The Epstein files lift the curtain on how power is exercised and influence traded by our financial elite. It is not a cheering sight. Business and economic gurus like the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers asking for dating advice from a convicted paedophile does not build confidence in the masters of the universe. Distasteful as these details are, the most telling insights into the predatory behaviour of the private-jet classes relate to how they exploit all of us, not just the vulnerable young women who catch their eye.

Peter Mandelson may blush at some of the personal details laid bare in his emails to Jeffrey Epstein. But perhaps the most chilling tell is advice given in 2009 to Jamie Dimon, chief executive of the investment bank JP Morgan, saying his response to the prospect of a tax on bankers’ bonuses should be to ‘mildly threaten’ the UK government.

Dimon took advice from the then business secretary to come over all Tony Soprano with the government of which Mandelson was a part. He privately warned the then chancellor, Alistair Darling, that plans for a new London office for JP Morgan would be reconsidered if that tax went ahead. Nice City of London you got there, Alistair – pity if anything should happen to it.

Institutional logic does not explain Reeves’s love-in with the banks. They seem to have made a Faustian pact

Institutional logic does not explain Reeves’s love-in with the banks. They seem to have made a Faustian pact

Sixteen years have passed since Dimon gave that warning. Epstein is dead, Lord Mandelson faces a police investigation, and our politicians have pledged to clean out the stables. But one thing has not changed. The bankers still feel they can coerce our elected politicians. And the current Labour Chancellor doesn’t just acquiesce to the coercion – she makes a virtue of it, while the rest of us pay the price. The banks have demonstrated that, so long as they get their way, they will continue to offer ‘investment’ the Chancellor can boast about.

Before Rachel Reeves’s second Budget last November, she had been considering how to plug the hole in the public finances. One option, favoured by the then deputy PM Angela Rayner, was a windfall tax on the banks. The Labour-friendly thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) had made a compelling progressive case for the levy. But Reeves refused to go after the bankers’ handsome profits. She raised taxes on small businesses instead.

The banks were delighted. JP Morgan announced a new three million sq ft European headquarters in Canary Wharf, housing some 12,000 employees. The plans had been in the deep freeze since 2009, but now Reeves had shown whose side she was on. JP Morgan was not the only international finance house delighted that she had shown herself so sympathetic to their remuneration strategy. The same day, Goldman Sachs unveiled a tech hub for Birmingham.

Reeves boasted that these announcements showed the banks were ‘choosing Britain because they like what they heard in the........

© The Spectator