And so, right on cue, here come the “accusations.”

What are these “accusations”? Good question. “Accusations” would seem to overstate the case, because it’s exceedingly unclear what Platner is even being accused of doing. But since the non-accusatory accusations have been dramatically unveiled by the The New York Times, all keen political watchers must now hold their breath and brace for the fallout. 

The Times’s Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer boast that they “spent months” doggedly reporting on the “complicated history of Platner’s relationships with women.” OK, then — after months of this intrepid investigative journalism, what did the journalists come up with? Reputedly that Platner’s relationship with various ex-girlfriends has at times been “emotionally wrenching.” The dynamic of these relationships, dating back to his 20s, is said to have been “volatile” and even “toxic.” And his behavior? “Unsettling.” 

These are the fruits of a New York Times enterprise project to canvass Platner’s ex-girlfriends, already a creepy enough initiative in its own right — and the worst they could uncover is that a handful of ex-girlfriends use vaguely unflattering adjectives to describe their subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner, stemming from consensual adult romantic activity a decade or more ago. 

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One ex, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that Platner grabbed her roughly and, in one instance, “yanked her out of a cab” in the course of “altercations.” Fifield happens to be a long-time Republican operative, having served in multiple GOP political action committees and currently listed as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank. Her affiliations are alluded to by the Times, which notes that the paper “could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account.”

If this is what we’re really doing now, why doesn’t somebody go and canvass the ex-boyfriends of Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer? They evidently deem it newsworthy that former love interests of Platner claim to have endured “emotionally wrenching” relationship travails. Given the prominent perches Glueck and Lerer enjoy at the New York Times, certainly they rank high enough on the all-important “power dynamic” pyramid that the public would be similarly entitled to know if anything “emotionally wrenching” or “volatile” might have occurred in their own private lives when they were in their 20s. 

Robust reportorial resources should thus be devoted to explore this harrowing possibility, with any resulting material reframed and reinterpreted many years after the fact to comport with whatever news-cycle imperatives might arise on a given week. New York Times readers have every right to evaluate whether their own unreported romantic histories might be exerting undue influence on their 2026 midterm election coverage. 

God forbid either journalist be alleged by some disgruntled ex to have exhibited behavior that could be retroactively characterized as “toxic.” And if Glueck or Lerer wishes to dispute that characterization, perhaps for a lack of context or any other mitigating factors they may wish to cite, they’re plain out of luck, because everyone knows it’s a lose-lose situation to be rehashing dirty relationship laundry in the pages of The New York Times. The more you talk, the worse you look, regardless of what the truth happens to be.

If by any chance either female journalist has ever had an “off-and-on long-distance relationship” with old boyfriends who may have less than flattering memories of the experience, this is now to be considered straightforwardly reportable information, given the new Platner standard they’ve opted to set forth. Any relevant anecdotes would need to be fleshed out with ambiguously motivated remembrances of the journalists’ past emotional traits, since this is the kind of psychobabble that litters the Platner exposé. (For reference, Katie graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 and Lisa graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, so those are some decent leads to start with for any shoeleather reporters out there looking to better inform the public about contemporary power dynamics in America.)

Fifield, the flagship “accuser” in this Times story, doesn’t appear to be accusing Platner of anything in particular (though she has since taken to the X app, formerly Twitter, wielding the A word, “abuse”). Lacking anything more tangible to report, the Times is reduced to relaying Fifield’s assessment that Platner is “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions” — whatever the hell that means — which Fifield has extrapolated based on having sporadically dated Platner from 2013 to 2015. 

Seeing his recently discovered archive of Reddit posts, she claims, has “reminded me of just how much he hated women.” Left unexplained is why she apparently dated someone who “hated women” for two years. Or why, after the relationship apparently broke off by 2016, friends sent texts encouraging her to “move on,” implying that she was disinclined to “move on.” Nor do the Times sleuths probe whether her apparent knowledge that Platner was simultaneously seeing other women during their relationship might have been a key factor in generating her negative feelings toward him. Or what she precisely meant in a post-breakup diary entry, purportedly shown to the reporters, in which she wrote that Platner was “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” 

How did Platner destroy her life, exactly? What is the definition of “toxic” in this context? (That word can seem to be quite malleable.) What kind of alleged “abuse” is she talking about here — emotional, physical, or something else? And by any chance, are there additional sentences or paragraphs surrounding the curiously truncated excerpt that might shed additional light on her psychological state at the time, or further elucidate what Platner is even accused of doing wrong, which again remains exceedingly unclear, despite months of intensive investigation by a team of seasoned reporters? 

According to one of her friends in the DC-conservative-blackslapping network, the podcaster and opinion columnist Bethany Mandel, Fifield had already spent the past “many months” on a political mission to inflict maximum political damage against Platner — first by calling attention to his purported “Nazi Tattoo,” which had apparently never alarmed her enough to cease dating him. Then, when that proved insufficient to sink Platner, Fifield went in for the kill with a standard slate of “accusations” pertaining to nebulous intimate-partner improprieties. 

