Peter Mandelson, the former U.K. ambassador to the United States, has been released on bail after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the news in a statement issued just after 2 a.m. Tuesday.
Mandelson, 72, was filmed being led from his London home to a car by plainclothes officers on Monday afternoon. Police searched two of his properties in London and western England as part of a criminal probe launched earlier this month into his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The Metropolitan Police spokesperson kept it clinical:
"A 72-year-old man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office has been released on bail pending further investigation."
The police did not name the suspect. Mandelson had previously been identified as the former diplomat under investigation.
At the center of the investigation are claims that Mandelson passed sensitive government information to Epstein, the disgraced U.S. financier convicted of sex offenses involving a minor in 2008. Messages suggest the information exchange occurred in 2009, when Mandelson was a senior minister in the British government, the AP reported. The information was potentially market-moving.
Mandelson also appears to have told Epstein he would lobby other members of the government to reduce a tax on bankers' bonuses. This was after Epstein's conviction. Not before. After.
And Mandelson once called Epstein "my best pal."
More than 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents were released last month by the U.S. Justice Department. Those files helped trigger the criminal probe now engulfing two of Britain's most prominent public figures.
Mandelson's arrest was not an isolated event. Four days later, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, landed in police custody on suspicion of a similar offense related to his friendship with Epstein. Both men are suspected of improperly passing U.K. government information to the financier.
Mountbatten-Windsor was released after 11 hours in custody while the police investigation continues.
Two members of the British establishment, each with deep ties to Epstein, each arrested within days of each other, each on suspicion of betraying their government's trust to a convicted sex offender. The pattern speaks for itself.
The political fallout lands squarely on Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who made the baffling decision to name Mandelson as ambassador to Washington at the start of President Donald Trump's second term. This was a man with known, deep, and publicly acknowledged connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer chose him anyway.
The decision nearly cost Starmer his job earlier this month. He has since acknowledged he made a mistake and apologized to the victims of Epstein. He fired Mandelson in September.
Consider the sequence: Starmer appointed a man who called a convicted sex offender his "best pal" to represent Britain in Washington, then fired him when the obvious became undeniable, then watched him get arrested on suspicion of passing government secrets to that same sex offender. This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20. The warning signs were visible from orbit.
The British government has pledged to begin releasing documents connected to the appointment in early March. Whatever those documents reveal, the judgment failure has already been exposed.
Mandelson was no backbencher. He was an architect of New Labour, the political movement that brought the party back to power in 1997. He served in senior government roles under Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2001, then returned under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010. He was the European Union's trade commissioner between those stints. He was appointed to the House of Lords for life in 2008. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was a former Labour Cabinet minister.
He twice had to resign from government posts. Earlier this month, he resigned from the House of Lords entirely.
The man was Labour royalty. Now he is out on bail.
Gordon Brown, for his part, has been particularly angered by the revelations and has been helping police with their inquiries. When a former prime minister cooperates with investigators probing his own former cabinet minister, the institutional rupture runs deep.
Mandelson remains on bail pending further investigation. The government's promised document release in early March could deepen the political crisis or clarify the scope of Starmer's knowledge before the appointment. Meanwhile, the Mountbatten-Windsor investigation proceeds on a parallel track.
The Epstein saga has already consumed reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. The release of 3 million pages of documents by the U.S. Justice Department made sure of that. But what's unfolding in Britain is something distinct: not just social embarrassment or tabloid scandal, but criminal investigations into whether powerful men traded their country's secrets to a man everyone already knew was a predator.
Mandelson helped secure a trade deal in May. He moved in the highest circles of British and international politics for three decades. None of it insulated him from a pair of plainclothes officers and a Monday afternoon car ride.
