Former British cabinet minister Peter Mandelson has resigned as a member of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party after new reports of his links to disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein, media reported on Sunday.
Mandelson, who was sacked by Starmer as Britain’s ambassador to the United States last year after previous revelations about his links to Epstein, said he did not want to cause “further embarrassment” to Labor, according to media reports.
“I have been further associated this weekend with the understandable furore surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, and I feel regret and apology for it,” Mandelson said in a letter to the Labor Party reported by the newspaper. BBC and other media outlets, which Reuters could not get immediately.
Mandelson said he believed the allegations about Epstein’s financial payments, which appeared in British media based on files released by the U.S. Department of Justice, were false and that he would investigate them.
“In doing so, I do not wish to cause further embarrassment to the Labor Party, and I am therefore withdrawing from membership of the party,” the letter said.
Mandelson played a key role in Labour’s electoral success when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, starting in the 1990s.
He came under investigation last year after US lawmakers released documents including a letter in which he called Epstein “my best friend”, which led to his dismissal as British envoy to Washington.
Mandelson also had a checkered career in domestic politics. In 1998, he resigned as trade minister over a loan he obtained from a fellow minister to buy a house, amid questions of a conflict of interest.
A second stint in cabinet also ended in resignation in 2001, when he was forced to resign over his alleged involvement in a passport scandal involving an Indian billionaire. He was later cleared of acting inappropriately.
Mandelson, a former European Union trade commissioner, is on leave as a member of the upper house of Britain’s national parliament.
Separately, Starmer said on Saturday that Britain’s former Prince Andrew is expected to testify before a US congressional committee, following new revelations about his links to Epstein.
