Of all the countless assertions about the close relationship between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein this week, one in particular caught my attention.
Perhaps it is because I am a psychotherapist, a profession where we try to fathom out what motivates people to act in the way they do.
The comment was made by Shaun Woodward, who was Northern Ireland Secretary under Gordon Brown.
Asked about Mandelson’s downfall and appalling lack of judgment, he admitted it was hard to explain ‘how somebody so clever and smart did something which if [the emails] are right was anything but those things’.
When pressed, he added: ‘I’m tempted to say he must have been in love with the guy and lost the plot.’
Now, it sounds a preposterous thing to say. But Shaun Woodward is no fool – and there is no doubt he knows Mandelson well and has long considered him a friend.
So could he be right? Did Mandelson throw it all away because he was in love with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?
Would he have abandoned caution to the wind, shared government secrets, risked everything he holds dear in his professional life because he was infatuated with the financier? The emails between the two men are certainly flirtatious, and in Mandelson’s case extraordinarily confessional.
Mutual infatuation: A laughing Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein in a photograph released by the US Department of Justice
Peter Mandelson sits with late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as he blows out the candles on a cake, in an undated photograph released by the Department of Justice
As far back as 2006, he confided in Epstein that he faced a ‘terrible situation’ in some unexplained area of his private life, and later the same day sent a second email thanking Epstein for taking the time to speak to him on the phone. ‘Please stick with me through this,’ he begged.
More light was shone on Mandelson’s private life in an email exchange in 2009 when Epstein wrote: ‘I spent an hour with Rinaldo [sic]. Call me tomorrow at office.’
It suggests the financier communicated with Mandelson’s partner Reinaldo da Silva, 53, whom he married in 2023, while serving the last few days of his jail term for soliciting prostitution.
‘Thanks for talking to Reinaldo,’ Mandelson wrote. ‘It did him (therefore me) a lot of good. You now see the problems. I cannot talk to him about these things at all, he won’t listen. I am doing Sunday media then will call. Thanks again xxx.’ Epstein responded: ‘I as always am there.’
It is as if Epstein is behaving like some sort of agony aunt to Mandelson. Later in 2009, Mandelson wrote to Epstein again about ‘a real bust up with R’.
Epstein replied within hours, saying: ‘I’m sorry – but as you enter the springtime of your senility, I think you are in need of a co-pilot, to help fly and navigate through ever more uncertain weather.’ Here Epstein seems to be telling Mandelson to dump Reinaldo.
Shortly afterwards, Mandelson wrote: ‘All I asked him [Reinaldo] was where are the sandals and could he find them. So rude. Problem is that while he gives me nothing, he doesn’t demand much apart from money and lodging.
‘Not sure there are many co-pilots around at my time of life. Hardly people queuing up and current photos looking very puffy.’
Peter Mandelson is pictured and mentioned many times throughout the released Epstein files
In this photo, Mandelson stands in white underwear talking to a woman in a bathing robe
Epstein’s response was both assertive and reassuring: ‘Don’t sell yourself short, I won’t allow it, I recognize you don’t want/like/desire to be alone. However, if he were just a neutral influence, as contrasted with a great deal more heat than light, the decision would be easier.
‘If you like I am more than willing to give him a spiritual spanking explaining that… he needs to exorcise his own demons as opposed to becoming yours.’
What do these emails tell us about the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein? Mandelson here seems to be more besotted, needy. But it is not all one-way traffic.
Epstein’s response to the bust-up breathes pure contempt for Reinaldo. Could it also be a demonstration of his affection for Mandelson, an expression of jealousy?
He depicts Reinaldo as someone to dismiss, someone without worth – unlike himself.
It is likely that in reading this email from Epstein, Mandelson would have had a frisson of affirmation, because it would enhance his own importance at Reinaldo’s expense.
Other emails show Epstein seeking solace and advice, and Mandelson responding to the challenge.
My view is that we are seeing two classic narcissists in Mandelson and Epstein.
Mandelson served as Business Secretary to Gordon Brown (pictured in 2010 when Brown was Prime Minister)
He was also Keir Starmer’s US Ambassador (pictured together at the welcome reception to the ambassador’s residence in Washington in February last year)
Usually, narcissists need a foil as a deflection from their own insecurities. They are by definition self-consumed, and need someone they consider an unequal to perform for.
But I believe the extraordinary meeting between Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson produced something unique. They found in one another a reflection of themselves, and it pleased and satisfied them both.
