Tony Blair met with Jeffrey Epstein at Downing Street while serving as prime minister, following lobbying from Lord Peter Mandelson, according to the BBC on Friday.
Mandelson's later career as UK ambassador in Washington came to a crashing end when messages were published detailing the depth of his relationship with Epstein, a convicted child sex offender.
A memo by senior civil servant Matthew Rycroft, dated May 14, 2002, briefed Blair about “super-rich” financial adviser Epstein ahead of a meeting scheduled for that day, six years before Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor.
A spokesperson for Blair said, “As far as he can remember, Blair met with him for less than 30 minutes in Downing Street in 2002 and discussed US and UK politics. He never met or engaged with him subsequently.”
“This was, of course, long before his crimes were known of and his subsequent conviction,” the spokesperson said.
Emails seen by BBC News show Mandelson pushed for the meeting, telling Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, that Epstein was “a friend of mine” whom former US president Bill Clinton hoped to introduce to the prime minister.
In a May 2002 email, Mandelson described Epstein as “an active scientific catalyst/entrepreneur” who was “young and vibrant” and “safe.”
He told Powell that Clinton was “now doing a lot of travelling with him.”
Rycroft’s briefing memo described Epstein as “a financial adviser to the super-rich and a property developer”, “a friend of Bill Clinton and Peter Mandelson”, and “very rich and close to the Duke of York”.
Epstein’s death reignites political scrutiny
Mandelson, then a backbench MP, had twice resigned from the Cabinet but remained influential in Labour. Epstein was later convicted in 2008 and died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Epstein mingled with the wealthy and powerful, including prominent politicians, for decades before pleading guilty in 2008 to felony solicitation and procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution.
He was arrested for a second time in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking minors and was found dead in his prison cell roughly a month after being taken into custody.
Authorities have maintained that Epstein killed himself by hanging, though public scepticism over the circumstances of his death has continued to mount.
Trump's MAGA allies have for years loudly clamoured for the release of the government's Epstein records, as they speculate that the files incriminate high-profile individuals.
The Justice Department's public determination in July that Epstein was not murdered in his jail cell in 2019 and its claim that he had no "client list" set off the largest rift within Trump's MAGA, or Make America Great Again, base.
