Peter Mandelson — twice-resigned Cabinet minister, architect of New Labour and, until recently, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States — went to the University of Oxford from Hendon County Grammar. Mandelson read PPE at St Catherine’s College from 1972 to 1976. Young Mandelson’s impressions of Oxford, as detailed in Donald Macintyre’s Mandelson: The Biography, are mixed at best: Hertford College ‘stank of cabbage’ while St Edmund’s Hall was ‘sort of thirteenth century’, the Union ‘hoorayish’ and ‘off putting’. With too many Peters in his year, Mandy was known, simply, as ‘Benj’.  

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Fast forward some 40 years and Mandelson was awarded an honorary fellowship by St Catherine’s College in 2018. In 2024, with his ties to Epstein already a matter of public record, he unsuccessfully stood as a candidate for Oxford University Chancellor. His honorary fellowship survived until November 2025, when he resigned it following the release of emails detailing the full extent of his relationship with the convicted sex offender. The college said he had ‘decided to step back from public life’ and offered no further comment. The St Catherine’s JCR President at the time was slightly........

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