For decades, Peter Mandelson treated his sexuality as classified information — redacted, denied, strategically ignored. Then, confronted with the implosion of his career over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, he did something startling: he invoked being gay as proof that he could not have known. In the unforgiving light of BBC’s flagship studio, the ultimate political fixer reached back into the closet that once threatened to destroy him and asked it, at last, to save him.
Mandelson is a gay veteran political operator who helped overhaul Britain’s centre-left Labour Party in the 1990s. | Artwork by Alex Mellon and Guardian Design. Source Photographs by Getty Images/AFP for The GuardianYou can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
The studio lights at the BBC’s Broadcasting House flatten everything: skin, fabric, the careful set of a public face. On the morning of 11 January 2026, Peter Mandelson sat opposite Laura Kuenssberg in that particular quality of institutional light, recently sacked as British Ambassador to the United States, and did something he had spent the better part of four decades refusing to do. He talked about being gay. Not in the confessional mode the British press had always wanted from him, not as revelation or as the lurid confirmation of what everyone already knew. He talked about it as an alibi.
Asked about Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted child sex trafficker whose proximity to Mandelson had cost him his ambassadorship, he offered what he seemed to regard as a logical defence. He had never seen young women or girls at Epstein’s properties, he said. Only ‘middle-aged housekeepers’. And then the formulation that would chase him all the way to a police cell and the collapse of a consultancy empire: ‘I think the issue is that because I was a gay man in his circle, I was kept separate from what he was doing in the sexual side of his life.’
Epstein, Mandelson explained, had maintained three distinct categories of associate. Financial and political contacts occupied one bucket. Academics another. The third — the trafficking, the girls, the suites and the islands and the closed doors — existed elsewhere, sealed off. Mandelson placed himself firmly in buckets one and two. He asked Kuenssberg, and through her the country: ‘Do you really think that if I knew what was going on and what he was doing with and to these vulnerable young women that I’d have just sat back, ignored it and moved on?’
Almost admirable, as a piece of rhetorical engineering. In seven sentences, he had taken a sexuality that the British establishment had used against him since 1987 and repurposed it. Not as solidarity with the vulnerable. As a mechanism of separation from them. Being gay meant he could not have been present for the crimes. The closet turned inside out: no longer a prison but a panic room.
You only grasp how brazen that was if you know the history. The closet door was first forced open on live television twenty-eight years earlier.
Late October 1998. A live edition of Newsnight, broadcast in the days after Ron Davies’s resignation as Welsh Secretary. Matthew Parris (gay, former Conservative MP, then parliamentary sketch writer for The Times) told Jeremy Paxman there were ‘two gay members of the Cabinet at least.’ He named Chris Smith, already out. Then, almost as an afterthought: ‘Peter Mandelson is certainly gay.’ Paxman’s face tightened. ‘I think we’ll just move on from there,’ he said.
Within hours, a BBC memo went to every producer in the building: ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever should allegations about the private life of Peter Mandelson be repeated or referred to on any broadcast.’ A state broadcaster had, by editorial fiat, ordered the re-closeting of a Cabinet minister. Mandelson telephoned the BBC chairman, Sir Christopher Bland, and the Press Complaints Commission. The clip vanished from the airwaves for twelve years.
He had been outed before. The News of the World splashed ‘My love for gay Labour boss’ across its front page in 1987, when Mandelson was merely Labour’s director of communications, the man they already called the Prince of Darkness. He neither confirmed nor denied. That became his method: say nothing, concede nothing, treat privacy as a form of statecraft. Peter Tatchell, co-founder of OutRage!, later noted that Mandelson, unlike openly gay colleagues Chris Smith and Stephen Twigg, never gave an interview to the gay press, never appeared at a queer community event, never publicly endorsed the campaign for equal rights. Worse, Tatchell argued, the most powerful closeted politician in Britain appeared to be actively de-gaying Labour policy. The 1997 election manifesto had quietly dropped commitments to outlaw discrimination in housing and employment that had appeared in 1992’s. The ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces, which Labour had pledged to lift, remained. Mandelson’s allies said there was no electoral advantage. Tatchell observed that BBC polling already showed two-thirds of the public supported the right of gay people to serve.
When Boris Johnson, then a Telegraph columnist, marked Mandelson’s first Cabinet resignation in December 1998 with a column celebrating ‘tank-topped bum boys’ weeping into their drinks, Mandelson described it later with uncharacteristic bluntness. Johnson never apologised. But Mandelson never arrived at the public reckoning his position seemed to demand. He came out not through declaration but through slow, reluctant erosion — allowing photographs with his partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, to appear around 2000, then marrying him at the Old Marylebone Town Hall more than two decades later.
