Sir Keir’s judgment has been suspect since he hired Lord Mandelson, whose career has courted controversy, to be Britain’s ambassador to the US. The peer was eventually sacked over his links with Epstein. Yet even when the US Department of Justice released 3m documents from Epstein’s personal files featuring the peer thousands of times there was no automatic expulsion, no legislative action, no institutional reckoning. Once cash flows into a minister’s household while that minister is in office, the argument that there was “no personal benefit” disappears. “Have you permanently stopped the Reinaldo sub?” Lord Mandelson jokes with Epstein in 2010 in reference to money for his husband. This is household-level financial support from a disgraced financier to the family of a serving cabinet minister.