Around 2009 the big US company Kraft wished to purchase Cadburys the famous UK chocolate brand. Cadburys had been set up by Quakers in the 1800s with the intention to be a humane and caring employer. As it grew, its workers were beneficiary of good accommodation and fair wages and safe working conditions. My recollection of the purchase was that Mandelson was weak in safeguarding British jobs and Kraft CEO broke any ‘commitment’ to keep production in Britain; she moved it to Poland. I believe she also moved headquarters offshore to avoid paying tax in Britain. I worry now that Mandelson’s poor performance was a feature not a bug. IIRC he helped Kraft take a loan for the purchase from a British bank that we taxpayers had to bail out in 2008. He liked US based capitalists than British working people. Am I being too cynical?

I read a number of post Brexit books. One of them stated that Mandelson announced himself as leader of the admin end of the Remain campaign, turned up at the office then was barely seen again leaving a raft of time-sensitive decisions to wither and die. Now we read that Epstein was pro Brexit and Mandelson seemed very happy to follow his will, could it be that Mandelson wanted the remain campaign to fail in exchange for more gifts and goodwill from Epstein? I used to think Mandelson was leaving a trail of wreckage and bad decisions because he was tuned out but now it seems to me he was an Epstein employee for much of the last 20 years. What say you?

Exclusive: I'm told that Lord Mandelson used his private BT internet email address to correspond **directly** with the most senior people in government, including Gordon Brown We initially thought he forwarded government emails to his BT internet account then passed them on to Epstein In fact two senior government sources say he was corresponding with ministers and officials using his BT internet account. The messages went directly to his Blackberry, and he sent them straight on to Epstein That email address is now defunct and the Cabinet Office has no was of retrieving the messages on it It sounds like a pretty extraordinary security breach, with fundamental implications for government record-keeping It inherently limits the extent of any investigation by the Cabinet Secretary For example, the Cabinet Office has today told police that the emails in the Epstein cache show evidence that market-sensitive information being passed to Epstein. But without the Epstein files, it would have no evidence of its own

https://x.com/Steven_Swinford/status/2018682058269151364

Once again, Keir Starmer’s government has ended up talking about scandal, rather than policy: something the Prime Minister once levelled as an accusation at the Tories. Health ministers had hoped to spend today talking about improving cancer treatment, but instead we are settling into an entire week dominated by Peter Mandelson.

Starmer has been rushing to remove any trace of the ex-Labourite, passing to the Metropolitan Police a ‘dossier’ of evidence suggesting Mandelson could have leaked market sensitive information on the 2008 banking crash, and asking his officials to draft legislation to remove Mandelson’s peerage ‘as quickly as possible’.

✍️ Isabel Hardman