The first Mandelson scandal

When Peter Mandelson bought a house in the street where I grew up, I suspected something didn’t add up. Pity then that my editor killed the story.

I’ve never met Peter Mandelson but as one of the first journalists to ask questions about his financial affairs it comes as no surprise to me that Labour’s “Prince of Darkness” has finally had his comeuppance. As I discovered when he moved to the street where I grew up, Mandelson has a long history of lying about his relationships with the rich and powerful. The only question is why it took the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files for him to be found out?

The answer in one word: deference.

I first became suspicious of Mandelson in October 1996 when I learnt he’d bought a four-storey house in Northumberland Place in Bayswater, west London. In 1961 when my parents moved to Northumberland Place, their house came with a sitting tenant and cost them just £6,000. But following financial deregulation in the 1980s and the “Big Bang”, house prices in Bayswater and nearby streets in Notting Hill had soared and properties in Northumberland Place were changing hands for in excess of £450,000.

How was it then, I wondered, that Mandelson, then a backbench MP earning just over £40,000 a year, could afford to live there? At the time, average mortgage rates were 7.58% and the most a bank or building society would lend was three times a person’s salary. In Mandelson’s case, I calculated, the maximum loan he could afford was £120,000.[1] The question was, how had he bridged the difference?

In fact, as I later discovered when I checked the sales details in the land registry, Mandelson had paid £475,000 for his house at No. 9 Northumberland Place. So, assuming he’d covered the rest with a personal mortgage, that left him with a shortfall of £355,000.

Peter Mandelson’s former home in Northumberland Place.

At the time, I was working as a feature writer on the Evening Standard, so, smelling a story, I began digging. I wasn’t alone. Unbeknownst to Mandelson, five doors down from him in Northumberland Place lived another journalist, Phillip Knightley. A member of the Sunday Times investigation team that broke the thalidomide scandal and a former reporter of the year, Knightley had been helpful to me when I was looking to break into journalism, so it was natural I should ask his advice.

“Follow the money,” he suggested. So I did.