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.