Around the time of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as the UK’s ambassador to Washington in late 2024, Nigel Farage, our possible next prime minister, said that while he “might disagree with Mandelson on his politics” he was “a very intelligent man”, who would be a good choice for the job. If the Tories raised objections at the time, they are not exactly seared to this day on the collective memory. As one senior Labour figure put it to me on Sunday: “They all thought it was a very smart political move back then. Now they are all full of this righteous indignation.”

Certainly, in MPs’ defence, we know much more now than we did then about Mandelson’s enduring links with Jeffery Epstein. And thanks to the Guardian’s extraordinary revelation last week, which rekindled this crisis and turned it into one about the entire workings of government, we discovered that Mandelson actually failed the official Foreign Office vetting job for the job but was appointed nonetheless.

One takeaway from the staggering Mandelson debacle, so far, is that journalists, not politicians, deserve the plaudits for plugging away and getting nearer to the truth. In 2023 the Financial Times’s Jim Pickard reported that Mandelson, who had twice resigned from Labour cabinets, had stayed at Epstein’s lavish townhouse in Manhattan while the financier was in........

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