“Allegations which I believe to be false that he made financial payments to me 20 years ago, and of which I have no record or recollection, need investigating by me.
It would be fun, for of course it would, if it turned out the Epstein files were full of completely made up bollocks now, wouldn’t it?
He does have a notable history of sugar daddies tho’, does Mandy.
<i>I have dedicated my life to the values and success of the Labour party and in taking my decision, I believe I am acting in its best interests.</i>
The success, maybe. The values? What a man of the people! Unable to remember if someone paid him 50 grand.
Of course, for modern Labour, I guess that’s pretty typical of their values.
I think he sums up the values of the labour party pretty well: arrogant, corrupt and hates this country.
Cheers!
…and a taste for the high life. Never forget that. Name me a prominent Labour figure who ended up poor.
Nuffin’s too good for the werkers…
Dennis Skinner springs to mind. He didn’t exactly end up poor, having an MP’s pension to fall back on, but he didn’t end up inexplicably rich like the rest of them. I seem to remember he lived in a council house all his career as an MP. May still do.
The exception proving the rule.
That a man as well paid as an MP occupies a council house seems to me to be unmistakeable evidence of moral corruption. Maybe I’m old-fashioned that way.
I’m not British, so not familiar with the details. Isn’t council housing supposed to be subsidized?
Maybe he was just cheap.
I think we’ll find he was “principled”, living as his voters did. It worked: he represented Bolsover – a hideous mining, then ex-mining area – for 49 years, during which time his voters started to wonder why, after 49 years, they were still living in fucking council houses.
So in 2019 they voted for the Tories, temporarily (actually to get Brexit done). Then in 2024 they reverted to type, voted Labour again (Skinner having retired) and still live in fucking council houses, although Bolsover is now considerably more vibrant than it was. Which is nice.
Ok, but let’s not romanticise Labour goats of that type. Tam Dalyell felt it was only right and proper that the taxpayer fork out for his fitted bookcase containing endless richly bound Hansard tomes.
Skinner certainly lived in a council house while an MP. ( At 93, he may now be in a care home.) It was an affectation: council housing should not be a lifestyle choice but a (5 years max?) transitional state while folk prepare to buy or rent in the private sector.
IIRC* he only drew the equivalent of a miners wage and donated the rest to the NUM or some other lefty institution.
*IIRC now means I can’t be bothered or haven’t got the time to ask ChatGPT or some other LLM.
who’d have thought that we’d come to “miss” the good ol’ beast of Bolsover!
So, a corrupt politician?
If he can’t remember who paid him what, he can’t really stay bought can he?
It would be fun, for of course it would, if it turned out the Epstein files were full of completely made up bollocks now, wouldn’t it?
You mean, they aren’t full of made-up bollocks?
Possibly, but that would mean someone actually managed to visualise and concoct a picture of Mandy in his tighty whities. Who could do such a thing?
Who could do such a thing?
Someone with a very limited imagination….Consider this…
Aaaargh! Theo, how could you do that to us?
I’m struck by how many of these pics are obviously quick, barely-framed snaps that probably took the subject by surprise. Few are funny or flattering. They look like kompromat to me. Otherwise, why take them? Many are not nice mementoes.
It’s “conceivable” that the recently released picture of Prince Andrew kneeling over that girl was him attending a first aid course. Context is everything.
Perhaps she needed first aid after…
I mean, that pic is scraping the barrel, isn’t it? What’s wrong with it? He’s not shagging her and there’s no money visible. That his wife may not like it is another matter.
Far more conceivable that Epstein was a nasty piece of work whose mysterious source of wealth was gathering kompromat, and that either the Rooskies or the Israelis or both had him offed.
Answer this question. What mysterious factor is it that has led all but three of UK Prime Ministers since Churchill being Oxford graduates. Are they unusually talented people because they attended this university? Spanner? Treason May?
The answer of course is networking. They met all the right people at Oxford.
This is what I believe Epstein’s talent was. He was a supreme networker. The goto man for anything & anybody.
I certainly don’t believe he was guilty of what he was accused of. It doesn’t make any sense. The amount of money he would have gained out of it was absolutely trivial. So why would he bother? And there’s nothing illegal about introducing one person to another. Providing the opportunities for them to meet. That doesn’t make you complicit in what people you’ve introduced do together.
