When Prince Andrew was asked to oversee a drive to end child abuse, he could not have been prouder. Giving an interview for Hello! magazine, in which he appeared with Nicole Kidman, Andrew said: “As a father of two young children, I simply could not sit back and do nothing … hopefully, in 20 years’ time, everyone will be able to pat themselves on the back.”
Inside he was pictured in a Buckingham Palace boardroom seated with Peter Mandelson, who was also involved in the Full Stop campaign by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).
The Sunday Times can reveal that just weeks earlier in 1999, Andrew and Mandelson had been photographed in bathrobes beside Jeffrey Epstein at a mansion on Martha’s Vineyard. It was there that Mandelson met Epstein for the first time. Epstein would not be convicted of a crime until 2008, but it marks the start of Mandelson and Andrew’s relationship.
Through interviews with former associates, public documents and emails from the Epstein files, our investigation has pieced together how Andrew and Mandelson’s friendship grew — and how both men moved through elite political, royal and social circles as scandals mounted.
We traced their first known meeting in 1999 — before the Martha’s Vineyard picture — when the NSPCC brought them together for lunch at Andrew’s apartment in Buckingham Palace, where they ate plaice with cream sauce.
Andrew’s former private secretary, Alastair Watson, has said the prince insisted on keeping his private life separate from royal staff.
And speaking for the first time, Giles Pegram, the former director of fundraising at the NSPCC responsible for the Full Stop campaign, said: “It’s horrible. Can anyone blame me for having brought Andrew andMandelsontogether given the circumstances at the time?
“Do I regret it? Yes, obviously I do. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it. If there was a scandal that was related to children, we wouldn’t have come within a mile of it.”
Wednesday July 29, 1981, was a public holiday for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. But Mandelson, then 27, sailed to Boulogne for a “republican awayday”. Sporting a moustache, Mandelson, who had dabbled in communism, smiled proudly on the deck for a photo taken by Harriet Harman, then working for the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Mandelson became Labour’s director of campaigns and communications in 1985 and was soon “good friends” with Ghislaine Maxwell, while working as a consultant for her father Robert Maxwell’s Mirror group and writing a column in The People newspaper. “Ghislaine knew Peter because he was a very social animal and she was a very social animal,” her brother Ian Maxwell has said.
In 1989, Mandelson met Charles at a reception at Kensington Palace. They were introduced by Mandelson’s friend Tom Shebbeare, who worked as director of the Prince’s Trust from 1988-2002.
“There was a real rapport,” Shebbeare has said. Mandelson’s dalliance with republicanism seemed long forgotten. The journalist Paul Routledge wrote in his biographyMandy: “Mandelson’s natural instinct was to get closer to the royal family, as the ultimate extension of his network.”
During 1992, the Queen’s “annus horribilis” during which Charles’s and Andrew’s marriages fell apart, Mandelson told of his outrage at the publication of intimate phone calls between Diana and a male friend and Andrew and his wife,Sarah Ferguson.
A few months after being elected as MP for Hartlepool in 1992, Mandelson wrote in support of Charles in an article in The Times amid his separation from Diana. “Let a new image rise from the ashes,” Mandelson argued.
Within weeks of Labour’s landslide election win in May 1997, Mandelson, appointed minister without portfolio, met Charles again and was invited to Highgrove for a private lunch with him and Camilla.
