35 billion) deal for the sale of a UK-taxpayer owned business, Sempra Commodities, to JP Morgan. “Something is really wrong here,” says Sarah Ransome, one of Epstein’s British accusers. “Peter Mandelson should not be ambassador. He needs to be fired.” Sensing opportunity, the Tory leader Kemi Badendoch used Prime Minister’s Questions to attack Keir Starmer for Mandelson’s Epstein association. “That is a disgrace,” she said.
How long can Britain’s ambassador last? In the coming days, the details of Mandelson’s bond with Epstein may end up overshadowing all talk of the special relationship between Britain and America, as the wars rage on in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Trump has turned on a British ambassador before. In 2019, Sir Kim Darroch was pushed out of his Washington post after diplomatic cables – in which he called Trump “inept” and “insecure” – were leaked. What might save Mandelson is that he has done nothing but praise the US commander-in-chief. Sure enough, whereas Trump loathed Darroch, he seems to have warmed to Mandy. Now both men would rather the world move on from Epstein.
It’s all so awkward. There’s another photograph of Epstein with Joel Pashcow, a longtime member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and an anonymous young woman holding up a large fake cheque from “DJ Trump” for $22,500. Clearly, in the time before 21st-century populism and the #MeToo movement, the global elite used to enjoy their risqué japes. But what does it all mean now?
Trump is adamant that Epstein, Epstein, Epstein is the new Russia, Russia, Russia: a hoax designed to distract the world from his revolutionary achievements. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, claims: “It’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign [the birthday book].” But it isn’t clear at all, unless Team Trump can prove that some of those other epistles have been faked.
It’s also baffling to ponder why, when Joe Biden was in the White House, the now-viral Epstein files did not find their way into the public eye. The Democrat-led Department of Justice and the FBI, along with their allies in the media, spent years hounding Trump as a Russian patsy, a fraudster, an insurrectionist and an abuser of women. Yet somehow, it seems, the anti-Trump deep state sat on eye-popping evidence appearing to tie Trump to Epstein. Was it simply because Bill Clinton, that philanderer par excellence, also appeared in the birthday bundle? A note purporting to be from the ex-president praises Epstein’s “childlike curiosity.”
The Epstein story now appears to involve the Democratic elite, the British establishment and Trump. It thus becomes an ever more mysterious meta-conspiracy – a kaleidoscopic scandal that takes on a different complexion depending on who looks into it. Republican figures, including Vice-President J.D. Vance, enjoyed fanning anti-elitist paranoia when the Epstein muck was on the opposition. They are strangely mute now.
For Vance and MAGA-supporting Atlanticists such as Nigel Farage, the hope for next week’s visit is that Trump, accompanied by various tech tycoons, will launch a broadside against Keir Starmer’s government for suppressing free speech online. Now, however, the whole world is gossiping about who did what with Epstein. Behind closed doors, Trump, the royal family and the Labour leadership will perhaps agree that sometimes it’s better for the people just to shut up.
