Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you so much for tuning in wherever you are in Britain, the world, anywhere, really.

And this is the podcast where we delve deep and contextualize.

First of all, an apology for everyone in the cooperative about the podcast earlier in the week,

which I think this is the first time it's actually happened to me,

where I recorded the podcast, partly about the Mandelson affair, and also about the wider lessons

of this fascinating by-election campaign being fought out this month.

When within about an hour of recording, the Epstein emails surfaced that exposed, to my mind,

the biggest political scandal of modern times. And modern times is a bit vague. I would say

post-war. It's been compared to the Profumo affair. And there are some echoes that scandal in

1963 kind of symbolizing the dying phase of a long period of conservative rule.

It involved issues to do with security, an affair with a model.

But Profumo was not as symbolically as bigger figure as Mandelson has been for many, many decades, a sort of

emblem of the new Labour era, and then brought back into great prominence in the Kirstama era.

And the scale of it continues to take the breath away.

The level of email exchanges in relation to sensitive financial information when Mandelson was

effectively deputy prime minister under Gordon Brown.

You know, there are fascinating sort of psychological questions to ask about what the hell did he think he was doing.

And that will continue to be an area of great fascination.

But of course, it goes much, much deeper than that.

And that's what I'm going to be reflecting on shortly.

And then there's been, you know, just shows that some things trigger all kinds of responses.

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