Paedophile and the Prince of Darkness turn Starmer into a zombie

There are moments in the lives of historic institutions which lay bare the pernicious ways in which power truly works, revealing the deep-seated rot which has spread throughout the system. In Britain, the recent wave of revelations emerging from the Epstein files is one of those moments. Former Bear Stearns financier Jeffrey Epstein has risen from the grave to drag Keir Starmer’s Labour government down with him.

As is well-known today, in no small part due to the release of 3.5 million pages worth of files testifying to his crimes, Epstein was at the heart of multiple, overlapping child sex trafficking rings, which saw thousands of women and girls bought, abused, and sold.

Epstein wielded power by fulfilling the cruel desires of the wealthy, preying on women from working class backgrounds, paying them for ‘massages’, as well as using modelling agencies to entrap women into violently abusive situations. Framing his advances towards these women as, in the words of legal scholar Marci Hamilton, meeting an “unmet need”, Epstein mobilised his riches and power to target young girls with the promise of a different life.

Forcing women and girls into relationships of dependency on him through his money, the financier would approach ballet and dance schools, luring young women and girls back to his ranch in New Mexico or his private residences in the US Virgin Islands.

Epstein, who was previously accused of sexually assaulting a minor in 2004, wielded his class power to fuel his sexual control over thousands of women and girls, cultivating relationships with corporate hegemons such as Bill Gates, real estate moguls like US President Donald Trump, and former princes like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the US, was a long-time friend of Epstein, and it is precisely this relationship that has wrought irreparable damage to Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

As well as receiving sums amounting to $75,000 from Epstein, the former MP for Hartlepool passed market-sensitive information to the financial troubleshooter during the 2008 global financial crash. He also stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment in 2009, whilst the serial rapist was serving an 18-month prison sentence for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

But why, given the public availability of at least some of this information, did the Prime Minister see fit to appoint a known associate of a globally-renowned paedophile as British ambassador to the US government? For the Starmer government, devoid of political talent, committed to the most servile traditions of Tony Blair-era patrimony, and nervous of Trumpian intemperance on the global stage at precisely the time when British imperial clout has severely waned, Mandelson’s appointment as British ambassador to the US is a marked sign of both this government’s meagre stature and its limitless venality.

Even if Keir Starmer’s Rasputin-like former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, took “full responsibility” for Mandelson’s appointment, it was the Prime Minister himself who actually appointed the so-called ‘Prince of Darkness’.

No amount of absolution can hide the reality that several figures in the higher echelons of the British state, as men in power so often tend to do, thought it was totally appropriate that Mandelson’s open and lasting connections to one of the world’s most famous perpetrators of sexual violence, was a small detail compared to his indispensability to the project of Keir Starmer’s Grey Labour.

The Prime Minister’s vapidity will now be the final nail in the coffin of his short-lived reign. Without his project managers, McSweeney and Mandelson, the Starmer regime is incapable of sustenance. It is a zombie government in every sense of the word.

But the problems will not stop there. The Labour Right and their allies on the party’s National Executive Committee made it abundantly clear just days before the revelations that there would be no soft left challenge to Starmer’s leadership.

Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham was denied a shot at standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the party’s ruling body. Labour is now being left behind as the Manchester contest sees a straight fight between the racism of Reform UK’s Matthew Goodwin, and the Green Party’s politics of ‘making hope normal again’, articulated succinctly by plumber Hannah Spencer.

This scenario may foreshadow Labour’s future electoral misfortunes. Former Deputy leader Angela Rayner, whose popularity with the Labour membership has ebbed as of late, may be too tarnished by a tax scandal to run for Starmer’s job. Wes Streeting, MP for Ilford North and the Labour Right’s rising star, has recently sought to brandish his left credentials by leaking Israel-sceptic messages. He fears the pro-Palestine Independent Leanne Mohamad who came within 500 votes of defeating him at the last election, but his support among a predominantly soft left Labour membership is far from guaranteed, and in this instance in particular, his close relationship with Peter Mandelson puts a dark cloud over both his ability to win a leadership election and his capacity to govern the country with any legitimacy.

Behind closed doors, it is rumoured that former leader Ed Miliband is preparing a bid. If you listen carefully, you can hear the zombies in Westminster waddle along, clueless as to where they actually march.

After 14 years of Conservative austerity devastated living standards and deepened the population’s miseries, Labour rode a wave of mass disillusionment with politics and won a majority. Starmer’s government had an opportunity to improve people’s lives, rebuild a country ruined by cuts, underfunding and social atomisation, and steelproof everyday life in the face of ecological catastrophe. Instead, this Labour government attempted to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, while it retreated from ending the heinous two-child benefit cap that saw welfare limited for parents of more than two children.

On both of those fronts, it was rightly forced to reverse its decisions. It did not contemplate reversing austerity once in office, but it has scapegoated refugees, and proscribed direct action group ‘Palestine Action’. This has been a government that has offered no positive agenda for the country, just misery. Every single day since this administration formed, with every ‘reset’ it has broached, we see the folly of that strategy.

This Labour administration, wrought by crisis since the day it entered office, deserves everything it gets. Starmer is an empty vessel for the politics of New Labour, best embodied by Peter Mandelson himself. The representatives of this tradition invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, commenced the War on Terror, and lost huge legitimacy for their widespread complicity in the expenses scandal, which saw politicians steal taxpayers’ money to finance their own personal luxury. That blatant abuse of power was an obvious precursor to Labour’s hubris today.

As the Epstein files continue to flood the public realm, tearing apart governments like Keir Starmer’s limp Labour administration, there are two simple facts we should take heed of. Firstly, elite rule operates by dominating the vast majority of people, mobilising coveted power to impose terror on the lives of society’s most vulnerable, precisely so it can fill the pockets and satisfy the perverse desires of the rich and powerful. And secondly, the interspersed wielding of class rule and sexist domination always eventually attracts a reaction.

Governments are falling, and it would not be happening were it not for the brave struggles of all the women who have exposed Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Donald Trump, Peter Mandelson and the rest of their misogynist class for the elite sexists that they are. Keir Starmer’s administration is just the first to feel the full force of their might.

Jonas Marvin is the author of forthcoming The Breaking of the English Working Class, due out for Verso Books in August 2026. He also cohosts Life of the Party podcast and blogs at Marx’s Dream Journal.

Follow Jonas on X: @m00dyjonas

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