By CLAIRE ELLICOTT

Published: 18:44 EDT, 7 April 2026 | Updated: 21:22 EDT, 7 April 2026

Labour should lift its ban on drilling in the North Sea immediately to stop households being hammered by the cost of the Iran crisis, voters have said.

The findings – that Energy Secretary Ed Miliband should ditch Net Zero dogma and release the £165billion worth of oil and gas beneath British waters – come amid a growing Cabinet split on the issue and mounting pressure on Chancellor Rachel Reeves to scrap planned petrol tax hikes in the autumn.

Since Iran began its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz following US and Israeli attacks, global energy prices have soared, with the cost of a litre of diesel in the UK heading towards the £2 mark.

Research conducted by former Conservative deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft has found that half of all voters think Mr Miliband should ‘drill, baby, drill’ – in the words of Donald Trump, who was elected in the US on a promise to ramp up gas and oil production.

The poll, shared with The Mail on Sunday, also shows an unprecedented three-way split between the Tories, Reform and the Greens, who are all on 21 per cent, with Labour trailing in fourth place on 17 per cent.

It is the first time in nearly a year that Reform UK has not led in a survey and will add to mounting anxiety within the party over Nigel Farage’s apparent loss of momentum ahead of next month’s local elections.

With no end in sight to the Iran war:

• The desperate hunt for an American airman downed in Iran intensified on Saturday night as US special forces raced against armed nomads to find the missing crewman in the south of the country;

• President Trump issued a blistering warning to Iran to re-open the Strait of Hormuz, warning on social media: ‘Time is running out – 48 hours before all hell will reign [sic] down on them. Glory be to God!’

• An elite team of Royal Navy divers are on standby to deploy to the Strait of Hormuz to help defuse Iranian sea mines blocking shipping lanes;

• Former RAF pilot John Peters – who was shot down and captured in Iraq in 1991 – warned the downed airman would be involved in a desperate bid to evade capture.

A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz and its closure has put intense pressure on the global economy.

Britain’s North Sea oil reserves were central to Margaret Thatcher’s administration in the 1980s, with the £70billion in revenues helping to fund industrial restructuring and tax cuts.

Mr Miliband has stuck to his Net Zero-driven opposition to new fossil fuel extraction, insisting that approving new drilling licences would not lower bills for UK consumers.

Last week, he said that ‘people who say new exploration licences will somehow create huge amounts of energy for us’ were ‘just wrong’.

Ms Reeves, by contrast, has said she is ‘very happy’ to back exploration at the Rosebank oilfield and Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.

The Tories and Reform have called for the Energy Secretary to reverse his ‘ideological’ opposition to accessing the three billion barrels of oil and gas, which are worth about £165billion, with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch describing the failure as ‘economic insanity’. 

On Saturday night, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice told this newspaper: ‘This poll proves that the British people have far more common sense than the political class. 

‘We’ve got hundreds of billions of pounds worth of energy treasure sitting under our feet.

‘It’s our patriotic duty to maximise British gas production, create jobs, boost growth, and achieve true energy independence.

‘Labour and the Tories have failed on this for years. Reform will lift the restrictions on day one, get drilling and deliver lower bills for everyone.’

That view has been echoed by President Trump, who has described the North Sea as a ‘treasure chest’ for the UK and urged Sir Keir Starmer to take advantage of it.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, the SNP, Tony Blair’s think tank and the Labour-supporting GMB Union have also expressed their support.

The average price of a litre of diesel at UK forecourts is up 30 per cent since the start of the war to 185.2p and could breach £2 within weeks, experts have warned.

Meanwhile, petrol prices have risen 16 per cent to an average of 154.5p per litre over the same period.

Ms Reeves, who is raking in more than £100million in extra VAT receipts each month, is planning to end the current 5p a litre fuel duty relief in September, a move which will add, on average, another £3 to the cost of filling a tank.

Governments around the world have been lowering fuel taxes to ease the burden on households from soaring petrol and diesel prices.

Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, has already halved fuel duty.

Writing in this week’s Mail on Sunday, Lord Ashcroft says: ‘Having seen how precarious our supplies from the Middle East can be, more think the Government should end its absurd ban on new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea than keep it.

‘For worried families, household bills and security of supply tend to win out over Net Zero targets.’

By NOOR QURASHI, NEWS REPORTER

Published: 09:58 EDT, 1 April 2026 | Updated: 12:58 EDT, 1 April 2026

MPs and benefit claimants are to receive bumper payments this week to help cushion them from the cost-of-living crisis.

Rachel Reeves last week ruled out blanket measures to help families cope with the energy emergency triggered by the war in Iran.

But MPs are now set to receive a £3,300 ‘cost of living’ adjustment as part of a 5 per cent pay rise.

The payment will apply to ministers as well as backbenchers, meaning it will be received by senior figures including Sir Keir Starmer and the Chancellor.

Unelected members of the House of Lords will also benefit from the hike, taking their tax-free attendance allowance to £390 a day.

Meanwhile, millions of benefit claimants will see their handouts rise by 6.2 per cent – double the rate of inflation.

And next week thousands of jobless families will receive windfalls worth thousands each when Labour scraps the two-child benefit cap. 

William Yarwood, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, warned that Britain risks becoming a ‘two-tier society’ in which ordinary workers have to shoulder an increasingly unsustainable burden to protect the lifestyles of others.

‘Taxpayers are exhausted from having to repeatedly broaden their shoulders as ministers demand ever more from fewer and fewer people,’ he said.

‘Britain is rapidly becoming a two-tier society, with politicians and benefit claimants protected from economic struggles while a shrinking class of working productive taxpayers shoulder an increasing burden.’

He added: ‘Benefits should be frozen, not increased, given the economic difficulties. And MPs’ pay should be linked to GDP per capita to ensure that politicians’ living standards track the broader population’s.’

Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe, who donates his salary to local charities, said his Great Yarmouth constituents would be the ‘only taxpayers in the country who will benefit from this MP pay hike’.

He added: ‘I actually wouldn’t mind paying MPs more if they delivered the goods – sadly, we all know that is not the case. The system is entirely broken – designed to protect the cheats, the indolent and the fraudsters. That’s just the MPs.

‘Cut tax, cut the size of the state, cut waste. Brutally. That is the only way to actually get inflation down and tackle the cost of living.’

The 5 per cent pay rise for MPs is far in excess of the current 3 per cent inflation rate. It is also well above the 3.3 per cent offered to nurses.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority signed off the increase to £98,599 earlier this month, claiming that the job is getting more ‘complex’ with more ‘intimidation’.

The quango also signalled that salaries for politicians will continue to rise fast, to reach £110,000 by 2029. The decision contributes to a growing divide in pay.

Official figures this month revealed that while average pay in the public sector rose by 5.9 per cent in the three months to January, the figure for the private sector was just 3.3 per cent.

The main rate of Universal Credit, Britain’s biggest benefit, will rise by almost twice that figure, with 6.5million claimants enjoying a 6.2 per cent increase.

The £1.9billion cost is due to be funded by curbs on the ‘health element’ of the benefit.

But the Tories criticised the decision to use the savings from this to fund higher welfare payments elsewhere.

Next week, Labour will abolish the two-child benefit cap at a cost of £3.5billion a year. The cap limited means-tested benefits such as Universal Credit and child tax credit payments to the first two children, costing families a typical £3,455 in lost benefits for each additional child.

Critics of the cap claim it has worsened child poverty, including among low-paid workers with big families. But analysis of official figures shows ditching it will hand thousands of pounds a year in extra benefits to almost 200,000 large families in which no one goes out to work.

Figures suggest the move could result in the largest affected families qualifying for more than £10,000 a year in additional benefits.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson yesterday said that ending the ‘awful’ cap would help with the cost of living.

