Lord Mandelson today admitted that more ‘very embarrassing’ details will come about about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. 

Britain’s ambassador to Washington had once referred to the disgraced financier as his ‘best pal’ and was found to have sent pictures of himself shirtless and in a fluffy white bathrobe, according to reports.

A minister today affirmed that Lord Mandelson continues to have Sir Keir Starmer’s support despite US lawmakers releasing vacation pictures from a trip he took in around 2002 to Epstein’s Caribbean retreat, infamously known as ‘orgy island’ by one of Epstein’s victims.

Additionally, emails allegedly disclosed that Lord Mandelson collaborated with Epstein on a £1 billion transaction concerning the sale of a UK taxpayer-owned banking enterprise after Epstein had been found guilty of child sexual offenses.

Critics cast doubt on the sustainability of his position, especially with the imminent state visit of US President Donald Trump to the UK, during which the Labour peer is expected to hold a significant role.

The Labour peer has previously voiced his ‘regret’ about ever meeting Epstein, who had fondly called him ‘Petie’. However, the true extent of their association has never been completely unveiled.

Addressing the revelations for the first time, Lord Mandelson expressed feeling ‘very embarrassed’, but indicated that he perceived a different facet of Epstein ‘because I’m a gay man’.

‘I never sought and nor did he offer any introductions to women in a way he originally did for others, perhaps it’s because I’m a gay man,’ he told podcast Harry Cole Saves the West. 

Referring to more information that could soon emerge about his relationship with Epstein, he continued: ‘I don’t believe I’m named in the Epstein files. I have no doubt at all that there’s a lot of traffic, correspondence, exchanges, emails between us. 

‘And we know those are going to surface, we know they’re going to come out, we know they’re going to be very embarrassing and we know that I am going profoundly to regret ever having met him and been introduced to him in the first place.

‘But I can’t rewrite history. What I can do is express my profound sympathy for those who have been trafficked by him and secondly I can accept, yes I can accept, that I continued my association with him for too long.’

He continued: ‘I regret very much that I fell for his lies, I fell for and accepted assurances that he had given me about his indictment, his original criminal case in Florida, like very many people, I took at face value what he said.

‘With hindsight, with fresh information, many years later, we realised that we had been wrong to believe him.

‘He is a charismatic criminal liar we now see, and I regret very much indeed. I felt it like an albatross around my neck since his death in 2018 or 19, when it was.

‘I feel, I feel a tremendous sense of regret, not only that I met him in the first place, but I continued the association, and I took, at face value, the lies that he fed me and many others.’

Education minister Josh MacAlister said Lord Mandelson still retained the backing of the Government and he warned against finding people ‘guilty by association’ with Jeffrey Epstein.

He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain he had not seen Lord Mandelson’s interview, but added: ‘Yes, the ambassador has the support of Government.’

‘People who abuse people in this way are often very good at hiding what they’re doing and… manipulating people. And that’s obviously what Jeffrey Epstein did.

‘Again, I don’t know the history and the details. I haven’t seen the interview. But the whole way in which these people operate and are able to continue their abuse is often by being highly manipulative. So we need to be careful not to make everybody guilty by association.

‘Jeffrey Epstein was a very effective social networker. He built relationships with lots of people, and in doing so, was highly manipulative, very secretive, and abused a lot of people in the process, and it’s why so many people, including Peter Mandelson, now deeply regret ever having been introduced to him and also continuing the relationship with him, if they had one.’

On Monday night, Democrats in Congress released a ten-page greeting handwritten by Lord Mandelson as part of a 238-page photobook compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003 by his on-off girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

The ‘birthday book’ features lewd messages from friends and associates of the billionaire US paedophile, apparently including Bill Clinton, Mr Trump – who claims it is fake – and an unnamed bikini-clad ‘assistant’ of Epstein who claims she met Prince Andrew and sat on the Queen’s throne in Buckingham Palace.

Lord Mandelson’s contribution weaves tributes to Epstein as a ‘mysterious’ and ‘intelligent, sharp-witted man’ into a lyrical picture story set over ten pages. 

The photos are Lord Mandelson’s holiday snaps, believed to be from a 2002 visit to Little St James, Epstein’s private island, which was later dubbed ‘paedo island’.

One image shows Lord Mandelson wearing just swimming shorts and gazing from a balcony, with the description that ‘you would spend many hours just waiting for him [Epstein] to turn up’.

Another shows a smiling Lord Mandelson in a fluffy dressing gown chatting to his host beneath a handwritten declaration that, ‘Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!’ On the last page, he writes: ‘Happy birthday Jeffrey – we love you!!’

There is no suggestion that he was aware of any of Epstein’s crimes.

The birthday greeting was penned five years before Epstein’s conviction in 2008 for soliciting underage sex, although he has not denied staying at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion the following year after his release from prison.

Meanwhile, emails seen by The Telegraph reportedly showed how Mandelson, who was business secretary at the time, took advice from Epstein during the 2010 sale of an RBS energy trading arm to JP Morgan, just months after the disgraced financier was released from jail for child sex offences.

Epstein is said to have introduced Mandelson to Jes Staley, then a top banker at JP Morgan who has since been banned from the City over his links to the paedophile.

Last night, the Labour grandee – who once said he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes’ – faced renewed scrutiny over his closeness to the financier, who was accused of molesting hundreds of teenage girls.

Lord Mandelson, 71, will play a significant part in next week’s state visit by Mr Trump, including as a VIP guest at the white-tie state banquet being held in St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle.

