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“Simultaneously, this is the biggest political scandal and the biggest royal scandal in my lifetime. I actually think Mandelson is worse than [John] Profumo, who was a decent man, everybody acknowledged that. Mandelson is like a moth to a flame, drawn to rich, powerful, famous people, because he wanted to live vicariously through their wealth. He was greedy. It’s the same with Andrew and Fergie.”
Morgan has tangled with Mandelson for decades, dealing closely with him when he was editor at the Daily Mirror between 1995 and 2004. There might at some point have been some mutual respect. After all, Morgan was once known as “the Hydra of the media industry” for his ability to be sacked (by various entities, including the Mirror, ITV and CNN) or punched (by Jeremy Clarkson) or prosecuted (again, various) and always come back stronger.
Today, though, he’s clearly incensed at the gall of Mandelson’s treachery in his time as business secretary. “He’s an extremely skilful politician in many ways, but his Achilles’ heel was himself. He couldn’t apply the same common sense [advice] to himself. He was brought down by his own penchant for scandalous behaviour. It’s sort of unfathomable that he thought he’d get away with this.”
Morgan once met Ghislaine Maxwell at a book launch, but he never came across Epstein. “I think he was a very, very evil person, and we don’t know the half of it yet. He was a gangster. I think with a lot of these pictures, he was filming and photographing people for kompromat,” he says.
“It would not surprise me if he turned out to be a Mossad agent, because he was up to his neck in it with [former Israeli PM] Ehud Barak and others. But also potentially doing stuff with the Russians. Putin’s name pops up all over the place. Were they using him to compromise a lot of high-profile Americans? He could easily have been simultaneously an agent for Mossad and for the Russians. Every conspiracy on this could be true.”
He is entranced by the money trail. “How’s that guy made half a billion dollars? Who was paying him? He was obviously able to hide the reality of his depravity behind a different persona he built for himself as Mr Gregarious, this Gatsby-like figure who brought everybody together. Underneath was a man of sickening depravity. I refuse to believe a lot of them didn’t know.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/07/piers-morgan-interview-starmer-trump/