She told Sky News: ‘There are big cost of living pressures we know that families are facing. And that’s why we are taking action.’

She said measures coming in from this month, alongside the lifting of the cap, included help on energy bills, expanding breakfast clubs and expanding childcare, in order to ‘back the British people’.

Ms Phillipson said the minimum wage is also being increased to help the low paid. And the new state pension will rise by 4.8 per cent next week as a result of the triple lock introduced by the last government.

The Royal Navy has been forced to borrow a German frigate after ‘running out of ships’ – as Donald Trump mocked Britain’s aircraft carriers as ‘toys’.

The destroyer HMS Dragon had been due to lead a Nato mission in the North Atlantic before it was redeployed to Cyprus earlier this month in the wake of the Iran conflict.

The Navy will now lead the Nato deployment using the German frigate FGS Sachsen.

The move came as the US President yesterday took another swipe at Britain’s military, saying UK aircraft carriers ‘aren’t the best’, adding: ‘They’re toys compared to what we have.’

Last night, former top brass branded the Government a ‘bloody disgrace’ while a World War Two Royal Marine veteran raged: ‘Winston Churchill would have sacked the lot of them.’

The criticism comes just weeks after the UK was bailed out by France, Greece and Italy when an Iranian drone hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and not a single British ship was in position to defend it.

It took nearly a month for HMS Dragon to reach the Mediterranean island, igniting calls from Cypriots to remove British bases from their country. 

Now the farce has deepened with the deployment exposing how short the UK’s defensive capabilities are.

As experts called on Labour to get a grip, Defence Secretary John Healey said he was ‘not happy with the situation’ as it ‘takes six years to build a warship’.

Yet despite repeated promises to boost defence spending, it also emerged yesterday that Nato has revised down UK defence spending in its annual report.

General Secretary Mark Rutte published figures that show the UK spent 2.31 per cent of GDP on defence last year, down from a predicted 2.4 per cent.

The report also revised down Britain’s spend for 2024 from an estimated 2.33 per cent of GDP to a final figure of 2.28 per cent.

UK military sources insist there has been no reduction and the drop is caused by changes to GDP, with other nations experiencing similar revisions.

But with anger mounting, former Nato commander General Sir Richard Shirreff told the Daily Mail the latest fiasco with FGS Sachsen ‘sends a bloody awful message’. 

He said: ‘It’s deeply embarrassing and it undermines the sense of what we should be doing as a nation. The Government needs to make sacrifices. We can’t go on ploughing money willy-nilly into welfare. 

‘Labour backbenchers have got to put up and shut up – and Keir Starmer needs to get a grip of his party.’

Royal Marine veteran Doug Cheshire, 102, who served on two battleships and an aircraft carrier in the Second World War, told the Daily Mail: ‘I think it’s a damn disgrace. They ought to be hauled over the coals for it. If Churchill was alive he would sack every one of them. He would be up in the air about the state of the Navy.

‘I’m angry. I’m very upset. After what we went through, for them to get us into this parlous state, to borrow from the Germans to do a job which we should be able to do – they need pinning against the wall for this.’

The German Embassy revealed this week that its frigate will ‘take over from HMS Dragon’ dressing it up as ‘an expression of the close Germany-British relationship’.

British sailors will use the ship to ‘fulfil its leadership role’, the Ministry of Defence confirmed. 

It insisted that it is not uncommon for a Nato group to be commanded from an allied warship and led by Royal Navy battle staff.

But Tory MP and former Army officer Ben Obese-Jecty said it demonstrates the UK has ‘seemingly run out of ships’ and ‘Britannia no longer rules the waves’.

Former First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord West, told the Daily Mail our Nato allies ‘are noticing that we are not the power we once were’.

He said: ‘The Royal Navy was the second most powerful navy in Nato and the most powerful European navy. 

‘You can’t really say that any more. Our American allies already are looking at us and saying, ‘Oh dear, this isn’t the British we’re used to’.’

