Mandelson now faces the prospect of many years in prison

Peter Mandelson is likely to be charged with offences of misconduct in public office (MiPO) for leaking highly sensitive market information he received as a UK cabinet minister in the government of Gordon Brown in June 2009.

Mandelson is also alleged to have conspired with Epstein to get a New York banker to threaten the UK finance minister with the sale of UK government bonds to pressure the minister to abandon a plan to tax bankers’ bonuses.

MiPO requires the prosecution to prove the accused held public office and while acting in that capacity intentionally engaged in misconduct abusive of the public trust reposed in him.

Mandelson’s email correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein shows egregious misconduct when he was a cabinet minister. But it is important to appreciate the offence is not committed if a public officer misconducts himself but only if “entrusted with powers and duties for the public benefit he abuses them or abuses his official position”.

In a case brought by Boris Johnson in 2019 against a private prosecution filed against him, the English High Court held that Johnson had not been acting as an MP when he falsely claimed that the UK sent the EU £350 million a week in the Brexit campaign. What has to be shown is that the accused was “acting as a public officer” which is not the same as “acting whilst a public officer”.

Although the misconduct alleged against Mandelson was egregious it will have to be shown that his email exchanges with Epstein were an abuse of his official position as a cabinet minister. He has let it be known that his conduct was not criminal and that he did not benefit from his misconduct – to which the short answer is that the information he provided enhanced his credit in the proverbial bank of favours.

On the facts revealed by the emails a criminal offence would have to be created if his alleged misconduct is not covered by MiPO. The last time a common law offence was created by the court was in 1962 when the highest court in UK held that the courts had a residual power to criminalise conduct that shocks the public.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer must have felt a sense of deja vu as he considered the various betrayals of Peter Mandelson that drove him to refer Mandelson’s alleged misconduct to the police last week.

It would have reminded him of the time when as Director of Public Prosecutions 2008-2013 he decided to prosecute Chris Huhne, a serving cabinet minister in the Conservative LibDem coalition government 2010-15. Huhne’s wife, the well-known economist Vicky Price, had betrayed marital confidences by leaking to the press that she had taken her husband’s speeding points in 2003 to help him avoid disqualification.

He left her for another woman, and she leaked the information to destroy her husband’s career by claiming that she took the points as a result of marital coercion. It was revenge for his betrayal of jilting her as soon as he became a cabinet minister – the late Robin Cook did something similar when he left his wife when he became UK foreign minister in 1997.

Huhne pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice in 2013 and she was found guilty by a jury after a retrial, and they were both sent to prison for eight months and only served four.

The prosecution and conviction of Huhne ended the political career of a prominent member of the coalition government. Vicky Price recovered and wrote a book about her experiences in prison and is frequently on radio and television commenting on economic affairs.

She must have regretted her betrayal of marital confidences to the press that landed her in prison but as the original saying goes, “heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.”  

Mandelson now faces the prospect of many years in prison. The maximum for MiPO is life imprisonment and if he is prosecuted and convicted, he will spend many years inside as the system will not be kind to him.

As for Starmer, he too must feel betrayed. Not in the same way as Huhne and Price, but Mandelson betrayed Gordon Brown in 2009, Starmer in 2025 and his country a few times in between.

Most political pundits do not believe the PM can recover, but the Labour Party knows that he is fundamentally a decent man who does not deserve to be removed on the back of the Mandelson scandal. He became an MP for the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras and succeeded as Labour leader and prime minister in 2024, winning 411 seats and an overall majority of 174.

There is a lot of hype, hindsight and hypocrisy about the Mandelson scandal. What appears to have happened is that Mandelson persuaded Starmer that his friendship with Epstein was not toxic because as a gay man his association with him had nothing to do with the sexual abuse of underage girls.

But no one imagined that Mandelson had previously been so close to Epstein he was prepared to abuse his position as a cabinet minister and betray his own country to please him.