Though, again, to even call these “accusations” wouldn’t be exactly accurate; Platner is accused by no woman in the Times story of doing anything self-evidently illicit. Instead, the article assembles an impressionistic collage of what the Times theorizes is a pattern of “unsettling” behavior. Surely, a stronger adjective would’ve been used for the headline, should any reportorial finding have supported it. Perhaps most bizarre is that Glueck and Lerer, scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel at this point, deem it journalistically crucial to grant anonymity to yet another ex-girlfriend, whom they “asked to sum up how he treated her.” This source said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.” What does this mean? Sounds quite rueful and poetic, sure, but whatever “accusation” it’s supposed to correspond with is shrouded in mystery.

Speaking of the supposed “Nazi tattoo” that is now said to be a singularly defining mark of Platner’s allegedly foul character, it seems rather doubtful that a great many of his fellow Marines circa 2007 — when Platner says he got the tattoo while on leave in Croatia — would have been steeped enough in esoteric pagan iconography to identify the symbol as intrinsically linked with National Socialism. Because to the naked eye, it could easily just appear like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that a certain type of military guy in his early 20s would probably think looks cool. Perhaps going forward, all US service personnel should be required to consult the Anti-Defamation League’s “hate-symbols” database before they ink themselves with anything improper. Better yet, they can fax their proposed tat design to Susan Collins for pre-approval.

Earlier this week, a crew of doofuses affiliated with the National Republican Senatorial Committee thought it would be hilarious to gallivant shirtless around Washington, DC, wearing nothing but a white bath towel. This was done to heckle Platner for the supposedly incriminating mirror selfie of his that recently surfaced, in which, yes, the Democratic candidate is pictured shirtless and with a towel around his waist. If that was the extent of the GOP stooges’ stunt, it might’ve been loutish and lame, but forgettably harmless. In the current political climate, however, they of course had to ratchet things up to the most rabid extreme, and wave signage proclaiming Platner a “pedo” — based on absolutely nothing other than that he had apparently maintained a personal account on an app called Kik, which is thought to be inherently disreputable, given the purported connotations of what the app is typically used for. 

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It’s of course possible that Platner has done disreputable things on this app — his wife did report to his campaign operatives that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with at least six women earlier in their marriage — but that’s preposterously far removed from Platner doing anything that could be remotely labeled “pedophilic,” besides some vague supposition that the app is populated with minors who circumvent age-verification protocols. There is zero evidence of Platner engaging in any conduct that could conceivably make him a “pedophile.” If the only criteria for earning such a sick designation these days is using a social-media app on which minors might be present, there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t also apply to X, on which much of the recent hectoring of Platner has taken place. 

More broadly, it seems to have been collectively decided that in 2026, flippantly declaring one’s political foes to be pedos, or pedo-adjacent, or pedo-complicit, is just standard procedure, with any evidentiary requirement a relic of the past. In addition, certain Republicans have clearly been laboring with pent-up frustration at how Democrats gamely operationalized the Jeffrey Epstein saga against President Trump, who now also gets routinely taunted as a pedophile, despite a similar dearth of credible evidence. 

As such, vengeful has-beens like Ari Fleisher have proposed an inventive new angle of attack for their all-hands-on-deck offensive to preserve a slim Republican Senate majority: “Platner is Epstein without the island,” the former George W. Bush press secretary proclaimed. Why? Because, again, a selfie has emerged of Platner wearing a bath towel, and the selfie appeared on an app that Fleisher and others claim is “targeted to teens,” though they cite no empirical basis for this inference — much less any basis for assuming that Platner himself has “targeted” anything untoward at any teen. 

But it doesn’t matter anymore. American political conflict is now a rolling cacophony of everyone and their mother calling each other a pedophile. Republicans, cruising for a midterm bruising, should at least be thankful that Platner’s improbable ascent has enabled them to savor a moment of temporary catharsis, as they pretend to be enthusiastic about re-electing Susan Collins to a sixth dreary term.

Talk of moral panics is cheap, but during an actual one, what is going on becomes difficult to name. Usually keen detectors of collective cortisol spikes go quiet, for the category of perceived evildoers has now started to expand chaotically. Make one incautious statement about insufficiency of evidence or the importance of due process, and you might find yourself in there too.

Still, it has to be said: there is definitely something dysfunctional going on. To press this point is compatible with noting matters of genuine public interest in the files: for instance, indications that Peter Mandelson and the former Prince Andrew passed on privileged financial information to Epstein, now being reviewed by police. Other countries are also belatedly realizing that when politicians or royalty get too close to billionaires, national interests can start to look horribly parochial. 

But there isn’t much excitement in a whiff of financial corruption on its own — as demonstrated by the relative silence on a recent Wall Street Journal scoop involving a UAE microchip contract and $500 million investment in a Trump-owned firm. The presence of colorful sexual scandal is clearly the magic extra ingredient that ensures a feeding frenzy. And yet, strangely, the files don’t offer much in the way of interesting new information in that respect.

