Short of dressing the former Duke of York in a Carmen Miranda-style fruit headdress and attaching two Catherine wheels to each of his buttocks, the Labour party couldn’t have done much more to draw attention to one famous pal of Jeff Epstein this week – from threatening bills on the line of succession to the Secretary of State for Defence’s briefing that the former prince will have his naval ranks stripped from him. Thank heavens for that; it’s well known, of course, that no sexual deviant ever served in the Royal Navy.
This is a fascinating tactic from the Labour party which reveals two truths. One: they believe the general public to be intensely stupid. Two: that some of their number are even stupider than we previously thought. Perhaps they believe that keeping Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in the headlines will help distract the general public from the stabbing epidemic, the state of the economy, the Chagos betrayal, the farm tax, the Chancellor’s property portfolio and, er, the Epstein scandal.
It was as if the appointment of Mandy had happened deus ex machina
Yes, lest we forget, the actual closest member of the British establishment to Paedo Jeff wasn’t Andy but Mandy. Why would you seek to keep Epstein in the headlines when the only person who has recently appointed a noted and unabashed pal of the paedo to anything was Sir Keir Starmer? Andrew, for all his glaring faults, didn’t write a birthday card so creepy and weird that it causes anyone who reads it to be swallowed into the earth by the forces of pure cringe. Lord Mandelson – who has somehow kept his title – did. Put another way, when it comes to nonce-adjacency, the Labour party is possibly closer than the House of Windsor.
This awkward reality was always going to be front and centre during the questioning of two mandarins – Sir Chris Wormald and Sir Olly Robbins – by the foreign affairs select committee. Seasoned Mandarin-watchers will know these two of old. Sir Olly is part of the gaggle of bigwigs responsible for negotiating the Chagos betrayal: in an ideal world he’d be answering questions in the Tower of London. Meanwhile, Sir Chris has been, in recent months, on the receiving end of disagreeable briefings courtesy of No. 10, who want to replace him with someone else. Admittedly, this must be a bit like finding that a contract has been taken out on your life but that the people responsible for carrying it out are Mr Tumble and Zip the Pinhead. Still, Sir Chris is another example of Sir Keir’s effort to find anyone else to blame – at all times.
Unsurprisingly, Sir Chris radiated unease; he fiddled with his glasses and had developed a bizarre verbal affectation where he added about fifteen more syllables to ‘civil service’ than it actually contained. He was right to be nervous. MPs weren’t feeling particularly sympathetic to the mandarins’ plight.
Aphra Brandreth began with a question from the ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ school of scrutiny: ‘Were you aware that in his previous roles, he’d been sacked as trade and industry secretary in 1998 for failing to declare an interest-free loan…’, Or, that ‘he’d been sacked in 2001 after trying to broker a passport for a wealthy donor to the Millennium Dome project’. On and on it went.
Sir Olly replied that he had a ‘duty of care and confidentiality’ towards Lord Mandelson and therefore didn’t want to single him out. Which is a bit like saying that you feel a need to protect the boa constrictor which has just eaten all your other pets in case it feels ‘singled out’. We were also treated to some prime examples of civil service gobbledygook from the pair of Poohbahs. Sir Chris explained vetting processes 1, 2 and 3 at great length. We learnt that process 2 was ‘proactive’, whereas the ‘conflict of interest process’ was a matter of ‘self-declaration’. All this would culminate in a report, received by the employing department and employing line manager. It was unbelievably technocratic.
Uma Kamaran wondered whether ‘associations with well-known paedophiles’ should be ‘flagged for any future appointments’. To call this a masterclass of understatement would itself be, ironically, an understatement. Chris Wormald insisted that Lord Mandelson’s paedo-proximity had been raised in his department’s due diligence exercise – though in the process he accidentally promoted the paedo in question to ‘Lord Epstein’.
Emily Thornberry, whose voice is silky in the way that a Silk Cut cigarette is silky, purred pure menace at the mandarins: ‘Isn’t there also a skill set involved in asking the questions and getting an answer?’ she asked Sir Chris. But this was itself a doomed errand; like asking for an elucidation of Proust from an electric whisk. In Mandarin world, language must never be direct; there are never ‘problems’, only ‘issues around’. For instance, when asked whether Lord Mandelson had been sacked or had resigned, Sir Olly replied that ‘he was withdrawn from post’. ‘So he was sacked?’ asked John Whittingdale. ‘As I say, he was withdrawn from post.’ There was a palpable allergy to non-euphemistic language.
Wormald described the release of the Mandelson-Epstein emails as ‘game-changing’. Ms Thornberry huffed that it could hardly be described as ‘game-changing’, since it was already known that Mandy had stayed at Epstein’s house after his criminal conviction. Mr Whittingdale wondered why the civil service hadn’t alerted the PM to the contents of these emails before he went to PMQs to express his full confidence in his ambassador. Robbins hum-hawwed about ‘issues that needed to be looked into’ first. Wormald repeatedly insisted that he wasn’t there to apportion blame; as if this wasn’t the entire point of the committee hearing, to establish where the buck stopped. It was as if the appointment of Mandy had happened deus ex machina, everyone’s favourite crook appeared fully formed out of nowhere: corruptio ex nihilo, as his baronial arms really should have said.
For all the obfuscation and professional management-speak, for all of the efforts of two full-time professional wrigglers, the picture that emerged does not look good for No. 10. Sir Olly said that the PM had wanted to appoint Mandy so Foreign Office officials basically went through the motions to facilitate it. Sir Chris went about as far as his directness-phobia would allow in saying that much information about Lord Mandelson’s past had been collated in the briefing the PM received at the time.
Much credit is due to Emily Thornberry, whose persistence and downright belligerence nailed down two people who have risen through life partly on the basis of their ability to equivocate. Of course, her motives aren’t exactly a secret: the title of ‘Who Hates Keir Starmer Most’ is one of the most hotly contested in British politics, but there is quite a strong chance that the Lady Nugee makes the podium. After the recent action from the Palace, the gulf between their decisions and the back-covering that has come out of No. 10 looks starker than ever. Epstein, like a noncey Tutankhamen, may yet wreak more havoc from beyond the grave.
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