Former British Ambassador to the United States, Lord Peter Mandelson, has resigned from the governing left-wing Labour Party following the latest disclosures of his ties to deceased pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Longtime Labour Party operative Lord Mandelson, who served as Tony Blair’s spin doctor and Sir Keir Starmer’s Ambassador to Washington, before being sacked in September over his links to Epstein, has resigned from the labour Party on Sunday evening.
According to The Times of London, Lord Mandelson said that he did not wish to “cause further embarrassment” to the party and therefore gave up his Labour membership.
It follows the release of a trove of documents from the United States Justice Department, some of which concerned the relations between the former ambassador and the convicted pedophile.
Included in the release was a picture of Mandelson in underwear and a t-shirt talking to a woman in a white bathrobe.
Mandelson has previously claimed that he was largely kept in the dark about Epstein’s illicit sexual activities because he is a homosexual.
“I think the issue is that because I was a gay man in his circle I was kept separate from what he was doing in the sexual side of his life,” he told the BBC last month.
Nevertheless, he offered an apology to the victims of his late friend, saying: “I want to apologise to those women for a system that refused to hear their voices and did not give them the protection they were entitled to expect. That system gave him protection and not them.”
“If I had known, if I was in any way complicit or culpable, of course I would apologise for it. But I was not culpable, I was not knowledgeable of what he was doing… I regret and will regret to my dying day the fact that powerless women, women who were denied a voice, were not given the protection they were entitled to expect.”
The documents released by the Trump administration also contained multiple alleged communications between Epstein and Lord Mandelson, including an exchange in which he appeared to tell Epstein that he would try to influence government policy on banker bonuses.
Mandelson, who was serving as Gordon Brown’s Business Secretary, said that his motivations were more broad than his conversation with New York financier.
The documents also appeared to show Epstein transferring $75,000 to accounts allegedly connected to Mandelson. Lord Mandelson has said that he has no documentation or recollection of the supposed transfers and therefore could not verify the veracity of the document.