This is not because they are low on sleaze — on the contrary. It is rather that we already knew about it. We have long been aware of Epstein’s exploitative sex crimes against minors and Maxwell’s grooming of victims. There have been interviews, documentaries, books. We also knew about the constant presence of very young women, the nightmarish taste in vaguely pedophilic art, and the boast of keeping a copy of Lolita by his bedside.  

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On this basis, we could surely have guessed about the pornography on hard drives, the women offered as gifts, the gynecologist on speed dial. For years, it has been obvious that many friends and associates must have turned a blind eye to the lubriciousness pouring off the man, and that a few of them were probably similarly inclined.

When Mandelson was appointed as an ambassador, the basic facts about Epstein were all in the public domain, and most did not care about the personal connection — a fact which makes the current hypervigilance about further associates look bogus. Some now seem to be playing a game of Six Degrees of Separation, but with Epstein in the place of Kevin Bacon. The mycologist Merlin Sheldrake was in the papers this week merely for discussing taking a large grant from Epstein, though in fact the two never met and no money changed hands. Elsewhere, the chairman of the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee is under pressure to resign. The main charge is that he had a flirtatious email exchange with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002. 

This feels like overcompensation, but is still fairly vanilla compared with the absolute scenes in cyberspace. A dump of one million files with little immediate context has proved irresistible to online detectives. The main rule of interpretation is that every document deserves the most lurid treatment possible. 

Any off-color remark or hyperbolic statement made in a private context — quipping about attending a “paedophile convention” with Woody Allen, or writing of an unnamed other “I give you permission to kill him” — is to be understood perfectly literally. Epstein’s ordering of a reproduction of “Massacre of the Innocents”, a 1591 painting by the Dutch old master Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, should be taken as a direct confession of baby-killing. 

In this hysterical register there is no irony; no possibility of a malignant personality knowingly satirizing his own infamous reputation; and nor are there any mistakes or coincidences. Pity the chef mentioned several times in the files, charged with satisfying Epstein’s apparently large appetite for “jerky”. This has been interpreted by internet sleuths as a secret code for human remains. In retrospect, the chef probably regrets his professional connection with the disgraced financier; and I bet he regrets naming his former restaurant Cannibal even more.

In one sense, this was all inevitable — the result of the ungovernable internet getting rocket fuel from the monetization of clicks. A variety of bedroom-based obsessives are teaming up to bang their drums together: I won’t mention your rampant antisemitism if you support my quest to bring down Harvard elites. But even mainstream commentators seem prepared to endorse madly conspiratorial claims as long as it will hurt their enemies. Given the unusual range of Epstein’s social associations, there is material in the files for score-settling in many directions; though frustratingly, nothing juicy for Trump haters yet.

There is a way of using the term “moral panic” which purports to exhibit a worldly indifference to Epstein’s sexual decadence, and a contempt for critics’ irrationalism and prudery. In this view, the panicking is bad but the moralizing is worse. I only half agree. People should certainly stop panicking, but they are not moralizing nearly hard enough. 

Were people to stop the former, the files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”)

After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defense that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

But perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from the publication of the files concerns the reaction to them. The basic elements in the Epstein story that make his behavior abhorrent are, in fact, depressingly mundane. I have seen online outrage at child-like pornographic images in the files that would cause mere shrugging, had they been found on a different browser — not because they aren’t disgusting (they are), but because they are everywhere. And if you ignore the private jets and the Caribbean islands, everything awful thing that ever happened to a girl or young woman on an Epstein property would be just another day to many of those stuck in prostitution. Grooming, pimping out, coercive control, sexual exploitation, an insatiable appetite for extreme youth and novelty: all fall under the respectability cover of “sex work”. There was nothing unusual about Epstein’s perversions. He just had the means to indulge them to the max.

Yet it seems that onlookers can only get really offended about these sorts of events when there is another element to keep it spicy: for instance, if the perpetrators are billionaires. And even then, the topic cannot stay interesting for very long, apparently requiring further injections of drama to maintain fascination: tantalizing rumors about new names, or fantastical tales of murder and cannibalism. Before you know it, the discourse has run away with itself, and yet again the conspiracy theorists have failed to join up any actual dots.

The depressing fact is that sexual behavior like Epstein’s is absolutely standard in our society, in the twin forms of prostitution and the pornography industry. Not only that, but they are mostly tolerated. You can either take this as a defense of Epstein or as an indictment of society, and I do the latter. It’s great that we are all tough on Satanic cannibal billionaires now, but it would be good to channel all that outrage into something real. 

She had just been caught by journalists trying to sell foreign access to her princely husband for £500,000, and needed a reinvention story fast. She was eating compulsively and full of self-loathing. As she recorded dramatically in her diary at the time, reproduced in her book: “I don’t know how I will earn a living any longer. I need to rest, but I have to buy food… I must trust… God will provide what I need.”

