The latest release of millions of documents connected to Jeffrey Epstein has landed not with a single explosive revelation, but with a slow, sickening accumulation of details. Like financial collapse or institutional scandal, it followed a familiar pattern: first a trickle, then a flood. When the US Department of Justice released roughly three million files in one sudden disclosure, it became impossible to ignore how many public figures – particularly in Britain – had brushed uncomfortably close to a convicted sex offender while insisting they barely knew him at all.
That refrain has become almost automatic since Epstein’s arrest and death in 2019: I hardly knew him. In theory, this is plausible. Wealthy financiers collect acquaintances the way others collect business cards. Transactions can be impersonal; relationships transactional. But plausibility starts to collapse under the weight of repetition. How many lunches can one have with someone they “barely know”? How many emails, visits, flights, or financial exchanges still count as coincidence?
The British dimension of the Epstein files is especially revealing – not because it exposes dramatic crimes, but because it exposes something arguably more corrosive: how cheaply access, influence, and discretion appear to have been bought. The sums involved are not enormous by elite standards. That, in many ways, is the most damning detail of all.
Consider Peter Mandelson, one of the most seasoned political operators of his generation. His appearance in the Epstein files has been accompanied by a remarkable fog of forgetfulness. He cannot recall when or why a photograph was taken of him standing in little more than underwear beside a woman whose face has been redacted. He has no memory of payments totaling £55,000 from Epstein in the early 2000s. Nor does he have much to add about an email suggesting that a £10,000 transfer to his future husband should be structured as a loan rather than a gift.
Mandelson has said that, like “everyone else”, he only learned the truth about Epstein after his death. This claim does not withstand even casual scrutiny. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. This was not hidden knowledge, nor was it obscure. Many people knew. To say otherwise is not just implausible – it is insulting to the public’s intelligence.
Of course, appearing in the Epstein files is not evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That distinction matters, and it must be stated clearly. But it is also true that ethical judgment does not begin and end with criminal law. Something can be legal and still profoundly wrong. Something can be uncharged and still reek.
In the UK public sector, ordinary employees are bound by strict rules designed to prevent even the appearance of corruption. A nurse cannot accept more than a token gift from a patient. A civil servant must declare hospitality. These rules exist because trust is fragile, and public confidence erodes quickly when power and private benefit blur together.
So how does it not raise alarm bells when a sitting business secretary turns to a convicted American criminal for a loan – particularly one he could easily have obtained from a bank? Why is this treated as an unfortunate misunderstanding rather than a serious ethical failure?
The same question applies elsewhere in the files. A photograph of Prince Andrew in a compromising pose with a much younger woman may not prove a crime, but it certainly undermines the idea that nothing improper was going on. Emails from Sarah Ferguson asking Epstein for £20,000 to avoid financial embarrassment carry their own kind of ugliness – not criminal, but revealing. The tone is familiar: casual desperation mixed with entitlement, cloaked in social ease. “Any brainwaves?” is not the language of coercion; it is the language of comfort.
None of these sums would have mattered to Epstein. At the time of his death, he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Twenty thousand pounds here, fifty thousand there – these were trivial expenses. But that is precisely the point. If corruption has a price, it appears to be startlingly low.
Perhaps Epstein was generous by nature. Perhaps he enjoyed being helpful. Or perhaps, like many wealthy operators, he understood that small financial favors can create a sense of obligation far out of proportion to their value. A loan, a gift, a flight, an introduction – each one quietly binds people together, creating a network of discretion and mutual silence.
When reputations are later at risk, those relationships suddenly matter.
What emerges from the Epstein files is not proof of a grand conspiracy, but a portrait of a culture in which judgment collapses around wealth. A culture where warning signs are ignored because proximity to money dulls moral reflexes. A culture where powerful people convince themselves that rules exist for others.
Everyone named insists there was “no wrongdoing”. Legally, that may be correct. Ethically, it misses the point. The real question is not which laws were broken, but why so many intelligent, experienced figures failed to ask themselves a simpler one: Why am I doing business with this man at all? The tragedy is not just Epstein’s crimes, but the ease with which he embedded himself among elites who should have known better. The price of access was low. The cost to public trust is immeasurable.
Comments