Hold all of this. The suppression order, the memo, the doorstep, the decades of tabloid innuendo. Hold it, because without it the Kuenssberg interview is merely evasive. With it, the picture curdles: a man who endured the full violence of the closet reaching back into that same closet, at the moment of his gravest political crisis, because he had discovered it still had one last use.
The documents said otherwise. Nobody has accused Mandelson of sexual complicity. The problem was proximity, a closeness so deep that the three-bucket architecture could not bear its weight.
The US Department of Justice files released on 30 January 2026 showed that Mandelson and da Silva had received upwards of $75,000 in payments from Epstein, the first dating to 2003, the same year a birthday book compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell recorded Mandelson listing Epstein as ‘my best pal’. Epstein had funded da Silva’s osteopathy training. Emails showed Mandelson, then serving as business secretary under Gordon Brown during the 2008 financial crisis, passing what appeared to be sensitive government information to a convicted paedophile with connections to JP Morgan. On 9 May 2010, Mandelson gave Epstein advance notice of a €500 billion EU bailout. The following day, he emailed Epstein to say ‘finally got him to go today’; Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister on 11 May. In a separate exchange, he appeared to suggest that JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon should ‘mildly threaten’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And on the day of Epstein’s release from a Florida prison in July 2009, the exchange between the two men was recorded: Epstein wrote ‘free and home’; Mandelson replied, ‘how shall we celebrate?’; Epstein answered, ‘with grace and modesty (those are the names of two strippers).’
This was not a man kept at the margins of another man’s life. The intimacy was operational, financial, political, and deeply transactional. You cannot claim ignorance of the third bucket while your hands are so deep in the first.
What followed came faster than Mandelson — the great fixer of other people’s crises — could fix. He resigned from the Labour Party on 1 February 2026. He stepped down from the House of Lords. Global Counsel, his consultancy, went into administration as clients fled. The Metropolitan Police opened a criminal investigation, and on 23 February, he was arrested at his Camden home on suspicion of misconduct in public office — released on bail, the investigation continuing. The European Commission referred his conduct as EU trade commissioner to OLAF, the bloc’s anti-fraud office. Gordon Brown, who had elevated him to the Lords and returned him to Cabinet, issued public condemnations. Two members of Keir Starmer’s inner circle, chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and director of communications Tim Allan, resigned over the fallout. The scandal lapped at the prime minister’s own feet.
But the wreckage that matters most to queer journalism, to the slow, difficult work of building public accountability around LGBTQ+ lives, has less to do with government leaks or financial propriety than with something harder to prosecute. What happens when identity is instrumentalised? When the thing that once made you most vulnerable becomes a shield against the questions that vulnerability should have taught you to ask?
For decades, Mandelson’s homosexuality was treated by the British press as a scandal and leverage and entertainment. The News of the World, the Sun, the Daily Mail, Johnson’s sneering columns — all operated on the premise that gayness was something to be exposed and punished. Mandelson’s response was to wall himself off. He refused the subject entirely, would not permit it to become part of his public story. He treated his own identity as classified material, and the machinery of New Labour closed ranks around the redaction. He was outed, and outed again, and still the BBC circulated memos demanding silence.
Then, in January 2026, cornered by something the old strategies could not contain, he reversed the polarity. He claimed the identity, on camera, in the most prominent interview slot in British broadcasting, and asked it to do the work of exculpation. The closet had always said: your sexuality makes you unfit for public life. The three-bucket defence said something that sounded opposite but amounted to the same thing: my sexuality places me outside the circuits of knowledge and responsibility. Same premise underneath: that homosexuality is a separating condition, a thing that places you elsewhere. The closet punished him for being different. On Kuenssberg’s sofa, he asked that same difference to perform his absolution.
The recording from October 1998 has long since been aired. The BBC memo is a historical footnote. Peter Mandelson is out, married, seventy-two years old, and on police bail. The closet door stands open, and behind it there is nothing left that can protect him. Not from the emails or the payments, and certainly not from the message about a €500 billion bailout sent the night before the edifice fell. The three buckets have overturned. What spills from them is not, in the end, a question of sexuality. It is a question of character.
Character is what identity, however skilfully deployed, cannot stand in for.
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