God turned out to take the form of Oprah Winfrey. As we have learned from the new release of Epstein files, just after Fergie’s unfortunate encounter with the Fake Sheik, the financier emailed Ghislaine Maxwell with a link to an article about the sting: “I do not want this to lead to me.” Quite why he should have thought it would lead to him is unclear. But in any case, he was soon able to report happier news: his friend the impecunious Duchess was now “being sheltered under Oprah’s wing… Oprah decided she had talent and skill that could be used on her network”.

And indeed, some months later, a five-part series and book were commissioned by the media tycoon, entitled Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World. The idea would be to capture an inner journey from disaster to self-understanding; from privileged cluelessness to inner wisdom born of adversity. Ferguson would be berated on camera by various therapists and financial advisors; do some “soul-searching in the desert” — surely better than in the dessert — and traipse for miles through the Canadian arctic, looking for herself. She would also get hypnotized and meet a horse-whisperer. As Winfrey, in classic kindly-but-firm mode, told the gushing royal in a call at the start of the series: “all you’ve got to do, and trust me with this, is to get really real.”

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Hence the visit to Montecito, a miniature epic in itself. Hanging out with “a friend and spiritual counselor” called Anamika, the Duchess recorded she was there to work on her “ego”. Presumably to convey the depths of that struggle, another diary entry was included: “today the ego feels like a metal mask around my brain and head… It caused a buzzing in my ears. I started to get so angry and wished it would go away.”

Later in the same visit, apparently no longer beset by distracting buzzing sounds, things started to look up for our heroine. Staring into the abyss of her own soul, she became inspired by some Whitney Houston lyrics: “I tumbled but I did not crumble.” “Listening to this powerful song,” wrote the then-resident of the Royal Lodge in Windsor, “I pulled my shoulders back… and remembered the words of a refugee friend in Sierra Leone: ‘They can take my country, but not my soul’.”

Resilience unlocked, the chapter ends with an unexpected philosophical encounter. Conveniently popping up with some heartfelt peasant wisdom, a humble security guard at LAX airport tells the Duchess: “My name is Morgan, and I am from Wales. And I say every day that it is our duty to be happy.” Luckily for Fergie, she has finally met a duty she seems able to fulfill.

But writing her diary on the night of the Oprah deal months before this, she already seemed to be rallying. “Phew… we signed with OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) last night. A whole new start.” And it certainly was. Until then she had been drowning in debt, thanks to compulsively profligate habits. There were exotic holidays, with missed flights and endless excess baggage fees; imperious demands to staff for watercress on ice at 4am; insisting breakfast be laid out for her “in three different locations each morning so she could have a choice”.

Also according to Andrew Lownie’s entertaining biography Entitled — from which these last details are taken — she was being sued for non-payment by her lawyers, and owed thousands to others. Creditors included an artist she had commissioned for a painting, a photographic studio in Woking, and even — plot twist! — a “Malibu-based spirit guide, known as Anamika”. And as the DOJ files now make clear, in 2009 she had also been emailing Epstein about money (“I urgently need 20,000 pounds for rent today”), and had taken her young daughters to visit when he was still under house arrest for sexual crimes against minors. There is no suggestion of criminal wrongdoing on the Duchess’s part; but on the other hand, there is a strong whiff of being a narcissistic venal moron.

Along with a gift of £1.5 million from her ex-husband, the money from the OWN deal put an end to all that misery, at least temporarily. But the connection with Epstein didn’t make it into the Finding Sarah book, and nor did it seem to come up in accompanying interviews she did with Oprah. In May 2011, Ferguson emailed Epstein: “I just want to make sure you know I am going on Oprah tomorrow. And she is going to ask me about my debts, the entrapment of last year and the press about you in Jan… I just want to make sure you are aware of this and seek your advice on how you would like me to answer.” In response, Epstein advised Ferguson to say he had been unfairly characterized as a pedophile, “repaid his debt to society and… sought forgiveness”.

He needn’t have bothered; the question did not appear in the final edit. There is no suggestion here that Epstein had any influence over Winfrey, nor that there was any meaningful connection between them; the internet’s attempts thus far to establish otherwise seem to be fake. Still, an opportunity was missed by someone enormously influential to interrogate a supine Ferguson about what she knew of Epstein’s crimes, and about the extent to which her royal influence was still greasing his wheels. That line of questioning looked like an open goal, and producers appear to have been aware of it; but in practice, there is apparently a limit to how “really real” you can get.

Presumably it would have over-complicated the simple — and extremely lucrative — narrative of redemption. Energized by the fascination with tearful sofa confessions as well as a spate of makeover shows, personal reinvention was massive in the early 21st century. You could get a new house, new wardrobe, new body, new teeth: so why not a new soul too? Later in the new DOJ files, Epstein asks Deepak Chopra: “Should we bring together Woody and Oprah?” Perhaps he had in mind another miraculous reinvention, though this one appears to have been a step too far.

The trope is all over the case, viewed in retrospect. Many of the major players have risen phoenix-like from the ashes several times. The scabrous man at the heart of it was readmitted into parts of high society after his first arrest. The former Prince Andrew was widely considered a waste of space until he joined the Navy, then became a hero, then became a waste of space again when he left. Ferguson was once so unpopular during the Nineties, that — again according to Lownie — the Friargate Museum in York “removed her waxwork from its collection, recycling it as Nell Gwynn”. Even so, she bounced back afterward to something approaching public affection.

