Reading between the lines, there is clear guidance here on how to navigate complex political hierarchies \u2013 using flattery, displaying fury or contempt when necessary, juggling supplicants and patrons, handing out unsolicited advice. Mandelson has been honing his craft for more than three decades, and these messages could usefully form the backbone of a dark arts textbook, helping users understand the language of power in a world where loyalty is an overrated virtue.<\/p>\n
Scrutinising how politicians speak to each other when they think no one else is listening proved very educational during the Covid inquiry. Released emails revealed Dominic Cummings\u2019s angry rants about his desire to \u201cpersonally handcuff\u201d the deputy cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara, \u201cand escort her from the building\u201d, because he was fed up with \u201cdodging stilettos from that cunt\u201d.<\/p>\n
More recently, the Department of Justice\u2019s Epstein files gave clear insights into the teasing power play between Mandelson and his sex offender friend, as he cheerfully supplied information and jostled for job opportunities, asking: \u201cNeed a lord for the board?\u201d<\/p>\n
The language in the latest dump of Mandelson files is tamer and less overtly sexist, and yet it reveals a world where, still, it is mostly men who hold the power, both in parliament and the civil service.<\/p>\n
The files indicate Mandelson goes well beyond his brief as ambassador to Washington, offering extensive advice to senior figures in London about policy and strategy. As well as his line manager, Olly Robbins, his lines of communication mostly link him with male special advisers and behind-the-scenes operators, from Morgan McSweeney (the then chief of staff to the prime minister) to Pat McFadden (then senior Cabinet Office minister and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster) and Torsten Bell (then parliamentary under-secretary of state for work and pensions, and previously an influential Labour<\/a> party adviser).<\/p>\n He reaches out only rarely to senior women \u2013 the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, or the then home secretary Yvette Cooper; the overwhelming bulk of his communications, at least the ones published here, are with powerful men. The women he messages regularly tend (with a few exceptions) to be in facilitating roles \u2013 private secretaries, helping organise the logistics of his role.<\/p>\n The transparent transactional nature of Mandelson\u2019s interactions with junior politicians is particularly instructive. He sends out numerous messages congratulating recently elected or re-elected MPs or ministers or civil servants who have been promoted, but some of these notes are later followed by requests for assistance, notably with his campaign to become chancellor of Oxford University.<\/p>\n When he messages the Labour MP Emma Reynolds to ask her vote for him, he follows up immediately with another WhatsApp adding: \u201cVery keen by way to talk to you about pensions and savings x\u201d. Mandelson\u2019s many messages to Oxford-educated MPs asking them to support his attempts to be elected come with suspiciously friendly, fleeting suggestions that they should also catch up on other matters.<\/p>\n We saw in Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s emails a constant urge to make introductions between powerful people, and Mandelson displays the same impulse, endlessly seeking to put significant players in touch with each other.<\/p>\n Steve Akehurst, the director of Persuasion, a not-for-profit research initiative looking at how public opinion is shaped, noted in a Bluesky post<\/a> that the British political system was particularly open to this form of interfering lobbying because \u201cbewildered new ministers\u201d are often \u201crandomly thrown into briefs where they have little or no expertise. So they become vulnerable to ideological capture by the first people that get to them. It also influences hiring decisions. All good lobbyists know this!\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout, Mandelson displays a supreme confidence in his own superior abilities, expressing this in the form of a running critique of the incompetence of those around him.<\/p>\n Policy is \u201cdisjointed\u201d; \u201chalf-formed advice\u201d is offered to the foreign secretary; staff in Downing Street are \u201chighly sub optimal\u201d; the advisers and policy emerging from No 10 are \u201crubbish in rubbish out\u201d, the prime minister who appointed him lacks \u201cverve\u201d<\/a>, recanting frequently, in a cycle of \u201cadvance\/buckle\/advance\/buckle\u201d.<\/p>\n Loyalty to those above in the political hierarchy is not always required, according to Mandelson\u2019s operating system, but is welcomed from more junior colleagues, who offer fulsome pledges of faithfulness in this vein: \u201cPeter \u2013 thank you. (As usual) your judgment was vindicated. I won\u2019t forget any of it.