The New Statesman.

Hello, I'm Tom McTague, and this is the Daily Politics from The New Statesman.

Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Jim Picard, the Deputy Political Editor at the Financial Times,

who has been covering the Peter Mandelson-Ebstein story, not just this week, not just this year, but for years.

Jim, thanks so much for coming on.

No problem, Tom.

So we wanted to chat to you, obviously, because you have been working on this Epstein story,

Mandelson story, for years now. And we wanted to get your perspective

on what it's been like covering this story for so long and what it's been like in this past week

or two when so much of what you seem to know before everybody else has been confirmed.

So do you want to sort of take us back to when you first started working on this?

Yeah. I mean, I think the backgrounds of this is that others had written about the friendship

between Peter Madelson and Jeff Bateson and Jeffrey Epstein. I think The Daily Mail

did a few stories back in the day.

I think Cappy Newman at Channel 4 did a big hit maybe five years ago.

And there's all that stuff like the photos of them buying belts together at some luxury boutique in the Caribbean.

And the point where the F.T went quite hard on that particular story was 2023.

And we got our hands on an internal J.P. Morgan report. They basically investigated Jess Stalley, who was a former head of wealth

management, I think, head of private banking, at J.P. Morgan, who was very close to Jeffrey

Epstein and in turn close to Mandelson.

So there were all these emails between the three men in this internal report.

And we did a story.

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