LONDON — Senior British government officials on Monday defended the ill-fated hiring of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington despite his relationship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Mandelson was ousted from his role as Britain’s man in Washington earlier this year after emails were published which showed him telling the financier he “thinks the world” of him and was “furious” at his 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor.
In a grilling by the MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee Monday afternoon, Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary Oliver Robbins and Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald — Britain’s top civil servant — insisted that the government had not been aware of this specific information at the time of the appointment.
Wormald, who is the head of the civil service, confirmed that there was “no panel interview” when Mandelson was being considered for the role because the post was filled through a direct ministerial appointment by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
A panel interview would normally be used to ask a candidate if there was anything in their history that would bring the government into disrepute, Wormald explained, but Mandelson did not go through this process, and therefore the question was not directly posed.
Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein did come up during due diligence checks, Robbins said. But Wormald said the information that ultimately saw Mandelson ousted from his role was “not available to us at the time that the due diligence was done.”
Quizzing the pair, Labour MP and committee member Uma Kumaran argued that it ought to have been foreseen that a “well-publicized friendship with the world’s most notorious pedophile might be a problem to the government,” while Conservative MP Aphra Brandreth read out a list of publicly available information on Mandelson, saying he “kept a notoriously close relationship” with the pedophile and stayed in his Manhattan townhouse after Epstein had pleaded guilty.
Brandreth asked: “At what point were questions raised about whether that was appropriate, and why does it seem that suddenly a small additional bit of information would tip the balance on that being, at one point deemed appropriate to then not appropriate?”
Speaking in the House of Commons in September after the sacking, Starmer said the Mandelson-Epstein relationship was “far different to what I’d understood to be the position at the point of appointment,” and “had I known then what I know now, I’d have never appointed him.”
Under questioning by the committee, Robinson confirmed that Mandelson — who has said he feels “utterly awful about my association with Epstein twenty years ago and the plight of his victims” — is no longer on the government payroll, but refused to say if the former ambassador received any settlement following his exit.
The pair said there had been a “number” of changes to the direct ministerial appointment system since Mandelson was appointed. Wormald said these reforms would “effectively replicate what would normally happen in a panel interview,” introducing a higher degree of scrutiny.
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