His job will be to smooth any diplomatic ripples to ensure King Charles and Queen Camilla can host the perfect event when they welcome Mr Trump and his wife, Melania, to Windsor Castle between September 17 and 19.

Epstein victims have called for Lord Mandelson to be sacked.

Former ‘sex slave’ Sarah Ransome, 41, said that ‘something is really, really wrong here’.

She told The Telegraph: ‘Peter Mandelson should not be ambassador. He needs to be fired.

‘He is unsuitable to be ambassador. Keir Starmer must have known all this.

‘Everybody knew about Peter Mandelson’s close friendship with Epstein.’

Spencer Kuvin, a lawyer who represented nine of Epstein’s victims, said: ‘By allowing someone with clear ties to one of the worst sex abusers of our time to be ambassador is an insult to the victims of Epstein.

‘This man should be questioned by the FBI and the UK Government immediately to find out what he knows.’

Nazir Afzal, the former chief prosecutor for north-west England, said: ‘The most I’ve written in a birthday card to another man is probably ‘Happy Birthday Son’.

‘Mandelson writes poetry to [Epstein] with whom he stayed after conviction. Now he’s ambassador to the government of another of Epstein’s chums! A ‘regret’ isn’t enough, I’m afraid.’

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to authoritarian Uzbekistan, posted the photo of the two men and remarked: ‘Peter Mandelson, now Starmer’s ambassador to the USA, with Jeffrey Epstein.

‘I was sacked as ambassador for opposing torture and illegal rendition. The world of power is a dark place indeed.’

Sir Keir Starmer has ‘full confidence’ in Lord Mandelson, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said yesterday.

And Health Secretary Wes Streeting told LBC: ‘The ambassador has been clear that he regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein – and who can blame him? Who would want to be associated with Epstein given what we know now about the horrific crimes he perpetrated? I don’t think we should tar everyone as kind of guilty by association.’

In the 2003 birthday message, Lord Mandelson wrote about Epstein’s ‘glorious homes he likes to share with his friends (yum yum)’, alongside a photo of Little St James, the idyllic island in the Caribbean which it later emerged had been a place where schoolchildren were molested.

Fringed by coral reefs, it served as Epstein’s lair and was allegedly the ‘perfect hideaway and haven for trafficking young women and underage girls for sexual servitude, child abuse and sexual assault’, according to a lawsuit brought by the Virgin Islands against Epstein’s estate in 2020.

Among those allegedly trafficked to the beauty spot was Epstein’s 17-year-old sex slave Virginia Roberts, who labelled it ‘orgy island’ and said she was sexually assaulted there by Prince Andrew, which he has always vehemently denied.

Ms Roberts – later Virginia Giuffre – spoke about seeing countless women and girls on Little St James, claiming she was ‘passed around like a platter of fruit’ to Epstein’s powerful friends between 2000 and 2002 at a number of locations.

There is no suggestion that her visits to the island coincided with Lord Mandelson’s. In 2002 he was a Labour MP, having resigned from Tony Blair’s Cabinet.

In one of the peer’s photos, he is pictured on the island with two women – their faces obscured – being served breakfast by one of them. She identified herself yesterday as Cathy Alexander, 70, Epstein’s former housekeeper.

She told The Telegraph she believed the other woman, wearing a white vest and black bikini bottoms, was Maxwell.

Peter’s photo casebook – Lord Mandelson’s 10-page birthday greeting to Epstein:

Lord Mandelson’s handwritten caption on the photo states that Epstein would go away and leave ‘you with some ‘interesting’ friends to entertain’. 

Mrs Alexander said Lord Mandelson stayed there for a week with his partner Reinaldo Avila da Silva, 53, whom he married two years ago.

She recalled him as a ‘gentleman’ and ‘a very nice guy’. The housekeeper said she had never seen anything untoward during her time looking after Epstein.

Maxwell, 63, is serving 20 years in jail for recruiting young girls for Epstein to sexually abuse.

According to a court document filed in 2023, Epstein and Lord Mandelson had ‘a particularly close friendship’. A photo, thought to be from 2005, showed Lord Mandelson wearing a £21,000 Patek Philippe watch with Epstein in the US Virgin Islands.

By then Epstein was under police investigation over multiple allegations of sexually assaulting schoolgirls. There is no suggestion that Lord Mandelson, then on a taxpayer-funded £200,000 salary as EU trade commissioner, knew anything of the accusations.

For years, Epstein entertained an A-list roster of guests on his island, including Naomi Campbell and Kevin Spacey. Ex-US president Mr Clinton denies being a visitor, and all deny wrongdoing.

Mr Trump – who once told New York Magazine that Epstein ‘likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side’ – has played down his association with the financier. 

In the ‘birthday book’, there is a bawdy sketch allegedly signed by Mr Trump showing a woman’s body with the line: ‘Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret’. The White House says it is ‘fake news’.

Mr Clinton’s birthday message praised Epstein’s ‘childlike curiosity’. Mr Clinton has long maintained he did not know of the allegations against Epstein. 

Another drawing in the birthday book depicts a young Epstein enticing schoolgirls with balloons and lollipops, and an older Epstein being massaged by topless women, while a jet – presumably the billionaire’s infamous ‘Lolita Express’ – flies over his mansion.

Lord Mandelson’s office, the British embassy in Washington and the Foreign Office in London were asked to comment yesterday.