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Contempt everywhere. From Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges to the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s appointment, contempt radiates. Contempt for women and girls, for the law, for the public. A continuum of disdain runs from Epstein on the one end to our political establishment on the other. The other thing that joins them is a restless pursuit of power.
Contempt is not a byproduct of that power, it is the point of it. Procuring, trading, objectifying and violating women and girls is the summit of potency for those who already have everything else: money, status, respect. To subordinate another human being to your urges, to reduce her in all ways, is to be initiated into a club of super-predators who are above the law. The Epstein emails are a demonstration of how misogyny – there really should be a stronger word for it in this context – is a currency, lavishly spent to show how much power you have. The gut-twisting way that casual references to body parts would come up in correspondence is part of a whole language of signalling. Referring to women as “pussy” – or just “P” – is to flash your exclusive club membership card.
What facilitated that is a wider climate of scorn and impunity: the value system that still, even after Epstein was convicted, did not disqualify him from his friendship with others, nor disqualified those others from being appointed to roles such as British ambassador to the United States. Those caught in the revelations resort to the same excuses. We didn’t know. We were lied to. We did not know the full extent. Some perhaps took the word of a convicted criminal that it was a bit more complicated than that; others took the word of a man who was twice forced to resign from government, and who continued his relationship with Epstein even after his conviction.
Now that it is all out in the open, there is regret, so much regret. “The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong,” Morgan McSweeney now says, in his resignation letter as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. But to regret something is to suggest that it was all an unfortunate accident during which you should have had your wits about you. What people really regret is not realising that abuse of women and girls would ever be taken seriously.
The world of corruption has its own rules. It develops its own norms, its own codes. There is a definitive similarity in the way both Epstein and Mandelson conducted their business. They were favour merchants, fixers and facilitators; men who traded in networks, tribal hookups and fraternal flattery. Within that dynamic there was still an understanding that there were certain gentlemen’s agreements that should be honoured – we can see that in the email in which Epstein accused Mandelson of taking and never giving. The only sin in this world is to not understand that the value in relationships is that favours are to be appreciated and returned.
Female victims, the law, the public, are all remote and potentially treacherous things that need to be kept as far as possible from infringing on this vast, self-contained and sophisticated reciprocal system of power. It is only by understanding the Epstein network as one designed to circumvent the rules and shield its members from them through mutual reinforcement that the real nature of what happened in Downing Street when Mandelson was appointed becomes clear.
The decision was not about ensuring a trustworthy man was in DC; it was about putting in action a player who knew how to network, trade favours and shore up a closed circle back home with his aptitude for cultivating connections across influential domains without qualms or scruples. The euphemisms for what is essentially a flair for corruption are a tell that Mandelson’s dubious character was his main asset, not a liability. “The Prince of Darkness”, a “master of the dark arts”, a “Dark Lord” – these are all ways of saying that the media and politics respect a person who does not shy away from the means in the pursuit of the ends. In a Labour party defined by its relentless hounding of internal dissenters and purges of candidates, that sort of man is at home among a cohort for whom power is something not only to be attained, but hoarded, monopolised, leveraged.
In Mandelson’s appointment, despite private and public questioning of the decision, there is an echo of that contempt for those outside the inner circle and insistence on the leadership’s prerogative to do as it pleases in the service of political agendas that really have nothing to do with integrity, but utility. Which brings us to Keir Starmer. A prime minister who we are repeatedly told is a “decent man” who “actually does care” about victims and will be overcome with shame over this whole affair. Or simply, a useless politician who outsourced too much and has been let down by people he shouldn’t have trusted.
But Mandelson’s appointment could not have happened without Starmer making a conscious decision to relegate the seriousness of Mandelson’s associations. In these excuses for Starmer, there is an implication that such political calls are not subject to the naive morality of the outside world, but occur in a complicated sphere that functions high above the average citizen’s paygrade. This is not a fashionable thing to say under Labour’s “pragmatism” regime, but some moral issues are black and white. Call Starmer’s decision shortsighted, stupid, unwise, but it cannot be described as uncalculated. Mandelson’s value to the party leadership simply mattered more than his associations with the world’s best-known child sex offender. And therefore must have mattered more than the victims.
It is as simple as that. The radius of Epstein is populated by those who just didn’t think it was all serious enough to forgo the benefits of associating with him. None of those now reportedly having a dark night of the soul, including our prime minister, could resist that. To speak of a thwarted “decency” in this scenario is to implausibly separate action from intention, from character. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, decent is as decent does.
And so here is Starmer, blinking in the light of a problem that was supposed to remain manageable. And here is the whole putrid horror of it, spread out over millions of documents and “pussies” and “bitches” and young victims. Here is the public, suddenly too close and informed for comfort. And here is accountability, too late for too many, but better than never. But still not upon us, as a political crisis overtakes government, is a wider reckoning with the utter decoupling of principle from politics. With the chronic devotion to “grown ups” and admiration for their ruthlessness in the pursuit of power, this is the bitter harvest.
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Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
