Why Isn’t Mandelson in a Remand Cell?

What do you have to do to be remanded in custody these days? It seems to depend on who you are.

Edward Devenney was a British Naval Officer who tried to sell information to the Russians. He was held on remand prior to being sentenced to eight years for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

Robert Norman, a prison officer accused of passing information to a Daily Mirror journalist, was held on remand before being sentenced to 20 months for misconduct in a public office.

In both of these and multiple other cases there was clear evidence of wrongdoing, but there wasn’t much indication that the accused were likely to abscond, commit further offences or interfere with witnesses, the usual tests applied to determine whether a prisoner should be held on remand or bailed.

The degree of seriousness of an offence is another factor determining whether a judge is likely to grant bail or not. Murder, rape, kidnapping and other serious offences against the person will likely lead to a prisoner being denied bail. However, in other cases there is a presumption that bail will be granted.

So, why isn’t Lord Mandelson currently being held on remand? Is there a more serious crime than treason? It was still a capital offence until September 1998, two months after Peter Mandelson’s appointment as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. For other crimes, capital punishment had been abolished in 1965, underlining the uniquely seriousness of treason.

Why hasn’t he been arrested or charged? Plenty of evidence is in the public domain, evidence from an eminently reliable source, namely the US Department of Justice, that Mandelson passed state secrets, obtained by him in his role as a government minister, on to his BFF Jeffrey Epstein.

You’d think it could only help both Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Mark Rowley if the authorities acted with a bit of speed in the Mandelson case and locked him up sharpish. Surely, it would at least show the appearance of the smack of firm action.

Starmer and co should recognise that the public have learned quite a bit about bail and remand in recent years. In the infamous case of Lucy Connolly, we’ve seen how it was used as a tool to coerce Connolly to plead guilty, to avoid the risk of a jury acquitting her.

Likewise, in the Jamie Michaels case, the ex-Royal Marine was initially held on remand for 17 days after being accused of stirring up racial hatred following the Southport murders. It took the jury just 17 minutes to find him not guilty having been presented with a remarkably weak case.

If it’s okay for the police and the courts to use remand as a tool of coercion in these cases, why not with Peter Mandelson – and, come to that, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor too? How much more readily to cooperate might both of them be after a few weeks in Wormwood Scrubs?

By not acting speedily, isn’t the Establishment providing yet another example of two-tier justice? Why should Mandelson be free to swan around in his £8 million London townhouse or at his country retreat? Why should the ex-Prince Andrew be put up in a grace and favour farmhouse on the Sandringham Estate?

To date, Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of ex-Labour MP Robert Maxwell, is the only living person involved in the Epstein scandal to have seen the inside of a prison cell. It’s almost as if all the boys involved in this, on both sides of the pond, are being protected.

Interestingly, I’ve seen it reported in the MSM, though with no evidence to back up the claim, that Lucy Connolly was held on remand to protect her from threats to her life. If this is true, isn’t it just as likely that Mandelson is at risk from attack – though, given Epstein’s grisly end, he might be in more danger inside than out!

There seems to be nothing stopping the authorities from acting and hauling Mandelson in. I suspect the public’s patience will soon start to wear thin as they ask themselves why isn’t a clear case of treason being treated as seriously as an ill-advised X post?