Was there a home or a hostelry in the land where a cheer didn't go up when the news broke?
Not knowing precisely what the law is as regards publicly discussing live (potentially) criminal cases, I'll settle for a few random, unworthy observations.
- Gotta love the way Gordon Brown solemnly offered PC Plod his forensic account of how outrageously Mandelson betrayed him - sorry, betrayed the Nation - when in office just before and after the 2010 GE. Hell hath no fury ... and it's never difficult to tell the difference between a dour Scotsman and a ray of sunshine. Etc
- Also enjoyed seeing Mandy crammed into the back seat of ... a Ford Focus! Of all cars. With three other coppers. He won't have sat in a seat as lowly as that for the best part of 40 years!
- Channel 4's "sources close to Mandelson" said that when Andy was arrested but not him, he reckoned the storm had passed. Well, that's Mandy - always aggressive, shameless optimism in public, as we've said here before. But - how much sleep did Mandy get, do we think, after Andy was arrested?
- Nobody has much scrupled to disguise the exact location of his "Camden" house (= Regents Park). Nice house!
ND
UPDATE - now being reported that at 4am this morning, just a short while after PC Plod let him go home, Mandy started briefing against the Met Police! The modus operandi never changes - take the initiative, brief, spin, attack attack attack !
15 comments:
Shurely My Noble Lord Fumblebum has been renting premises owned by the Rothchilds........
My wife called me in to watch the TV news last night. Pretty uninformative except for a reference to his "home" being worth millions of quid. Where did that come from, then?
Partly house price inflation, no doubt, but when did he buy it and for how much? Did he pay market value for it?
I recall when the one-eyed Scottish idiot, as Jeremy Clarkson referred to him at the time, was in government there were innuendos circulating about his private life.
There's one thing you can rely on about commies, they never know when to keep their stupid mouths shut or when to keep a low profile. As the current events prove.
As I recall (too lazy to AI it in detail) the London house purchase was when he was an EC Commissioner, and there was allegedly some trick involved where the house price was artificially lowered and an extravagant amount was paid for "fittings", to get it below some Stamp Duty threshold.
Allegedly
IIRCC
Of course he lost his job (first time around) over a dodgy loan from Geoffrey Robinson which was for an earlier house purchase
I wonder if anything will come of the Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor fuss. I can imagine a trial(s) would be an embarrassing thing, lots of muck raked over. Not a nice idea. On the other hand having stirred up the Augean stables a sense of cover-up would never go away. The newshounds will never let go even if we had a trial.
Some countries adopt the high window/tumbled out approach, not the British way. But I can't see the silver salver, whisky bottle and pearl handled having the desired effect either. Unless 'encouraged', know what I mean.
All very difficult - what fool started this mess.
Thanks, ND. I can't complain much about the stamp duty fiddle unless its scale was excessive: lots of people in the 80s used the trick. Heavens, our solicitor recommended it to us. But at least our claim was realistic not extravagant. In fact it proved a useful bargaining tool to persuade the sellers to leave rather more fittings and furniture behind than they had originally intended.
Hold on! I've just googled stamp duty thresholds: if the AI is right then my memory is wrong. Why, then, did our solicitor want us to pay less for the house and more for the fittings? Size or cost of mortgage perhaps? It's a mystery.
Isn't it sobering when you come across evidence that something you remember is plain wrong?
And another thing. This chap isn't the most, ahem, judicious blogger I read but he's got a corking story here. Can it be true?
https://voxday.net/2026/02/24/the-corpse-wasnt-epstein/
He been watching too much "Night Manager2" ?
"We can be certain..." - strong words.
Mr Mandelson is, of course, completely unmotivated by personal gain.
Any troughs his snout may have been found in, were purely down to the serendipitous way his weary body lay after evenings with fine company, finer food, and the finest wines.
He has been a dedicated servant to this country, spending many years sparing his colleagues from having their morality tested by selflessly sacrificing his own, and saving many from the fiscal ruin they would undoubtedly face lest their tastebuds came acclimatised to cuisine somewhat richer than a £20 Tesco Finest Meal Deal.
Mr Mandelson dreams of the day he can enjoy the delights of a Greggs, but he has cast those aside like the dyed-in-the-wool patriot he is, and so suffers such foreign tastes such as fish eggs and crustaceans boiled alive.
Far from casting aspersions on Mr Mandelson, who let us not forget did not merely serve his nation just the once, but shows character by repeatedly coming back from well earned retirements, the Met, who we must not forget, is a villainous hive of rapists, racists, misogynists, and braziliohydraulikophobes, would do well to take note of his capacity to overcome such crippling disabilities as unwise facial hair choices, and a crippling attraction to wealth.
- Mishcon de Reya, possibly.
I am much amused that Petie, it was feared, might abscond abroad - to the British Virgin Islands. That's a bloody funny way to spell Israel, isn't it?
re the Vox Day story - you have to say it's a remarkable coincidence - and so convenient! - that the cameras were switched off/not working/tapes wiped/whatever when the most high profile prisoner of the century chose to "end his life"
Oh come now. All it required was that Epstein noticed that his cell-mate was absent and somehow miraculously divined that the cameras were on the blink and that the warders were off slacking somewhere. Could happen to anyone.
But seriously there are three contending theories. (i) It happened as the authorities said. (ii) He was murdered. (iii) He was smuggled out and a corpse was smuggled in.
Of those three it seems to me that much the least plausible is (i).
Sick of Andrew and Mandy (and Ms Price).
Looked at the business for today and the past few. They follow a pattern that seems exquisitely designed to achieve nothing as slowly as possible. Some poor fool is stuck with Diesel Cheat devices today for heaven's sake. The MoT system should have killed that off years back.
I see our university fees are way ahead of even the Americans (barring elite privates). Even the Americans let in the talented at a discount. The Vice Chancellors enjoy vast amounts of vintage port. But do no good for UK plc.
Then I see some spat over care fees for some unfortunate - about £16,000 a week for home care. Now that looks a lot like profit gouging from the care providers. Along with £20,000 for some girl to have riding lessons. All smacks of deliberate carelessness. Torn between funding the outsourcers, buying the ballot and doing an honest job by the voters.
I feel we need a latter day Guy Fawkes, borrow from Mr Putin. A really good one otherwise we will spend gazillions on a pointless restoration and archiving potsherds from the tea room. Wednesday lunchtime is favourite.
Cheer up. "random" killer, who took good care not to target his own group, was not securely detained "after they considered research that addressed the over-representation of young black men in custody".
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/23/nottingham-killer-valdo-calocane-race-mental-health-inquiry
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