Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.

My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the Eye studio with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Heslop.

We are here on quite a fast-moving news day.

So this is just to say that at the time of recording,

Kier Starrmer's Prime Minister and Peter Mandelson hasn't been brought back in again for another job.

I've come up with a new principle of political life.

You know the thing of the Peter principle where everyone is employed one degree more than they should be.

This is the Peter Mandelson principle where you come back one time after you really should be.

One time too many.

One time too many, yeah.

I would say three is three times too many.

I suppose we're going to start off with how this whole thing unfolded in the first place.

Were there any signs possibly that making Peter Mandelson ambassador to the USA was a bad decision? Yes, the two previous resignations for basically exactly the same sort of thing, which is having slightly suspicious relationships with wealthy people. It's how much due diligence you actually need to do? Because you can pretty much guarantee that if you give Peter Mandleton a job, he's going to be in with some dodgy very, very rich person. He's not going to declare that to the people he should have been.

He's going to open up some sort of back channel to do some kind of dodgy favour for them.

And he's going to have to resign pretty quickly and make everyone look stupid. I mean, it's not hard to work out, is it? I mean, I'm not saying that I was underwhelmed by the scandal,

but there has been a lot of that this is the greatest scandal since the perfumer affair, it's the scandal of the century, whatever.

And I kept running into my, but this is what Peter Mandelson does kind of filter. And I also wonder whether or not for people who aren't so tuned into the Westminster bubble and the soap opera aspect of it, the way that it's affected now, Kiers Summer's now former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, this was just a kind of like more sort of snouts in the trough kind of. I put it on a par with maybe MP's expenses perhaps as the most similar scandal of the kind, which is I think it will have validated a lot of people's prejudice about the kind of thing that they thought politicians were all up to anyway. I know there's an element of it which is very much scorpion stings frog shock but there is also an element where

we were promised all sorts of boring process and we were promised a politics that treads lightly

on everyone's lives and we don't appear to have that i still cannot believe anybody's surprise

i've made a point about the the cover about um beatrice and eugenie being sold off to Epstein, which we made a long time ago.

But when he went on that yacht with Osbourne and Deripaska, Private, I ran a cover and we put in as many puns as we could at the time.

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