In Jeffrey Epstein’s wider circle, women and girls were treated as less than human by powerful men acting far beyond the law. The sexual trafficking plotted by him and his fellow criminals is the most egregious example of a global network of wealthy and powerful men that thinks it can act with impunity. Nothing less than a century-defining rebalancing of power and accountability is equal to this moment and the trauma of the victims. This scandal is primarily about them and their pain.

But as I digest the details of what has emerged, I also find it hard to find words to express my revulsion at what has been uncovered about Epstein and his impact on our politics. During the financial crisis, I wanted every moment of every day to be spent doing everything that could be done to save people’s homes, savings, pensions and jobs. That a member of the cabinet at the time was thinking more of himself and his rich friends is a betrayal of everything we stand for as a country. That the leaks of sensitive information were going to someone we now know was the ringmaster of a cabal of abusers and enablers sickens me.

In the weeks and months to come, we must find ways to rebuild trust. Yet trust in politics, once dented, is difficult to repair. And so, as the police investigate Peter Mandelson amid allegations of financial and political misconduct, indeed criminality, politicians have a herculean task to persuade people that they act in the public interest and not only self-interest. Already, two-thirds of the British public believe that politicians are out primarily for themselves. The grim truth is that unless something fundamental changes, this week’s revelations will be acid in our democracy, corroding trust still further.

We in Britain must face uncomfortable facts. Every few years, our country has suffered a major scandal that shakes us to the core but from which lessons are never fully learned: the Profumo affair of the 1960s, the “brown envelopes” sleaze of the 1980s, the MPs’ expenses affair of the 2000s, the Boris Johnson Partygate excesses of the early 2020s and now the Mandelson affair.

I have to take personal responsibility for appointing Mandelson to his ministerial role in 2008. I greatly regret this appointment. I made it at the end of his four years as the UK’s European commissioner on trade. I was informed that his record in the role was unblemished and there were no reports of a relationship with anyone named Epstein. No one could say I promoted him out of favouritism. I did so in spite of him being anything but a friend to me, because I thought that his unquestioned knowledge of Europe and........

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