Unless, of course, your “right” network becomes the Old Network, and the New Network-in-Power ( usually the other half of the (political) equation..) seeks to bring you down…
And take as many people of your old network with it if they can manage it..
This is all a who’s-got-who-by-the-balls powergame.
I think you may be entirely right. And he may well have had compromising knowledge with evidence to stand it up. That’s not saying he would have any intention of using it. It’s just inevitable.
But it wouldn’t be the New Network in Power, that would necessarily see him as a threat. It’s the Old Network in Power who are seeing their networking power collapsing.Their influence no longer protects their guilty secrets. So you’re going to get former members of the network in conflict.
I don’t really buy the compromat theory. He’s going get more out of being helpful than he will out of being a threat. Help gives willingly & keeps giving. You can only use compromat once.
Without kompromat I can’t really see why he did what he did. He could have just got quietly on with shagging teenage girls himself, without also pimping them out to the great and good. I might suspect that he considered the possible consequences of a young blabbermouth, and decided to arm himself with favours to call in if required. With menaces.
Didn’t work though, did they?
Let’s try & explain how this works. You network. Each person you introduce to the network will introduce you to others. So your network can grow exponentially. You benefit from this.
As a result of your networking you come into possession of compromising material. If you sting your victim you gain out of it. Once. But that is now a person who is not going to be increasing the size of your network, is he? In the long term, you lose.
That’s how the real world works. Not how you see in Hollywood films.
There’s more. If your network members know each other and you sting one they’ll talk, and you’ve just destroyed yourself.
“I certainly don’t believe he was guilty of what he was accused of. It doesn’t make any sense. The amount of money he would have gained out of it was absolutely trivial. So why would he bother? And there’s nothing illegal about introducing one person to another. Providing the opportunities for them to meet. That doesn’t make you complicit in what people you’ve introduced do together.”
Considering that he had previous form, I absolutely think that he might have done it. Who knows what the detail is, though? My guess is blackmail. You hire girls who are underage but who might be mistaken for adults, they have sex and then you can use that against them. The men might not even be chasing little girls, and there’s really nothing wrong with banging a 17 year old, but they’d be branded as a pedo. They’d be facing criminal prosecution. Then they take out a big investment with you and you collect a fat management fee. The fee is a disguised blackmail payment.
It also makes me buy the conspiracy theory about his death. All these powerful people didn’t want Epstein making a deal, and naming names. So, they arranged for him to be dealt with.
I also don’t think that everyone he knew was implicated. Some had other uses. You get to know Fergie and Andy, they know a load of other people. Some people might have given advice, or just said nice things. Or helped to ease away prosecutions. You pay a politician, maybe they tell their friends to not go after you.
I reckon there’s tapes in some warehouse unit or some old shack somewhere that only he knows about.
My guess is blackmail. You hire girls who are underage but who might be mistaken for adults, they have sex and then you can use that against them.
But that’s not what he was prosecuted for. Norm says he was pimping. That’s not a criminal offense, it’s an insult. The offense is monetary gain from the earnings of a prostitute. As I said, I can’t see why he would be interested in such a trivial amount of money.
Underaged girls? Let you into a little known secret. Women lie about their age. There’s plenty of women up into their early thirties will swear blind they’re 15. And some of them can even look convincingly like it with the right clothes, hairstyle & slap. The same way that 15 y/o’s can look in their 20s. What’s important is what age the mug thinks she is..
“But that’s not what he was prosecuted for”
He was arrested and charged with sex trafficking of minors.
“Underaged girls? Let you into a little known secret. Women lie about their age. There’s plenty of women up into their early thirties will swear blind they’re 15. And some of them can even look convincingly like it with the right clothes, hairstyle & slap. The same way that 15 y/o’s can look in their 20s. What’s important is what age the mug thinks she is.”
Sure, but as affidavits were filed, there was a lot more checking than just does she look it.
It’s always hard to know the truth in these stories. I don’t actually believe that Savile was some child-molesting monster. Despite what people said later, there was never any smoke about him doing it in his lifetime. The common joke was that he was shagging corpses at Stoke Mandeville.
But Epstein was previously convicted for procuring a child prostitute. So doing it again? Sounds very plausible.
Trafficking is one of those meaningless catch all crimes. Moving someone from place to place for whatever?
Is a cab driver taking a prossie across town trafficking? Internationally is it the airline, the booking agent or the pilot?
