Ministers, advisers and civil servants are braced for political fallout from the impending release of tens of thousands of documents relating to the disgraced peer Lord Peter Mandelson and his appointment as UK ambassador to the US.
Many fear highly embarrassing messages will emerge, including some that contain criticism of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer himself.
“There’s a lot of concern that there could be things that are irrelevant to the issue at hand, but very embarrassing — tittle tattle, ‘water cooler’ gossip,” said one person familiar with the matter.
A former Number 10 adviser said: “Honestly, I think this exercise is mental.”
The Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into whether Mandelson committed misconduct in public office when he was business secretary in 2009 and 2010.
Files released by the US Department of Justice showed that he as a minister forwarded confidential government information to Epstein, who had paid him $75,000 in three instalments several years earlier.
At the same time, the Cabinet Office is preparing for the release of a deluge of documents relating to Mandelson’s most recent time in office as US ambassador for seven months in 2025.
Officials have given a rough estimate that as many as 100,000 documents could be released.
Starmer was forced into the release of those documents last week by a Conservative parliamentary motion called a “humble address”.
Hannah White, chief executive of the Institute for Government think-tank, said the imminent disclosures were likely to prompt a bout of reflection within Whitehall.
“This is likely to be one of the first of a certain sort of political scandal that is the result of there being so many records of communications because you can retrieve texts, WhatsApps, emails,” she said.
“In the past if you had a scandal like the Profumo affair there may have only been one or two pieces of paper and things were quite cut and dried. The quantum of information that can now be drawn on is now of a different magnitude.”
White suggested there was a risk that the revelations change the way that ministers and officials communicate, with less record keeping: “If that leads to less decision-making being done formally, and more decisions being taken without trace, that’s not a good outcome.”
The papers that will be published by the Cabinet Office will begin six months before Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador last year as well as covering his time in office.
They will include exchanges between Mandelson, ministers and special advisers about the vetting process before his appointment to the diplomatic job.
But crucially the wording of the “humble address” suggests that the government will have to release a vast array of material including “electronic communications and minutes of all meetings between Lord Mandelson and ministers, government officials and special advisers during his time as ambassador”.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, this week spontaneously released his messages with Mandelson, which showed him complaining about Labour’s lack of an economic policy and his fears that he is “toast” at the next election. In another message, indirectly criticising Starmer, he said: “There isn’t a clear answer to the question: why Labour?”
The FDA trade union, which represents senior civil servants, has opened discussions with the government about how the document release will be handled, and is arguing that officials should have the chance to see — and challenge — the decision to publish documents.
While some government figures are concerned about a rushed process, others argue there is political impetus from all sides to finalise the release as soon as possible.
Labour wants to cauterise the issue and move on while opposition parties want to maintain momentum on a bad news story for the government.
The disclosure process had been overseen by cabinet secretary Chris Wormald but that has been complicated by his expected departure.
Some of the documents will be redacted, but that decision will be made by parliament’s cross-party intelligence and security committee, chaired by former Labour minister Lord Kevan Jones.
Jones’s committee met on Tuesday with a handful of senior mandarins, agreeing that the government would decide which documents are within the scope of the humble address.
Civil servants will also initially decide which documents could prejudice national security or international relations.
The intelligence and security committee will then consider that subset of sensitive papers and decide whether or not that material should be withheld or released.
The committee signalled that the first batch of documents to surface into the public domain will be the vetting documents around Mandelson’s appointment. One person close to the negotiations said these were in the “single figures” and included newspaper cuttings.
The process is complicated by the Met insisting they will examine material shared by the Cabinet Office to assess whether publication is likely to damage its own investigation. Detectives searched Mandelson’s properties last week and will interview him under caution within days.
Meanwhile the Cabinet Office has proactively begun a trawl into messages sent by Mandelson over his lengthy career which included ministerial jobs in Tony Blair’s first administration from 1997 as well as his comeback as business secretary at the end of Gordon Brown’s regime.
Relevant documents would be sent to Scotland Yard and are unlikely to be published, according to people close to the process, which is happening independently and was not requested by the Met.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, has also been accused of leaking government documents to Epstein when he was a trade envoy.
UK prosecutors said on Wednesday they are in “close contact” with the police over their investigations into both Mountbatten-Windsor and Mandelson.
At a media briefing, the director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, said the police had not yet asked for formal advice from the Crown Prosecution Service but prosecutors were standing by.
“We are in close contact with both the Met and Thames Valley Police, but we haven’t been asked for formal advice yet,” said Parkinson at the Ministry of Justice.