Her 2000 collaboration with WeightWatchers was literally called Reinventing Yourself, and there was yet another slim volume, published just two weeks before the cash-for-access furor, poignantly entitled What I Know: Simple Lessons Learned the Hard Way. And of course, the other notable British person caught up in Epstein’s circle is Peter Mandelson, a man with more regenerations behind him than Dr Who. Each new Mandelson fall from grace was absolutely irrevocable, until it wasn’t. Undisclosed loans, major conflicts of interest, dodgy passport applications, free cruises; they all just bounced off.

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In the case of Ferguson — and perhaps Mandelson too, in his recent stint as US Ambassador — the fact of intercontinental ricochet must have helped. When a native son or daughter’s reputation is toast in Blighty, just head to the States and sell something with no currency whatsoever back home — the very fact of your Englishness. The covering up of personal failings seems to go better when your listeners think of you as a character from Love Actually.

Rejuvenation accomplished and back at home in the rain, your newfound Yank-reflected glory will move weaker-minded Brits to consider you redeemed too. As Andrew knows to his cost — and Keir Starmer might be about to find out — homegrown displays of self-justification and pleas for forgiveness don’t tend to go very far here with a skeptical public. But when they come pre-approved Stateside, somehow the bullshit element can get obscured.

In its time, the Oprah industry beloved by millions of women across the globe — the shows, the magazine, the book club — was criticized for its emphasis on individual responsibility, hiding the detriment of structural conditions like poverty or racism. A more basic point is that rarely was real responsibility preached at all. Instead, there was a cult of monstrous self-involvement, full of magical thinking and vacant platitudes like “look inward — the loving begins with you”, and “turn your wounds into wisdom”.

Once named out loud on the couch, personal flaws were treated as usurpers, inevitably rooted in past trauma, occasionally overwhelming you. In Finding Sarah, giddy from the attention of various Oprah-approved therapists, Ferguson is always blaming her “people-pleasing” tendencies, seemingly envisioning them as entirely separate homunculi that have inexplicably got hold of the inner joystick. And the solution is always more self-acceptance and self-forgiveness, not less.

For Oprah was first and foremost a businesswoman, and her aim was always to capture consumers. She did that best by providing salacious glimpses of the stars and feel-good fairytales about redemption, not difficult nor complicated moral lessons. And if, in the process, she ended up inadvertently laundering the reputation of a pedophile rapist at one remove — specifically, by laundering the reputation of the princess who was taking his money and inviting him to Buckingham Palace for tea in return — then perhaps she now tells herself that it is all OK; that she can offset the mistake with good deeds like it was a carbon footprint. After all, self-forgiveness in her world comes fairly cheap.

Or maybe she has calculated that, with the right sort of careful treatment, it will make for the mother of all confessional formats later on. A wide-eyed Fergie will rise from the dead once more and sit on the sofa, saying she’s terribly sorry and blaming the incessant buzzing of her ego, or those irrepressible people-pleasing tendencies. Sources say the Palace is already worried she intends to take another massive wodge from Oprah to spill the beans on Andrew’s sexual interests, but there is “not much they can do to stop her”. That watercress is not getting iced by itself; and nor is the public hunger for tearful self-abasement and spiritual metamorphosis going away anytime soon. Come to think of it, it might be a good time for that museum to put Nell Gwynn back into the melting pot.

How else can you explain three extraordinary scandals in a single day? By Monday morning, it was clear that Peter Mandelson’s behavior, specifically while serving in the Brown government, could warrant a criminal investigation. Here was a man who reputedly received tens of thousands of pounds from Jeffrey Epstein, and who later sent the pedophile financier internal government memos and market-sensitive information. Even more troubling, Mandelson, through Epstein, advised JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon to subtly “threaten” the then-chancellor in an effort to stop a tax on bankers bonuses. This chancellor, of course, was Alistair Darling, Mandelson’s colleague in government. By Wednesday, the Prime Minister said Mandelson had lied to him “repeatedly”, though one wonders why he chose to believe a man who resigned twice from cabinet in disgrace. Accompanying that claim was a promise to publish documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment, by Starmer, as the Ambassador in Washington.

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Meanwhile, with the media scrambling to comprehend the scale of the debacle, two other stories were breaking which, under usual circumstances, would lead headlines. The first concerned Dan Norris, elected as Labour MP to North East Somerset and Hanham in 2024. Norris was arrested last April for a string of offenses including the rape and abduction of a child. This week, he was arrested for a second time. Though previous investigations relating to minors were dropped, it emerged that a second rape investigation had begun, as well as one concerning the potential sexual assault of a third woman. Norris may also stand accused of voyeurism and upskirting.

