Media: morally bankrupt

By Richard North - February 4, 2026

At times like this, when the media is in one of its periodic feeding frenzies, there’s not an awful lot you can do – except sit back and enjoy the show.

But one of the most telling comments, I thought, didn’t come from the legacy media but from social media in a throwaway remark that predicted: “You just know that in 9 months’ time they’re all going to be tearfully accepting awards from each other for their ‘fearless’ reporting of the downfall of Mandelson”.

Sophy Ridge – a hack for whom I have absolutely no time – added her ha’porth, recalling her first meeting with the “Prince of Darkness” when she was a lowly trainee reporter without status. “And I guess the best way to put it”, she wrote, “is that Peter Mandelson was dismissive rather than charming”.

“The reason I’m saying this”, she added, “is because I think it goes to the heart of Westminster’s problem, a problem that I believe is deeply connected to the Epstein scandal (in Epstein’s world status – connections – and money – was everything)”.

She goes on to say that: “Because people who look at Westminster – in the same way as they might look at Washington – and think, this is a closed group of elites, who all know each other, who go to the same parties, and share the same in jokes… well, to a large extent, they are right”.

For the record, I don’t entirely agree on this status thing. You can measure status by rank, position and a number of other attributes (such as qualifications). This is something more subtle, more than status. As I wrote, it’s prestige: the invisible marker that the elites award each other. You can have high status and still be invisible – the elite only recognise in-group prestige.

Whether status or prestige, Ridge argues that Peter Mandelson is the embodiment of that. Charming, well connected, gossipy. In the inner circle. “If we’re honest with ourselves”, she writes – an attribute for which the fourth estate is not exactly noted – “that’s the reason he’s been allowed to fail and then be rehabilitated so many times”.

She adds: “It’s the reason he was given the best job in politics – US Ambassador – despite being friends with a paedophile. And it’s the reason he’s had a softer landing than many others would have in his position”.

Allison Pearson picks at this thread in a piece in the Telegraph headed: “When I met Peter Mandelson, I knew straight away he was rotten”. She recalls saying to some friends who were in Mandelson’s circle that she thought he was the devil incarnate.

Their response had been to laugh merrily and say, “Oh, that’s just Peter being Peter”. Power, Pearson observes, “not only attracts the worst; it blinds the best, who indulge the powerful, extending to them a leniency they would never show to less important mortals”.

This reminds me of the late John Prescott, one-time deputy prime minister, who in May 2001 was hit by an egg thrown by a protester at an election rally. Prescott, an ex-boxer, famously turned and punched the protester.

His boss, Tony Blair, made light of his behaviour, shrugging off the subsequent controversy by saying “John is John”, a phrase that was harnessed to explain away other “unconventional” actions by a man who was often described by his fans as a “titan” or “colossus” of the Labour party.

This rather underlines the point that, once you acquire the requisite level of prestige, you can get away with almost anything, even murder as some would aver. It explains how Jimmy Savile got away with it for so long, as did Huw Edwards

A few (perhaps more than we know) manage to take their secrets to the grave but some fly too close to the sun and think they are immortal. Mandelson is not the first to crash and burn and he won’t be the last.

Pearson, however, marks out the Mandelson–Epstein scandal as the end of the globalist era, and she has a point. “We can now see quite clearly that government is rotten to the core”, she says, adding:

Whether it is human rights lawyers earning tens of millions by pursuing innocent veterans, socialists preaching virtue to working people while practising the opposite, or thousands of young girls raped and ignored because powerful men consider them beneath notice, the system is morally bankrupt. We deserve far better than this, and we will take it from them if necessary.

I don’t altogether share her confidence on that, but I do agree with the George Washington quote she uses, where she has the first US president say: “Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder”.

Peter Mandelson, she observes, did not even try. But he didn’t get where he did on his own. Says Pearson: “Everyone who indulged him, everyone who handed him another plum job, everyone who laughed and said, ‘That’s just Peter being Peter’, must take a share of responsibility”.

In yesterday’s piece, I cited a 2008 article from the Independent which remarked on Mandelson’s dubious dealings with Oleg Deripaska – and the other people with whom he associated – noting that it highlighted the existence of elite networks involving billionaires, yachts, private jets, and politicians from both Labour and Conservatives.

Again, Pearson picks up the thread, saying: “Conspiracy theorists are mocked for claiming that the world is run by a vastly wealthy, arrogant global elite who despise ordinary people, believe themselves above the law and pretend to care about society while pursuing a greedy, borderless and depraved agenda of their own”.

Peter Mandelson, she now says, “has done us the courtesy of proving that this is no theory at all”. But actually, he (and others) did us all that favour in 2008, but nobody wanted to take any notice just then. It’s taken the best part of another two decades for the issue to explode into the public consciousness, even though the self-important media claque have known it all along.

Read that Independent article – all of it. It’s headed: “The Corfu controversy: How the world really works”, retailing “a saga of high finance, high living and the high seas, featuring Peter and George, Nat and Oleg, Rupert and Matthew and a cast of many, many more”.

Suzanne Moore, also in the Telegraph points out that Starmer, Blair and Brown all turned a blind eye to Mandelson’s flaws, so they too are disgraced”. By repeatedly placing the Prince of Darkness back into positions of power, Labour leaders enabled his venal behaviour, she writes.

But then, so did the media and they played along – as they always do. But theirs is the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages: power without responsibility – phrasing attributed to Rudyard Kipling.

But now the Epstein files have been released by the US Department of Justice, the media can no longer ignore the venality of the man who has entertained them for so long, and nor can they get away with soft focus interviews that allow him to soften the punches.

According to John Rentoul, “Epstein’s ‘dog muck’ is a smell that Labour can’t wash off”, with him anticipating that the final fall of the “Prince of Darkness” could take Keir Starmer down too.

“Mandelson”, writes Rentoul, “was funny, gossipy, and a determined social democrat. What made him attractive to journalists and Labour leaders alike were the qualities that led, repeatedly, to his downfall. He was obsessed with power, who had it and how it worked, and he took risks in trying to obtain it for himself”.

But while the hacks have convinced themselves that the scale of the disclosures in the Epstein files have finally turned the tables, they have known enough for decades to put Mandelson down but have chosen not to. If his doom now threatens Starmer’s survival, Mandelson will have at least done us another favour, but the reckoning has been too long in coming.