The Defence Secretary was wheeled onto the airwaves yesterday to defend the latest fiasco. 

Mr Healey told LBC’s Nick Ferrari: ‘The Germans have stepped in to supply their warship… that’s a sign of the strength of the Nato alliance.

‘But I’m not happy with the situation we have with British warships and that’s because it takes six years to build a warship.’ 

But Mr Healey stumbled over his figures when asked how many frigates are at his disposal, wrongly stating: ‘We have 17 frigates and destroyers. It’s down from 23 at the end of the last Labour government.’

In fact, that figure is 13.

An MoD spokesman said: ‘The UK is one of the top defence spenders of all Nato nations and, as these figures show, our spending has increased by almost £9billion since 2023 – a significant real terms increase.

‘We are a leader in the alliance, committing our nuclear deterrent in full to Nato and offering almost all our Armed Forces to Nato on land, in the air and at sea. 

‘We are delivering the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War and investing £270billion in defence across this Parliament alone.’

It’s just before 10.30pm on Monday October 20 and one of the Metropolitan Police’s busy 999 call centres receives an urgent call. On the end of the line is a 48-year-old man, with a soft Irish accent, who wishes to report an emergency.

‘Oh, hello,’ he says. ‘Someone just robbed my phone.’

The caller explains that his assailant, a ‘black guy’ in his ‘late teens’ of slim build and average height, had brazenly ‘come on to the pavement to grab my phone and cycled off on a bike’.

Although he’d given chase, it had been in vain: the street criminal travelled ‘a few blocks’ north before turning left into a park and disappearing.

There follows a short conversation in which the phone operator apologises that no one can be deployed to the crime scene, since ‘we are having extreme demand on police officers’.   

They instead offer to take a crime report over the telephone. Details are duly shared, and a couple of minutes later, the victim is issued with a ‘crime reference number,’ and wished goodnight.

So ends what, in Sadiq Khan’s London, is a depressingly common series of events. Some 117,000 phones are pinched in the capital each year, with around 80,000 taken via robberies.

Many, including the one in this incident, are snatched from the hand of an unwitting pedestrian who happens to be texting while walking along a pavement after dark.

Yet in this case, the victim is no ordinary pedestrian. And today, some five months later, his phone (or more particularly its contents) lies at the epicentre of an explosive political scandal.

The controversy revolves around a simple fact: the 48-year-old man in question was none other than Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s then chief-of-staff and one of the most powerful men in Britain. 

His stolen iPhone was a work device. Throughout the almost 18 months since his boss had moved into Downing Street, he’d been using it to run the country.

At the time of the 999 call, McSweeney also happened to be heavily embroiled in the fallout from his close friend and mentor Peter Mandelson’s sacking as UK Ambassador to the United States.

In addition to recommending the Labour Peer’s appointment in the first place, he’d played an extraordinarily, and perhaps inappropriately, active role in a subsequent vetting process which had seen Mandelson parachuted into the £161,000-a-year role – leapfrogging several highly-qualified career diplomats in the process.

It was McSweeney, rather than a member of the Number Ten ‘propriety and ethics’ team, who was instructed to interrogate his old chum over various links to Jeffrey Epstein which had been ‘red-flagged’ during a civil service vetting process. 

Unsurprisingly, he’d then given the paedophile’s associate a clean bill of health, prompting Keir Starmer to rubber stamp Mandy’s move to Washington in December 2024.

That had, of course, ended in tears. And following Mandelson’s chaotic departure from Washington which cost the taxpayer £75,000 in compensation, and caused significant damage to the UK’s reputation, McSweeney’s role in the whole thing was coming under severe scrutiny. One might say that vultures were circling.

Most pressing, was an issue flagged in early October, when a group of Labour whips had attended meetings at which they discussed how to respond to an expected ‘humble address motion’ by the Tories on the whole thing.

It was feared that they would seek disclosure of every email and WhatsApp exchange related to Mandelson’s appointment and resignation.