Then there was Tulip Siddiq, the Government’s anti-corruption minister until last January. In November, she was sentenced to two years in absentia by a Dhaka court for her role in a scandal centering on her aunt, the former prime minister of Bangladesh. On Monday afternoon, as the Mandelson revelations grew increasingly salacious, Siddiq’s sentence was upgraded to six years. The assertion that Labour are less prone to scandal than the Tories suddenly feels as dated as the Metaverse.

None of this is bad luck. Indeed such stories reveal something deeper, specifically about the modus operandi of the Labour Right. Mandelson, a decades-long tribune for that political tendency, was open to briefing an investment banker about developments from within government precisely because, for him and his comrades, the truth is always defined by the contingencies of the moment — whether it was “sexing up”’ the pretext for war in Iraq or exchanging cash for honors. It’s easy to forget now, but the highest law during the New Labour years, particularly for its staunchest advocates, generally revolved around status and personal advantage. This was politics, at its worst, at the end of history.

Philip Gould, New Labour’s polling supremo, wrote that the aspirations of the post-industrial working class had significantly shifted, now revolving around things like buying a new washing machine. Ideals and utopias were a thing of the past, he contended, replaced by consumerism, Pareto optimality and public management speak. But discarded alongside the ideological refuse of the Twentieth Century — by many of Gould’s fellow travelers at least — was any belief in an ethical life. For the faction’s most senior figures that intensified into a veneration of power for its own sake. It’s no accident that Jonathan Powell, formerly Blair’s chief of staff, and now Starmer’s national security adviser, wrote a book titled The New Machiavelli.

Rather than politics being an instrument to achieve a particular good, such as social democracy, national renewal or a flourishing free market, it became an end in itself. That would, in time, give rise to some of the ugliest pathologies in public life: if politics was about technique, and not morality, then how one behaved didn’t matter — and one certainly shouldn’t be concerned about the consequences. Understand this and suddenly the actions of not only Mandelson, but Blair and Alastair Campbell, become easier to comprehend. An obsession with making money, a vice typically ascribed to the Conservatives, is far more intuitive to the common man.

To grasp how insidious this particular mindset goes, consider the case of Andrew Gwynne, whose recent resignation triggered the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. Gwynne officially stood down for “health reasons”. In reality, though, it was a series of nasty posts — written in a secret WhatsApp group — that ended his political career. They included Gwynne wishing that a 72-year-old constituent would die: simply because she had the audacity to write to a local councilor about bin collections. Elsewhere, his wife, also a councilor, joked about local children playing in sewage. The story’s toxic postscript, with Andy Burnham blocked from standing for Labour’s nomination in the seat thanks to NEC fiat, just adds to the episode’s squalor. An ugly cliqueish culture and a presumption of impunity – combined with an instinctive aversion to popular democracy. In one small story you have distilled the outstanding features of the Labour Right.

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Jeffrey Epstein's corrupt overclass

By Mary Harrington

Similar skulduggery is evident in the case of Matthew Doyle, who became a peer after serving as the Downing Street head of communications. Almost a decade ago, however, he campaigned for a councilor to be re-elected, despite the individual in question being one Sean Morton — who had been charged with possession of sexual images of children. Such was the severity of the charge that Morton, who maintained his innocence, stood as an independent after being dropped by Labour (at that time controlled by the Corbyn faction). But that didn’t stop Doyle from joining his friend on the campaign trail, and even at the election count. Morton was later found guilty of possessing indecent images of girls as young as 10.

Why does the Labour Right receive a comparatively easy ride on stories like this? One potential answer is political sympathies. While the country’s press undoubtedly leans towards the Tories, the orientation of most in broadcast media is instinctively New Labour (hence they didn’t mind Cameron). It’s no coincidence that Mandelson himself worked in television before leading on Labour’s comms in the 1987 election. The new worlds of public affairs, political consultancy and satellite TV all emerged at the same time, as the embryo of Blairism began to grow. A snapshot of that can be found on Sky News every Sunday morning: not only did Trevor Philips know Mandelson from their time at Carlton Television, but Mandelson was also the best man at Philips’ first wedding. Adam Boulton, another iconic face on Sky in the decades since its inception in 1989, is married to Anji Hunter — a former Blair spin doctor. Derek Draper, who died in 2024, and who was central in the rise of New Labour’s ‘innovative’ PR strategies, was married to ITV’s Kate Garraway. TV news and New Labour go together like the sun and shadow. Perhaps that helps explain Starmer’s ongoing struggles. In an era of social media, and GB News, the old rules are changing.

While in opposition, Starmer tried to cast Labour as the party of public probity — a foil to a bungling, contemptible government. But glance at the party’s roll call of shame, from Gwynne to Morton, and the claim looks downright absurd. And now, with the revelations of Epstein and Mandelson, which could be the country’s most seismic political scandal since the Profumo Affair, Labour faces a tainted brand for decades to come.

Why are the two major parties like this? Why is the electorate constantly forced to choose between the Tories, whose parliamentarians included a man who took pictures of himself with cocaine, and a Labour party which appears more at ease with child abuse than a Gary Glitter garden soirée? Whatever Britain’s wider problems — its widening infrastructure deficit, the increased tolerance by the state of low-level anti-social behavior, and a lack of economic vitality — nobody would claim such degeneracy reflects the general public.

