Peter Mandelson did not want, he wrote disdainfully to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, to “live by salary alone”. Not for him the life of the little guy, slave to a mere six-figure salary: he had always aspired to something grander, a lifestyle well beyond his means, to which rich men such as Epstein were so often his passport.

First it was his millionaire colleague, Geoffrey Robinson, from whom Mandelson secretly borrowed money to buy a house he couldn’t afford. In 2003 and 2004 it was Epstein, at least according to files released in the US this week, suggesting the financier paid £55,000 into Mandelson’s bank account, though he now says he can’t find records of it. Five years later, in 2010, the files record Mandelson confiding in Epstein of his hopes for a gig with merchant bankers JP Morgan, where he could leverage his “networks” to make the really big deals.

How lucky, then, that he had allegedly been so helpful to Wall Street just a few months earlier at the height of the banking crisis: passing on inside snippets of government thinking during the crash, according once again to those telltale files, and suggesting via Epstein (at the time recently released from jail) that JP Morgan should “mildly threaten” the British chancellor, Alistair Darling, to get around a proposed ban on bankers’ bonuses. Meanwhile, the files record Mandelson’s partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, asking Epstein for £10,000 for an osteopathy course and a laptop, which the latter promises to wire over immediately. No such gift was ever declared, and Mandelson insists he has no record of it. But what’s striking about the email is its casualness, almost as though da Silva were one of the dreaded wage slaves, filing his expenses.

And so the man with a rightful claim to have........

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