Mandelson arrest is a ‘big disaster’ for the government, says Prof Anthony Glees

A leading security expert has described the arrest of Peter Mandelson as “a big disaster” for the government.

Reacting to the news, Professor Anthony Glees told GB News: “In the case of Lord Mandelson, he still is Lord, it’s a question of the damage that he could have done to the British state, but also the damage that he did to the Labour Party and the Labour government.

“And it’s not just this 20 year stretch of highly influential activities in which Lord Mandelson was engaged on, it is also a question of the obvious failure to vet him properly before Sir Keir Starmer made him British ambassador in Washington.

“So now that he has been arrested on the basis of allegations, the police and the Security Service, I should have thought, possibly even the Secret Intelligence Service, whose job it is to gain information about what happens overseas, will all be involved in building up a rich picture, a very rich picture.

“Because along the way, and Lord Mandelson has never made any secret of this, he’s had good relations with leading people in Putin’s Russia. He’s been an EU trade commissioner, a leading member of Gordon Brown’s cabinet, Deputy Prime Minister, in effect, whilst working very closely with Epstein.

“This is a broad canvas, and any eventual case, should one emerge, would be highly complicated, take a number of years, I should have thought, to assemble.

“And the longer this goes on, the worse it is for the Labour government, the worse it is for the Labour Party, and the worse it is for Britain.”

He added: “This is a man who boasted of the fact that he had his fingers in so many different pies that he, as I say, was a very senior cabinet minister in a Labour government, a EU Trade Commissioner…millions of Epstein papers, some have not even, we’re told, been uncovered.

“Yet the people looking at this will have to go far and wide and deep. And certainly, I think inside the European Union this evening, they too will be very worried, because public servants are meant to serve the public. They’re not meant to serve themselves, and they’re certainly not meant to serve pedophile millionaires.

“The allegations could hardly be more serious and more damning. Of course, they could be wrong, and that’s why we have the rule of law in this country, which will determine it.

“But you need only look at the faces of Lord Mandelson or Prince Andrew, formerly Prince Andrew, to realise that the seriousness of the position they now find themselves in has not escaped them.

“However, don’t let’s forget this is somebody who the government claimed they had vetted just a year ago, even though by that stage, they knew full well that Lord Mandelson had had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that went back 20 years.

“So this really does ask a critical question, how seriously does this current government take our national internal security?

“We know Sir Keir Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions, in his former life, and a prominent human rights lawyer – did he actually give our security services the respect they needed and the chance to do the job the public expected them to do, both, as far as Andrew is concerned, and now as far as Lord Mandelson is concerned?

“Whichever way you look, this is actually a big disaster.”