The blame must certainly include our electoral system. The point of first-past-the-post, indeed some argue its advantage, is that it generally guarantees the stability of a system resting on two major parties: a government and an opposition. If you are unhappy with one side there is always a strong, albeit limited, alternative. Yet beyond its many failings, not least an inability to generate original thinking in areas such as foreign and industrial policy, FPTP means a deliberate, systematic foreclosure of the political marketplace. This inevitably gives rise to venal, self-serving cultures across the spectrum — not least because whatever happens, and no matter how poorly your party does, it will still access the accoutrements of opposition. The public now grasps this, which is why both Labour and the Tories — if polls are to be believed — face an existential challenge.

But even if one or both were replaced, by Reform and the Greens say, the electoral system would, in time, give rise to the same pathologies. FPTP, especially without primaries, as in the United States, encourages an insular culture that is hostile to the wider public, as Andrew Gwynne’s messages — however trivial — reveal. Instead, the political process is captured by individuals who excel at factionalism, undermining opponents and learning how to gerrymander bureaucracy: none of which is particularly useful in administering the state, building houses or having a police force that actually solves crime. In short, our system selects for politicians who can’t meet the challenges that matter to voters, and who prefer to obsess over internal power struggles.

Yes, the American system is plutocratic, indeed more so than our own. But primaries permit an openness — to new ideas, actors and policies — that ours does not. Without primaries there would be no Mamdani, Trump, Obama, Ocasio-Cortez or Marjorie Taylor Greene, and by extension there would be no challenge, or possibility of renewal, for public life. When Labour activists in this country called for something similar during the Corbyn years, and the mandatory re-selection of all party MPs, it led to a ferocious backlash from the political and media class. Why? Because it would take power away from Westminster elites, and re-distribute it — however imperfectly — to ordinary people. These political pressures, and the impossibility of internal regeneration within the Westminster system, are what gave rise to Brexit. Had Conservative associations been able to choose prospective parliamentarians in a manner that registered Republicans can select candidates for Congress, then Brexit might have been a more serene, efficient affair.

Such systemic dysfunction is only compounded by the second chamber. “Need a Lord on the board?” Mandelson cheerily asked Epstein in one email from 2010, a pithy distillation of what the upper house is really about: creating sinecures for has-beens and bag-carriers, who can subsequently leverage their status for personal gain. All the evidence suggests that the reforms to the Lords under Blair have been a disaster. And yet nobody with power seems capable of acknowledging that fact, let alone offering an alternative.

Of course corruption is inherent to political life. We all desire status, and mostly want money. Inevitably some people will pursue such things to the detriment of the public good. Yet our present electoral system incentivizes such appetites, rather than seeking to mitigate them. It is ridiculous to presume that only two parties might have a monopoly on good ideas, or people. The same applies to moral conduct.

It’s worth recalling that this scandal would never have surfaced were it not for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, an unthinkable piece of legislation in this country. That should raise questions about how we do politics in Britain and, I hope, prompt a conversation about an electoral system that only generates more than two plausible parties of government at a time. If we are to retain this status quo then, at the very least, it should require primaries and mandatory reselection. During the Corbyn years the media often described such proposals as Stalinist, despite their being the default across the Atlantic. I would simply say they keep politicians honest. In the context of SW1 that increasingly feels like a revolutionary demand.

Journalists parsing the files have found thousands of references to Vladimir Putin and to Russia. There is still no proof that these files relate to a real espionage operation, in which victims were blackmailed after sordid encounters with Russian women. But connecting the dots leads to what sounds like an absurd conspiracy theory, where some of the world’s most powerful men, men with security teams and agencies meant to guard and protect them, were left exposed to an age-old, tried-and-tested Russian trick: the “honeytrap”.

The honeytrap is as straightforward as espionage maneuvers come: the sexual seduction of a target is photographed or filmed then used for blackmail. In return for keeping the indiscretion secret, the blackmailer demands information or political favors. If the Epstein case was a honeytrap, who can know what Epstein, his guests, or his Russian contacts knew, agreed to, or wanted? But what is certain is that the scandal summons up the memory of honeytraps long past. It’s precisely because it sounds like pulp that the scandal now lands with such force in a political culture already primed to believe the worst about elite networks and hidden influence.

If the Epstein story has provoked hand-wringing and disbelief in the West, the reaction in Russia has been something closer to glee. On Russian Telegram channels, nationalists and Kremlin-supporting patriots are delighted. The dominant tone is a rolling mix of mockery and derision. But it’s also permeated with a sneering commentary on the West’s “perverse ecosystem” which permits such behavior, combined with a knowing scorn for a tabloid culture that yearns for Russiagate tapes and kompromat porn. One widely shared post treats the entire affair as confirmation that Western elites are decadent, hypocritical, and permanently compromised. But it also says that claims about Russian involvement are false, cooked up by “British spies”. Indeed, another user dismisses the entire story as “the invention of deranged Brits”.

