‘Lord Mandelson instructed me to f**okay off over Jeffrey Epstein query”
Financial Times journalist George Parker has revisited his infamous interview with Lord Mandelson after the ex-politician’s emails to Jeffrey Epstein were leaked in the released files
Lord Mandelson has been featured in the newly released Epstein Files(Image: PA)
Political journalist George Parker has recalled an interview with Lord Peter Mandelson that ‘hasn’t aged well’ since the extent of his association with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein came to light. Lord Mandelson stepped down from the House of Lords earlier this week after a new wave of emails between the 72-year-old and Epstein, who died in 2019, came out in the Epstein Files.
It came shortly after a furious Keir Starmer called for the former ambassador to be kicked out of the Lords, having sacked him from his US Ambassador role in September over this Epstein links.
Now, journalist George has detailed his “icy” interaction with Lord Mandelson after he quizzed him over his Epstein links last year, with the politician telling him to “f**k off”. The Financial Times journalist accompanied him on a trip to Manchester in February 2025, ahead of his new role as the UK’s ambassador to Washington.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain, George said: “We’d been on Lord Mandelson’s case for a long time in relation to his connections with Jeffrey Epstein and interviewed him just before he went off to become the UK’s ambassador to Washington.
“I was travelling up on a train with him to Manchester and I could almost feel the air temperature drop as I raised the question of Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson said yes, he regretted meeting Jeffrey Epstein, he regretted the harm that had been done to the young women abused by Jeffrey Epstein and then he gave me an icy stare and said, ‘This is a Financial Times obsession and frankly, you can all f off.’
George added: “He did actually use the expletive as well. This was exactly a year ago and wasn’t a quote that aged particularly well.”
Later in the interview, George revealed Lord Mandelson’s strange comment that appeared to hint that he knew his downfall was to come.
“The final line of this was he was handing over his robes as the Chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University and he said to the people there, ‘I’ve done eight years in this job, I hope I can last at least half as long in my next job in Washington.’
“I thought to myself, ‘That’s an odd thing to say. It’s almost like he’s got doubts in his own mind about whether this is going to work out.’ And of course, it turned out it didn’t.”
The sordid extent of Lord Mandelson’s links to Epstein came to light in the latest dump of Department of Justice files last week. The politician was pictured in his underpants with an unknown woman in the sex-trafficker’s Paris flat in one unearthed photo, while emails from Mandelson also seem to suggest that he may have leaked market-sensitive information to Epstein while in Gordon Brown’s government as First Secretary of State.
It also emerged that Epstein transferred thousands of pounds after Lord Mandelson’s husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, asked him to over his osteopathy course fees, with the couple receiving over $75,000 in payments.
While other emails demonstrate Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein even after the billionaire’s conviction for soliciting underage sex in 2008, with Mandelson telling him to “fight for early release”.
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