It was a union in which their personalities merged so completely that a deep emotional bond was established. Was this love? Perhaps so but, as I said, a narcissistic love.
Mandelson, for instance, was deeply solicitous in that now infamous email in 2008 offering Epstein succour just before the paedophile went to jail.
‘You have to be incredibly resilient, fight for early release and be philosophical about it as much as you can,’ he wrote.
‘Everything can be turned into an opportunity and that [sic] you will come through it and be stronger for it. The whole thing has been years of torture and now you have to show the world how big a person you are, and how strong. Your friends stay with you and love you.’
This relentless correspondence, in which they continually offer each other advice is strangely intimate. In them, both men reveal their desire to be needed, their pride in their ability to fix things and their wish to be perceived as indispensable.
They each reveal carefully chosen vulnerabilities that provoke the other to offer solutions and support.
Mandelson pictured leaving Downing Street with then Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney in June 2025, after fresh allegations emerged about his ties to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein
Pictured (right) with former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock (left) in 2004. As far back as 2006, Mandelson was confiding in Epstein about his private life, writing to him that he faced a ‘terrible situation’ and sending him emails thanking him for speaking on the phone
In one sense, love did blossom between them in this intense relationship. A love in which they are each complimented and reassured by each other.
In 2010, Mandelson asked Epstein to watch him being interviewed on TV host Charlie Rose’s programme in the US. The reassurance he was seeking from Epstein was not long in coming.
‘You were f***ing brilliant. A+,’ Epstein replied later that night, although he criticised Mandelson for the way he was sitting. ‘Charlie was unnecessarily aggressive, hence my only critique was of your physical posture, you were sitting as if you were imitating a giant prawn.’
They enjoyed a childish type of humour laced with flirtatious innuendo and poor taste. In one exchange, Mandelson described Epstein’s release after serving his sentence for child sex offences as ‘Liberation Day!’
Mandelson suggested they should celebrate. Epstein responded with a crude joke: ‘With grace and modesty (these are the names of two strippers).’
Mandelson asked: ‘How is freedom feeling?’
Epstein responded: ‘She feels fresh, firm and creamy.’ Mandelson replied: ‘Naughty boy.’
On the evening after the election in May 2010 in Britain, Epstein wanted to know what had happened.
Peter Mandelson shaking hands with President Donald Trump in May 2025 amid a trade deal with the UK
‘Well?’ he emailed Peter Mandelson, who was effectively deputy prime minister in Gordon Brown’s government.
Mandelson responded: ‘We are praying for a hung parliament. Alternatively, a well hung young man.’ Tasteless banter? Or something darker?
I believe these sordid jokes reflect a co-dependency, a form of intimacy, that helped them to blot out the hidden shame and insecurity they felt about their behaviour.
Both of them dealt in betrayal – grotesquely so in Epstein’s case after countless young victims had put their trust in him.
But Mandelson, too, appallingly betrayed the Government in what is now being labelled one of the biggest political scandals of all time.
Epstein was asked in the last interview filmed before his death, if he was the Devil.
Mandelson was known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’.
Neither men flinched from these descriptions of themselves. Instead they revelled in them.
Mandelson was made a peer in 2008 during Gordon Brown’s Cabinet reshuffle (pictured here in 2010)
Mandelson (right) pictured with then-PM Tony Blair (left) in 2001, when he served Blair as Northern Ireland Secretary
Both seemed to have rejected society’s norms in ways that amused them. There was scorn in that amusement. Scorn for the ease with which they controlled people and situations.
Their success at manipulation became addictive and fed their affection for each other.
But now, with the revelations that are emerging from the Epstein files, the narrative that was shaped and compelled by manipulation and betrayal is reaching its denouement.
Epstein, the arch exploiter, died in prison in suspicious and degrading circumstances, his name synonymous with depravity. Mandelson’s life is in tatters.
In desperation, he now refers to his once best friend, in an interview with The Times, as, ‘Dog muck that you cannot get off your shoe’, and as the ‘bubonic plague’.
When the narcissist is confronted by the kind of humiliation that Mandelson is experiencing, he retreats into a sort of psychological fog.
His carefully constructed self-image, reinforced and supported by his buddy, Epstein, has been lost.
The reflection of himself that he saw in Epstein’s eyes, the mirror of self-delusion has been shattered. And all he can see is his shattered and humiliated self.