Peter Mandelson breaks his silence

Lord Mandelson may now have gone to ground as more and more damaging details emerge about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, but it seems clear that only days ago the disgraced still believed he had a way back into public life.

The former US ambassador allowed himself to be interviewed by the Times’s Katy Balls at his Wiltshire home on January 25, with the results destined for the paper’s magazine on Saturday, February 7. Revelations from the Epstein files scuppered that plan, and the paper has now published an updated version on their chat on its website. Remarkably – or not, given the Labour peer’s astonishing lack of personal judgment – Mandelson decided to talk Balls again for a follow-up chat after resigning his party membership at the weekend, and was still defiantly laying out where he might contribute to Britain in the future.

Among the many highlights of the wide-ranging interview are Mandelson’s victim complex (his ousting as US ambassador over links to Epstein last year was “like a 5.30am drive-by shooting”, “like being killed without actually dying” and a “life-changing crisis”, all emotions probably more experienced by Epstein’s actual victims).

He says his husband – who is not accused of wrongdoing – took money from Epstein to fund an osteopathy course, something Mandelson saw as “as kindness, nothing more”. Epstein was lobbying Mandelson, then business secretary, to change the bankers’ bonus rules, but the peer now says: “The idea that giving Reinaldo an osteopath bursary is going to sway mine or anyone else’s views about banking policy is risible.”

As for the alleged Epstein payments amounting to $75,000 to accounts linked to the Labour peer between 2003 and 2004, Mandelson tells Balls he has “absolutely no recollection or records of receiving his money and I think I would remember such a large sum”. He also doesn’t know anything of that photograph of him clad in just shirt and y-fronts (“no idea what I am doing in this photograph or who the woman was. It looks as though she came in and showed me something on an iPad”).

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As ever, he was just “too trusting”, he says. “I don’t know what his motives were – probably mixed – but he provided guidance to help me navigate out of the world of politics and into the world of commerce and finance. Perhaps he wanted to be a mentor and I was naive in regarding him as a good-faith actor.”

He also sheds light on a night shortly after his sacking as ambassador, when he dined at former chancellor George Osborne’s house in Notting Hill and was later photographed urinating on a neighbour’s wall. “People said it was very humanising,” he says. “I didn’t quite feel that myself. I just blame Uber.

“I had two cars, both of which cancelled on me, and after half an hour I was bursting for a pee. I could have gone back and woken them all up, but they did have three children.”

But while the Prince of Darkness might have momentarily gone quiet, he insists he’s not going away. “I am a New Labour person and always will be, wherever the party situates itself,” he told Balls following the cancellation of his party membership direct debit.

“But I think I want a sea change. I want to be more of an outsider looking in rather than the other way round. I want to contribute ideas that enable Britain to strengthen and to work for all, in every part of the country.” Keir Starmer must be absolutely delighted!