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Alongside this ire runs something even less subtle: unalloyed delight at the West’s rich and powerful looking ridiculous. One popular channel revels in the image of Western financiers, politicians, and intellectuals undone not by some grand geopolitical strategy but by their own uncontrollable sexual appetites. Should they exist, these Russian women should not be ashamed of degrading themselves or being trafficked, say the Putin supporters. Instead they should be proud: they have fulfilled their patriotic duty by undermining the West.

In this framing, Epstein is not an aberration or a one-off monster, but merely the latest episode in a long and satisfying history of honeytrap stings on Westerners that reveal their sexual avarice. Proof, once again, that the West cannot be trusted to govern itself morally and that Russia is the world’s real bastion of “traditional values”. Sex trafficking, simply put, is less a tool for corrupting the West than for revealing its inherent corruption. Thus some Russians cheer the Epstein scandal as the latest example of their spy agency’s most beloved technique.

The history of Moscow’s honeytrap operations runs back to the early Cold War days. The KGB professionalized seduction with an almost bureaucratic seriousness. Female agents known as lastochki — “swallows” — were trained to target foreign diplomats, journalists, soldiers, and businessmen. There was remarkably little shame in the Russian secret services about using underhanded or dirty methods. Former KGB “swallows” later described their work as patriotic duty.

Honeytraps were a common feature of everyday espionage. Diplomats were told to assume that everybody they met was an agent and, accordingly, to behave with discretion. Bars and clubs, especially in the homosexual underground, were constantly monitored. Foreigners visiting Moscow were funneled through official Intourist hotels staffed and monitored by NKVD and KGB personnel. Soviet women were deployed by the security services, sometimes to target a specific individual and sometimes to seduce any Westerner they could. Anyone, wherever they sat in the social or political hierarchy, could be targeted — after all, even low-level functionaries might still have some useful information. Rooms fitted with hidden cameras and microphones ensured that sexual encounters were recorded. The kompromat factory was a nationwide affair.

A compromised Westerner might never be contacted at all. Some ignored the KGB’s threats: the American columnist and CIA operative Joseph Alsop was compromised in a gay honeytrap in Moscow in 1957 but rejected the ensuing blackmail attempt. Counterintelligence prevented other scandals getting out of hand: Sir Geoffrey Harrison, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, was recalled after being confronted with compromising material in 1968. Others proved more pliable: Clayton Lonetree, a US Marine guard, was seduced in the Eighties by a woman posing as a translator and went on to pass sensitive information to Soviet handlers.

The honeytrap was so effective because it was a ruse that gathered intelligence which also produced explosive political material that could damage Western democracies. The classic British example is the case of John Vassall, a junior Admiralty clerk who was photographed in a homosexual encounter in Moscow in 1954 and for several years passed classified information to his handlers. When the case finally became public, the scandal caused huge embarrassment to then prime minister Harold Macmillan’s government by exposing failures of vetting, security, and judgment at the heart of the British state.

But the Russian state’s security organs don’t only use the honeytrap strategy on Westerners; they sometimes use it on their own citizens. It has been deployed against Putin’s challengers, such as the opposition leader Ilya Yashin who was subjected to a crude attempt to undermine his political credibility by letting him drown in a moral quagmire of his own making. In Russia, humiliating and denigrating an opponent is politics as normal; the same offensive tools used against Western targets are just as easily deployed against Russians by a Kremlin that’s terrified of both internal and external threats.

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Jeffrey Epstein's corrupt overclass

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The honeypot approach is still used because it’s blunt but effective. It uses kompromat sometimes in exotic, outrageous forms, but just as often in banal, almost bureaucratic ways that resemble those of the Soviet era. One entirely ordinary Estonian soldier, for example, was seduced on a trip to visit family in Russia and subsequently convicted for espionage.

It would be a surprise if sexual blackmail is not being deployed against high-level Western businessmen, diplomats, and politicians today. Russia does not primarily seek to attack the West by surgically extracting targeted information, as traditional espionage would. Instead, it seeks to embarrass, humiliate, and degrade Western societies into destroying themselves by widening existing political fissures and disagreements and watching as a story-hungry media and viral social media storms do the hard work.

From Moscow’s perspective, it doesn’t matter so much whether the latest poisonous claims in the Epstein files are true. Even if the most sensational claims about who is (or who isn’t) a Russian agent collapse under scrutiny, the story itself will please Putin immensely. It will fuel suspicion that, regardless of their political orientation, the rich and powerful in the West can commit moral aberrations with impunity, and that institutions will shield them from consequence, instead of investigating them.

Backed by a group of supporters with no moral limits when it comes to undermining the West, the Kremlin will surely keep drudging up kompromat. But next time around, it may not need to wait for some hapless Westerner to fall into its trap. In the age of hacking and AI fakery, anybody, anywhere can be made the target of such blackmail. The future honeytrap does not need hotels and hidden cameras. It will be enough to make Western publics ask only whether something could have happened — and that, played out to the roaring crowd on social media, will achieve the Kremlin’s aims.