As for the sex part, is there actually evidence apart from hers that it happened? Sex in the rape definition? Penetration? And it has to be for monetary gain or minor means age of consent in the jurisdiction.
I’m thinking neither Epstein not La Maxwell are stupid or ignorant people. Why would they knowingly commit a crime when they don’t need to?
We’ve seen with Trump how the US legal system can be weaponised. And the UK. Lucy Connoly. How is saying “I don’t care if …” incitement to … That would never have merited a custodial in any other circumstances. “Cut their throats..” didn’t even merit a conviction. It’s starting to look like the nurse convicted of murdering babies is a cover-up for institutional failures.
A number of people have claimed – insisted – that the presence of foreign tarts in London is proof perfect of trafficking. The idea that working girls might move to higher paid cities doesn’t register. Nor does the idea that some such might prefer to be so working a little further away from Mum and Granny than in the same street sort of thing.
So that the woman is the victim?
Julie Bindel ran one of them. So she could insist that the woman was the victim, yes.
Not a name I associate with objectivity, rationality or empiricism.
The fact that suddenly there’s a fuss about Russki involvement implies to me that it would have been the Israelis. As for murdering him I dare say that the CIA might have done it as a courtesy to Mossad, or in exchange for some favour. Or just for hard cash.
But qui bono?
Anyone who didn’t want him blabbing.
The counter-argument is that he wasn’t murdered but instead spirited out of the jail with someone else’s corpse placed in his cell. The justification for that case is presumably that Mossad (or whoever) wanted to show they would always look after their own guys. But I’m not sure that works unless Mossad (or whoever) is prepared eventually to boast of his survival.
Are we saying it was another Prince Philip hitjob?
That’s broadly my take. The scumbag was probably selling kompromat. And, as BiS says, it’s implausible he would bother to traffic pussy, underage or not. And, as for the emails Epstein addressed to public figures but merely sent to himself, colour me sceptical….And why did so many people allow themselves to be photographed in, er, unflattering circumstances – eg in their underwear (Lord Mandelslime of Fondleboys).
…because they didn’t expect it.
The DT was showing a picture of Fondleboys in his trollies talking to a girl in a white dressing gown. Mandeson’s holding what looks like a menu. I doubt he was selecting from the range of services she personally had on offer. He also doesn’t look as if he’s aware of being photographed.
Not sure what the kompromat value of that was but no doubt the snap was taken for a reason.
“as for the emails Epstein addressed to public figures but merely sent to himself”
There was a tactic used against either Trump or Bush fils.
You’re a bureaucrat who has business with the target.
You get a meeting and put an item classified as secret on the agenda.
Then you discuss absolutely anything about that item, even “this exists”.
Then you run to the papers and tell whatever you like about the meeting. It’s classified, so they can’t release the actual details.
The emails sent to himself seems of the same cloth. “I have emails about (x)” in a call to people around the target might be used to pressure them.
Yes it’s high stakes, since they could say “publish it then”.
But most people are cowards that way.
The Twister mat had slipped out of the picture.
Tim, I believe you’ve spotted the “get out of jail free” card planted to enable Clinton and Obama to be completely exonerated should any of the shit appear to be a bit tacky when it flew their way…
“Allegations … need investigating by me”
He’s going to investigate the allegations against himself? Isn’t that very New Labour!
No stone unturned. Relentless pursuit of the truth etc. He’ll be asking himself some tough questions.
Lessons will be learned. Or possibly leared.
To be fair if someone alleged to have bunged me $75,000 that I didn’t remember I would certainly investigate, starting with looking down the back of the sofa.
Maybe he’s worried that HMRC might take an interest.
Didn’t this happen when he was a bigwig in the EU? If so, it’s no surprise that £75k would be small change to him.
Mandelbum news, courtesy of Guido.
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/02/02/mandelson-epstein-no10-documents-4m-job/
Is there anything that Capt Underpants has done which was ethical and above board? He has even denigrated the poor people of Hartlepool by association.
Cynical old me wonders if the undeniably shrewd Epstein cultivated the former Duke of York as a failsafe defence mechanism for distracting attention from the real movers, shakers and kiddie-fondlers should the proverbial ever hit the fan.
Nice plan but I imagine he also saw himself watching on from a friendly middle-eastern state or at worst a very secure tropical hideaway.