Peter Mandelson lost his cool in the interview (Image: New York State Sex Offender Registry / Getty)
Peter Mandelson flipped his lid while being questioned over his relationship with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a shocking new interview.
The newly-appointed British ambassador to the United States delivered a swear-filled rant to the inquiring journalist when probed.
In shocking comments reported by the Financial Times, he was asked to justify the relationship which an internal JPMorgan report in 2019 described as “particularly close”.
Lord Mandelson insisted: “I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell.
“I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women.”
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Peter Mandelson is about to begin as ambassador to the US (Image: Getty)
The FT described the mood of the train carriage becoming icy, when Lord Mandelson spat out: “I’m not going to go into this.
“It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all f*** off. OK?”
The JPMorgan report, revealed in 2023, claimed: “Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government.”
It suggested that in 2009, when Lord Mandelson was Gordon Brown’s business secretary, he stayed at Jeffrey Epstein’s enormous mansion in Manhattan at the same time as the US businessman was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
In 2023 Lord Mandelson refused to confirm or deny that he stayed in the $77 million townhouse.
On two later occasions in 2010 and 2011, Epstein emailed a colleague to say that “Petie” was with him at his apartment in Paris.
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Peter Mandelson visited Epstein’s New York mansion (Image: Jim Henderson)
The pair, who have multiple photos together, knew each other since at least 2002 when the New York Magazine said he attended an Epstein dinner party alongside and others.
A person close to Peter Mandelson said he had never done business with Epstein, and they only met through Ghislaine Maxwell.
The person said it was “obvious” that Peter Mandelson would not have taken advantage of young women given he is gay.
A spokesman in 2023 said: “Lord Mandelson very much regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein. This connection has been a matter of public record for some time.
“He never had any kind of professional or business relationship with Epstein in any form.”
In other comments in his latest FT interview, Lord Mandelson said those in Trump’s inner circle who are suspicious of him “will discover I’m not an uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and I’m pro-market and pro-business”.
He boasted that former US President George W Bush describes him as “Silvertongue”.