According to the Spectator, those involved had later told colleagues: ‘If the Tories pass a humble address motion, Morgan is f***ed.’

All of which is broadly what came to pass. Following disclosures made via the Epstein Files, the Government has already released one tranche of official documents (they show how McSweeney had dismissed concerns about his powerful friend via a memo claiming, wrongly, that they had ‘all been dispelled’) and is expected to make more papers public shortly after Easter.

This second tranche of documents should, on paper, contain both formal and informal communications between Mandelson and the Downing Street machine.

Particularly juicy would be the large number of WhatsApp messages he’s believed to have exchanged with McSweeney, in which the duo would, given the Prince of Darkness’s extensive track record, be expected to have exchanged insider gossip about everything from policy to reshuffles, to the competence (or otherwise) of the Prime Minister and various cabinet ministers.

They could, in other words, be political dynamite. But for one important fact: thanks to the conveniently timed mobile phone theft of Monday October 20, those messages appear to no longer exist.

To understand why, we must interrogate both the Metropolitan Police’s transcript of the 999 call plus various pieces of guidance, and public statements, about the whole thing that have been issued by both Downing Street and senior ministers over recent days.

At times, they are strangely contradictory. And in the cold light of day, several aspects of the official account don’t entirely seem to add up, prompting Tory frontbencher Alex Burghart to say yesterday that ‘the whole thing stinks of a cover-up’ while Nigel Farage declared: ‘What a convenient theft for McSweeney. Does No 10 think the British public are complete idiots?’

Back to that emergency call, which raises several significant questions. Not least why McSweeney doesn’t bother to tell the police that he happens to be the Prime Minister’s chief-of-staff, which would surely have seen the force divert significant resources to recovering the stolen device. Instead, he said, somewhat vaguely: ‘It’s a government phone.’

Then there is a strange passage during which McSweeney told the call-handler that the incident had occurred in

‘Belgrave Street,’ an address in Tower Hamlets. In fact, it had occurred in Belgrave Road, a busy thoroughfare connecting Pimlico with Belgravia. 

When the call-handler asked whether he’d followed the assailant to Stepney Green Park (which is again in Tower Hamlets) McSweeney replied, wrongly: ‘Yeah. He turned left there.’

As Andrew Neil observed last night, that ‘couldn’t have been true… It’s almost as if McSweeney [was] deliberately misleading the police call handler to sow confusion.’ 

Then there is the small matter of what happened to the iPhone’s automatic tracking function, which should in theory have allowed either the police or Downing Street’s security staff, who might (in the context) be expected to have taken the incident very seriously indeed, to quickly locate the stolen device.

McSweeney to this end tells the operator: ‘About two minutes before I rung you and I chased… I rang my office to get the phone tracked.’ Yet somehow, Number Ten’s finest sleuths appear to have been unable to find it.

What instead seems to have happened is that they decided to both shut off the stolen device and wipe it remotely. 

Somewhat weirdly, Starmer’s office refused to answer questions yesterday about whether they had subsequently contacted the Met to liaise with them over the incident.

There is further confusion over how the police followed up the incident. On Tuesday, Labour sources were briefing that they’d been ‘too busy’ to mount a further investigation. 

But the Met said yesterday that they’d instead made two calls to the victim the very next day, via the personal phone he’d made the 999 call on. They did not get a response.

Conveniently, given the context, there appears to have then been no way for McSweeney or anyone else to access the WhatsApp messages that were sitting on that phone. 

While most people’s devices are backed up to Apple’s ‘cloud’ services, meaning they are automatically downloaded each time they log into a new telephone, security concerns mean that senior government officials aren’t allowed to use that service.

Neither are they meant to run WhatsApp on their laptops or tablets, which might create alternative records of past correspondence.

Instead, Government guidance states they must either forward or screenshot messages on to an official system, and that they are responsible for protecting personal data from ‘accidental loss’.

That McSweeney seems to have failed to follow such protocols seems, at the very least, careless.

