So what is a friend? And when does a friend stop being a friend? You can probably guess why I ask the question. Until recently, there are plenty of people who would have described themselves as a friend of Peter Mandelson, who would today say they are not.
Like Wes Streeting, a long-time friend and supporter of the former Labour cabinet minister and disgraced former UK ambassador. Asked on the radio if Mandelson was still a friend, he could not have been clearer. “No,” he replied. Some will go further, and say they never were friends.
It’s the same with Jeffrey Epstein. Lots of “friends” who were happy to take his hospitality, enjoy his planes, his parties and in some cases his “girls” – aka women and children trafficked and abused for his and others’ pleasure – now pretend they barely knew him.
Then there’s Elon Musk, who has long said he never had any interest in going to Epstein Island, now exposed for his childlike begging to be part of the Island’s cool set. Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who had done interviews saying the guy made him sick and he had cut all contact, similarly exposed.
Trump himself was proud to call Epstein a friend when it was expedient to do so, no longer a friend when Epstein became persona non grata for the world.
At least I can honestly say, hand on heart, having met Epstein once, that I didn’t like what I saw or heard, and said so at the time. The ostentatious display of wealth. A pretty sickening self-regard. Eyes I wouldn’t trust.
We met because Ghislaine Maxwell was on a flight I was taking to New York for a funeral, came to chat, and asked if I wanted to see her later, and meet her new boyfriend. I had known her when I was on the Daily Mirror, then owned by her father, so I thought “why not?”
I was at his house for around an hour, saw nothing to indicate he was a crook or a pervert, heard nothing much beyond the Who’s Who of names he dropped, and reported in a subsequent phone call to my partner, Fiona, that “he gives me the creeps”.
In saying that, I claim no moral superiority. I simply wonder how many of the people who saw themselves as “friends” of Epstein really were. Trawling through the latest dump of the Epstein files, it strikes me that he represents a necessary morality tale about the need to be very, very careful when power, money and “friendship” crowd into the same space.
I reckon you’re fairly lucky if you can reach all 10 fingers when counting really close, lifelong friends. This guy, it would seem, had hundreds, presidents and prime ministers, titans of business, academia and culture, all now desperately trying to distance themselves. All aware – surely, no? – that someone so well connected, in so many places, on so many levels, could not possibly be a real friend to them all. So was he, in all truth, a genuine friend to any of them, or they to him?
It was this single encounter, and an exchange of business cards, that led to my name and the Downing Street switchboard number being in his little black book, thankfully the only evidence of my existence in the files, apart from a reference to my diaries in one of the Mandelson-Epstein emails. Whatever vibe I gave off, he clearly had no desire for me to be his “friend”, and the feeling was entirely mutual.
Friendship and politics are not the easiest of bedfellows. Don’t get me wrong, there are people in my political life to whom I would turn if I had a real problem – surely, one of the definitions of friendship – but they are fewer in number than you might imagine.
Perhaps you heard an interview I did recently with Neil Kinnock, when we were able to joke about our friendship surviving the time he threatened me with a boiling kettle half an inch from my face. Another friend, David Miliband, was with us in Scotland over the Christmas break, with his wife and son. Friendship in politics can be real, and enduring.
There is, however, almost always an element of transactionalism in political friendship. It is not exactly “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” but it is rare that there won’t be some political factor playing out in the relationship.
When working for Tony Blair, I was always conscious that some people wanted “friendship” with me as a way of getting closer to him, because any power I had was ultimately his. I realised that ministers and MPs used me as a way of trying to shape how he saw the world, not least their role within it.
It means you have to be very careful about who you trust, and the extent to which you trust them. Tony was and is a close friend, but he was also my boss, and he is still a public figure, in the protection of whose reputation I willingly play a role. That often means frank discussion in private that would not exactly mirror how I might address an issue in public.
That is another political reality – you cannot always live life as an open book. Cabinet ministers invariably describe each other publicly as “a good friend as well as a colleague”. Occasionally, it may be true. Often it is not.
Peter Mandelson was a friend of Fiona and her parents when I first met him more than four decades ago, before either of us were in politics. He became a friend. He came on holiday with us sometimes.
He later became a colleague, which complicated things from time to time. But mostly, we got on fine. I helped him secure, and write, a newspaper column. I helped him navigate some tricky issues, as he did with me. Things got very complicated around his two resignations, the second of which to this day he and his husband, Reinaldo, think was driven more by me than by Tony Blair.
At times we have been close, and he has been a good friend. At other times, less so, and sometimes for long periods, we became distant.
Reinaldo has not spoken to me since that second “defenestration,” as Peter calls it. Fiona and I were not invited to their wedding. But Peter and I kept in touch intermittently, and when both of us returned to help Gordon Brown, him as first secretary of state, me as campaign adviser, we got on perfectly well again.
I am furious at the damage he has done to the Labour Party, the government, and to politics more generally. I fail even to comprehend that he might have been sending confidential government papers to a man like Epstein, who existed to add to the power, wealth and secrets he already had. I find it hard to think he hadn’t heard and seen things that made him feel he had to get Epstein out of his life, certainly after he went to jail for his unspeakable offences, if not before.
But when you have been through so many ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks, over so many years, and you turn on the TV news to see police entering the home of someone you’ve known on and off for 40-plus years, it is hard not to feel concern at a life and reputation in tatters.
So in answer to the question Wes Streeting answered so definitively, mine would be: “It’s complicated.” Because relationships are; friendship is; life is.
