Lord Peter Mandelson, the longtime Labour Party politician and Britain’s incoming ambassador to the United States, offered a curt reply when asked about his alleged “close relationship” with the deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Tapped to be his nation’s top envoy in Washington by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Mandelson spoke to a Financial Times journalist who raised the issue of the notorious pedophile. An internal 2019 JPMorgan report filed in court after Epstein’s death said the two appeared “to maintain a particularly close relationship.” In an article published Thursday, Mandelson replied: “I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women. I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all f--- off. OK?” Epstein himself claimed he was the “closest friend” of President Donald Trump, the leader of the country where Mandelson will soon take up his diplomatic post. Mandelson previously called Trump a “bully and a mercantilist” but has tried to distance himself from those remarks in recent days, branding them “childish.”
Read it at Financial Times