\u201d<\/p>\n There is no higher praise in Mandelson\u2019s rulebook than being a \u201cgrown up\u201d. This is how he describes Jon Garvie, a former employee of his at Global Counsel, the political consultancy firm he co-founded. Mandelson advises Michael Ellam, a senior Cabinet Office official and one of the civil servants Mandelson corresponds with most, to be in touch with Garvie in his new role working for the then foreign secretary: \u201cYou ought also to talk to Jon Garvie, Lammy chief of staff. Grown up.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not clear from the messages precisely how he defines this status, but his withering descriptions of his protege Wes Streeting\u2019s concern for the situation in Gaza<\/a> reveal what he views as un-grownup behaviour.<\/p>\n In a series of WhatsApp messages in early 2025, Streeting, who was then health secretary, told Mandelson of his concern that Israel was \u201ccommitting war crimes before our eyes\u201d and of his dismay at hearing testimonies from medical staff who had seen \u201cthe most chilling and distressing scenes of calculated brutality against women and children\u201d.<\/p>\n In messages to McFadden, Mandelson criticises Streeting\u2019s \u201cwild long hysterical message\u201d which \u201creflects pretty badly on his maturity\u201d; his stance was \u201cpathetic\u201d. Mandelson appears to prefer what he sees as a cooler, more urbane approach to matters. Garvie messages him in September to say wearily: \u201cIn parliament listening to interminable Gaza debate.\u201d Mandelson replies: \u201cAh.\u201d<\/p>\n It is worth spending some time on parsing the grammar in these exchanges. Echoing the Epstein files again, we see a power imbalance in writers\u2019 dedication to full stops and capitals. Epstein misspelled everything because he felt he was the important person in most of his communications. Here we understand hierarchies instantly through the care (or absence of it) given to typing the messages.<\/p>\n It is immediately clear who is the supplicant, junior figure, because their messages are dotted with ingratiating exclamation marks and apologetic brackets. Senior, busy, powerful figures send out curt short missives; they do not always feel they need to waste their time with punctuation.<\/p>\n When he wants something, Mandelson is impeccably polite. \u201cDear Sarah,\u201d he writes to Sarah Jones, a new junior minister in the department for energy security and net zero. \u201cI hope you are well and settling into your important new role.\u201d<\/p>\n But when colleagues underperform, Mandelson replaces flattery with fury. The slowness of civil servants to secure a replica red ministerial dispatch box as a present for Donald Trump, with \u201cPresident of the United States\u201d written on it in gold letters, prompts him to \u201cgo tonto\u201d with rage. Sometimes, his replies appear laced with passive aggressive displeasure: \u201cI would be grateful if we can discuss how we might address this situation.\u201d<\/p>\n There are aspects of his craft that Mandelson needs to improve. He is less familiar than some of his younger, savvier colleagues with the importance of activating disappearing messages, of course. Occasionally, colleagues suggest that sensitive conversations should be shifted offline: a senior civil servant tells him a question is better suited to a \u201cnightcap in Washington\u201d; McFadden tells him not to write down his thoughts: \u201cA convo for the phone. There is a pattern we must get out of\u201d. After these latest message publications, there must be few civil servants or politicians still foolhardy enough to be communicating by WhatsApp.<\/p>\n The women who were Epstein\u2019s victims, who are central to this spiralling political catastrophe, barely feature in the 1,500 pages of messages, although Mandelson does remember to reference them in his valedictory letter to Foreign Office colleagues, inserting a line noting he felt \u201cutterly awful about my association with Epstein 20 years ago and the plight of his victims\u201d. It is the only addition to a goodbye message drafted for him by a junior civil servant.<\/p>\n Get in touch<\/p>\n Contact Amelia Gentleman about this story<\/p>\n If you have something to share about this story, you can contact Amelia using one of the following methods:<\/p>\n Secure Messaging in the Guardian app<\/p>\n The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS<\/a>\/Android<\/a>) and go to the menu. Select \u2018Secure Messaging\u2019. <\/p>\n Show more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Political analysts have been frustrated by the mass redactions in the Mandelson files published on Monday: with so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-619163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"What\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1780503371_35_1920.jpg\")
What\u2019s missing from \u2018embarrassing\u2019 Mandelson files? \u2013 The Latest<\/p>\n