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Chapter 1: What recent disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein are impacting U.K. politics?
2026 has not been great for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. You can hear it already in this interview with the BBC a few days after the new year.
You seem very cheerful and some people might be almost surprised that you're optimistic because you've had a very torrid time. I mean, I thought your resolution might be. that you're still sitting in that seat by 2027.
Well, I will be sitting in this seat by 2027, and if this long-form interview works, we can try it again in January of next year as well.
Starmer's approval rating was already poor before one of his close political allies showed up in his underwear in photographs released in the latest batch of the U.S. Department of Justice's Jeffrey Epstein files. The ensuing scandal has pushed out Keir Starmer's chief of staff and his communications director, and it may yet cost Starmer his premiership as well.
Here in the U.S., the reaction to the Epstein files has been different.
I think it's really time for the country to get onto something else. Now that nothing came out about me other than it was a conspiracy against me.
That's President Trump last week. It is true that nothing released in the documents so far implicates Trump and Epstein's abuse. And nothing refutes Trump's longstanding claim that he had a falling out with Epstein 20-odd years ago. But... Plenty of influential figures in politics, business, and academia do appear in the documents, including some of Trump's allies.
Take his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick. Last year, he told the New York Post that he met Epstein for coffee once in 2005 after they became neighbors.
My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again. So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn't going because he's gross.
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Chapter 2: How has the Epstein scandal affected Keir Starmer's leadership?
The latest batch of documents has also forced one-time ambassador to the U.S., Peter Mandelson, to resign from Britain's House of Lords and from the Labour Party. The fallout is threatening Britain's ruling government. So what is going on here? And why, at first glance, are the revelations leading to more consequences in the UK than the US? I took these questions to Edward Luce.
He's the chief U.S. commentator for the Financial Times. Let's start with that former British ambassador to the U.S., Peter Mandelson. Remind us what his role in politics and within the Labour Party was before these revelations.
Well, he's been a sort of storied figure on the U.K. left for decades. He was the co-architect with Tony Blair, of Tony Blair's New Labour third-wave politics. close ties with the Clintons. And so he's considered to be one of the great figures of the British Labour Party, but he's also one of the most controversial figures of modern British politics because of his questionable ethics.
Three times now, he's been fired.
On the topic of questionable ethics, there's a few things that really jumped out and made headlines in this latest trove of files. What specifically led to his ouster from the House of Lords and this kind of escalating pressure on Starmer's government?
So it turns out that in 2008, during the peak of the global financial crisis, Mandelson, who was then serving the British Labour government led by Gordon Brown, was in contact with Epstein and in fact passing on to Epstein, privileged insider, information from within Gordon Brown's government about a number of market-moving, market-sensitive things.
So this is considered to be in breach of several laws and one of the biggest political scandals in many years to have hit Britain.
And how does that tie to Keir Starmer, who it's fair to say was under tremendous pressure already, low in the public opinion polls? Is it fair to say his government was already kind of teetering on the edge before this?
Keir Starmer's been in trouble for many, many months. His party's opinion poll is rating way below Nigel Farage's pro-MAGA reform party in the opinion polls. He's got a massive majority and yet seems to be going nowhere with it.
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