{"id":143526,"date":"2025-09-14T14:55:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T14:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/143526\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T14:55:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T14:55:07","slug":"peter-mandelson-seen-as-worth-the-risk-as-us-ambassador-minister-says-peter-mandelson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/143526\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Mandelson seen as \u2018worth the risk\u2019 as US ambassador, minister says | Peter Mandelson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Mandelson had \u201csingular talents\u201d that meant his appointment as US ambassador had been seen as \u201cworth the risks\u201d despite warnings in the vetting process over his links with Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>, the business secretary has said.<\/p>\n

The dismissal of Mandelson<\/a> as ambassador following new revelations about his close contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted of child sex offences has caused fury in the Labour party about the slowness of No 10\u2019s response, as well as a major headache before the US president Donald Trump\u2019s arrival this week for a state visit.<\/p>\n

Peter Kyle denied Downing Street had known of the full exchange between Mandelson and Epstein that led to his sacking this week \u2013 but said he had transformed the UK-US relationship, which was why he had been given the vital role.<\/p>\n

\u201cGlobal politics had been turned upside down,\u201d he told the BBC\u2019s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme. \u201cThe relationship between Britain and America was in a perilous state because of the threat of tariffs, what was happening economically, trying to repurpose and rethink the special relationship.<\/p>\n

\u201cBritain needed somebody with outstanding, singular talents, experience which was very hard to come by. And yes, a lot was known about Peter Mandelson\u2019s relationship with Epstein. He had apologised for it. And these two things were weighed up.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said Mandelson had \u201cnavigated the most difficult period in the US-UK relationship since the second world war, and we have delivered for people in Britain time after time after time.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the Cabinet Office had not provided the prime minister with any further information apart from what was already in the public domain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Cabinet Office did an independent inquiry into the appointment, as they do in every public appointment of this nature, and the information was presented to the prime minister,\u201d he told Sky News.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second process was obviously a political process where there are political conversations done in No 10 about all the other aspects of an appointment of this nature. Now both of these things turned up information that was already public and a decision was made that, based on Peter\u2019s singular talents in this area, the risk of appointing knowing what was already public was worth the risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow of course we have seen the emails which were not published at the time, were not public and not even known about, and that has changed the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

No 10 is facing considerable scrutiny over the new emails between Epstein and Mandelson \u2013 exchanged as Epstein was facing an 18-month sentence \u2013 where Mandelson told him to \u201cfight for early release\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Mandelson is believed to have been in touch with the Foreign Office permanent secretary, Oliver Robbins, earlier in the week after receiving a request to comment from Bloomberg, but No 10 said the full extent of the emails\u2019 contents was not known until Wednesday afternoon after the Sun published a story.<\/p>\n

The former UK ambassador to the US Sir Kim Darroch said the vetting procedure for ambassadors took \u201cweeks and weeks\u201d and included interviews with other sources.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey ask people about you and they look into your background through sources you may not have nominated as people to act as your referees.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo they do a thorough job \u2026 they take weeks and weeks, if not longer, over individuals \u2013 the process takes a fair amount of time, so you would expect them to know quite a lot and discover things that maybe weren\u2019t advertised.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cOn the other hand, you know, emails from closed or old email addresses that have been closed down \u2013 I\u2019m not enough of a technical expert to know how you get to that kind of thing, so whether that would have been available to them I have no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peter Mandelson had \u201csingular talents\u201d that meant his appointment as US ambassador had been seen as \u201cworth the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-143526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}