Indeed, some have compared his situation to that of Rebekah Vardy’s agent, who prior to the infamous ‘Wagatha Christie’ trial managed to lose a phone containing a number of key messages relating to her feud with Coleen Rooney, which were expected to cause significant damage to the Vardy case, by dropping it into the North Sea during a fishing trip.

McSweeney resigned from Downing Street last month, saying: ‘The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong. He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself… I advised the Prime Minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice.’

As a result, his take on this week’s developments remains unclear.

Former Labour colleagues are meanwhile busy digging themselves into holes. At the weekend, Communities Secretary Steve Reed told LBC radio that the phone had been stolen ‘well in advance of anything happening about Mandelson… Maybe even a year before.’

That was, of course, untrue, prompting SNP leader Stephen Flynn to refer Reed to the PM’s ethics adviser, asking: ‘Why did he lie?’

Health Secretary Wes Streeting was meanwhile handed the poisoned chalice of doing yesterday’s media round. 

‘I can totally understand the cynicism in these sorts of cases,’ he conceded, before insisting that the loss of the Mandelson messages was nonetheless ‘a cock-up rather than a conspiracy’.

Labour hasn’t always been so forgiving when ministers manage to mislay old WhatsApp communications. 

Back in 2023, it emerged that Boris Johnson was unable to access an old phone containing messages he’d exchanged in 2020 and had been asked to provide to the Covid Inquiry.

It led to a furious political row, with Keir Starmer’s then deputy Angela Rayner accusing the Conservatives of ‘a desperate attempt to withhold evidence,’ adding: ‘The public deserve answers, not another cover-up.’

Some might argue that Ms Rayner’s silence over the McSweeney affair reeks of hypocrisy. Others might call it sensible politics. 

But she was right about at least one thing: unless the public starts to get some proper answers, the mystery of the missing iPhone will rumble on.

By ANDREW JEHRING, CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

Published: 20:13 EDT, 22 March 2026 | Updated: 23:33 EDT, 22 March 2026

Jeffrey Epstein illegally supplied Peter Mandelson with drugs while he was a government minister, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Bombshell emails also expose how the paedophile financier arranged for the Labour peer to have cosmetic Botox injections while he visited him in New York.

The astonishing exchanges came while Epstein was under house arrest after his conviction for soliciting sex from a 14-year-old girl. And in the most shocking message, Mandelson tells the sex offender that drugs thought to be Xanax sedatives are ‘all very well but you need someone to use them on…’

Epstein is known to have got his victims – including Virginia Giuffre – hooked on Xanax to make them dependent upon him, and more pliant. It is a controlled drug in both the US and the UK, meaning it is illegal to possess it without prescription. The NHS does not prescribe it due to high risks of addiction.

Yet in one email Mandelson boldly asks Epstein where he will get more ‘triangles’.

Xanax pills come in different shapes depending on their dosage, with the most potent being green and triangular. Last night, Mandelson’s lawyers did not deny that the ‘triangles’ in the messages referred to Xanax.

The tranche of damning emails unearthed in the Epstein Files show that Mandelson was so close to the sex offender that he repeatedly asked for medical advice and medication.

They will heap further pressure on Sir Keir Starmer over his decision to appoint Mandelson as US ambassador, despite his known ties to the paedophile. Last week, it was revealed the Prime Minister was warned in writing that Mandelson continued his ‘particularly close’ friendship with Epstein for years after his sex offence convictions in 2008.

Last night, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘These revelations are jaw-dropping. If Mandelson was being provided with restricted drugs and Botox from Epstein, it shows the depths to which he had become dependent on this evil paedophile. The police should immediately investigate.’

Epstein arranged for Mandelson to get Botox while he was on a taxpayer-funded visit to New York in March 2010. Even though Epstein was under house arrest at the time, Mandelson – who was then Business Secretary and Gordon Brown’s de facto Deputy Prime Minister – saw him twice. Ahead of the trip, Epstein asked Mandelson, ‘do you need me’ on March 3, to which the politician replied: ‘Always need you… have an official dinner on 3rd then fly back. What about the injections??’

