LONDON — U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday fired the country’s ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, over his links to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a statement in the House of Commons on Thursday, Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty said the decision came in the wake of the publication this week of emails Mandelson sent to Epstein in the 2000s.
“In light of the additional information in the emails written by Peter Mandelson, the prime minister has asked the foreign secretary to withdraw him as ambassador to the United States,” Doughty said.
He noted that Mandelson’s suggestion that Epstein’s first conviction was “wrongful and should be challenged” was new information.
On Wednesday, The Sun newspaper published emails that it said showed Mandelson telling Epstein to “fight for early release” shortly before Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
“I think the world of you,” Mandelson told him before he began his sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor in June 2008.
Doughty said the emails showed that the “depth and extent” of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein is “materially different” from what was known when he was appointed ambassador to Washington last year in the wake of the Labour Party’s election victory. Mandelson took up his post in February this year.
The emails were published after the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a 50th birthday album compiled in 2003 for Epstein, who at the time was a wealthy and well-connected financier. In that album, Mandelson called Epstein “my best pal” in a handwritten note.
The decision to fire Mandelson comes just a day after Starmer said he had “confidence” in the country’s ambassador to the United States.
Epstein took his own life in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, more than a decade after his conviction.
A skilled political operator, Mandelson is no stranger to controversy, having twice resigned from former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in 1998 and 2001.
He subsequently became a European Commissioner when Britain was still in the European Union, before returning to front line British politics in 2008 to serve under Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown.
Starmer considered Mandelson’s trade experience in the EU as vital in helping to limit the scale of tariffs imposed on the import of British goods into the U.S.
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