In response, Epstein asked him whether Wednesday afternoon would work. The next day, Epstein asked ‘Wed face and neck?’ with Mandelson saying, ‘do you think I should’, to which Epstein replied: ‘Botox first step.’ They went on to arrange times, but it is unclear whether the procedure went ahead. The MoS did find an invoice for ‘Lipokit’, a brand of cosmetic fat transfer injection, dated the same day Mandelson visited Epstein – but this is different from Botox.

Mandelson made an apparent reference to Xanax in an email sent on December 5, 2009, asking ‘One triangle or two??’ and Epstein replied saying ‘one’.

Later that month, Epstein asked Mandelson, ‘feeling better?’, to which the politician replied: ‘How will I get more triangles?!’ And this was not the only drug Mandelson asked Epstein for.

On the day before his New York visit in 2010, he mentioned he was down to his last Niaspan pill – a prescription-only medication that lowers cholesterol and blood fat levels – and asked for more. Epstein confirmed he could get some, replying: ‘Already done with triangles’, to which Mandelson said: ‘yippie’.

In June 2010, Mandelson appears to have asked about getting more Niaspan before adding: ‘Triangles are all very well but you need someone to use them on…’ Niaspan is not known to be a recreational or cosmetic drug, but Epstein was evangelical about its benefits. He told Mandelson to take it ‘every day’ and also to ‘have your doctor give you a prescription… it will change your life’.

In March 2010, Epstein emailed Mandelson saying: ‘After the election, we should change your meds. it causes dry nose and baggy eyes… there are much newer more effective pills with less side-effects.’

Mandelson replied: ‘Haven’t got dry nose! Rash lasted for hour, face, hands and body. So if doing morning press conference had better take after.’

Mandelson also told Epstein he was taking the antidepressant, Dosulepin, after revealing he was having ‘major face rash’.

It is not clear where Mandelson obtained Dosulepin, as NHS guidance says it should not be prescribed for depression because it can be highly toxic and comes with significant cardiac risks.

But it is evident Mandelson trusted Epstein enough to seek his medical advice. As late as February 2011, the politician asked him when to take his medication when crossing time zones.

While it is known that Epstein’s victims were given drugs, today’s revelations are thought to be the first time they have been linked to his friends. It also appears that Epstein gave Mandelson clothes during his New York visit. Days after the trip, the Labour grandee emailed: ‘Wearing new jumper with new shoes and belt. Thanks!’

Mandelson’s lawyers last night refused to comment on any point raised in the MoS’s investigation.

The peer – who remains under investigation on suspicion of misconduct in public office – has previously expressed his regret over his links with Epstein and called their friendship a ‘most terrible mistake’ and ‘misplaced loyalty’.

‘I got a bonus for massaging Andrew and Mandelson…’ 

A former employee of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has told how she was told to massage Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson.

Christine Kenneally spoke out after an extraordinary picture emerged of Andrew and Mandelson, both wearing bathrobes, sitting with Epstein during the trip to Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Ms Kenneally said she was flown to the island in 1999 by Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

Describing Andrew and Mandelson as ‘perfect gentlemen’, she said nothing inappropriate happened. She was paid for the trip and given a bonus for the ‘important people’ she massaged.

Meanwhile, a leaked email shows how Andrew and his business associate Jonathan Rowland joked about ‘getting a massage’ amid the furore that followed an MoS interview in February 2011 with Virginia Giuffre, the Epstein trafficking victim and masseuse pictured with the former Prince.

Two months later, Mr Rowland told Andrew he was in China with a banker, saying they were ‘considering getting a massage… What do you think?’

Andrew replied: ‘Ha ha. F*** you too!’

By BRENDAN CARLIN

Published: 13:25 EDT, 14 March 2026 | Updated: 14:04 EDT, 14 March 2026