Blair hid Mandelson from us with code name - ex MP

A former MP who was instrumental in Tony Blair's campaign to become Labour Party leader has said Peter Mandelson's involvement at the time was hidden from those who were wary of him from the beginning.

Peter Kilfoyle, who represented Walton in Liverpool from 1991 to 2010, was one of a small team working on Blair's bid to take over the reins of the party after the death of John Smith in 1994.

Kilfoyle said he had told Blair he would only support him if Mandelson, who was kicked out of the party and resigned from the House of Lords this week over his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, was not involved.

But Kilfoyle said he later learned Mandelson had been operating behind the scenes, and that Blair and others had been using the codename "Bobby" for him, apparently so people did not know he was involved.

Kilfoyle, now 79, said he and the late Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam had been the sponsors of Blair's leadership campaign.

He said: "I said I would get involved as long as Mandelson had nothing to do with it. I said that because I didn't trust him and I didn't like him.

"I had been falling out with him ever since we both started in the Labour Party, at roughly the same time.

"I don't think Blair ever said that Mandelson wasn't involved, but the impression was that he wasn't. And he never showed his face at any stage."

Kilfoyle said it was during an event at Church House in London, after Blair's leadership campaign victory, that he first realised Mandelson had played a part.

"During his speech he said he wanted to thank 'Bobby', and everyone was thinking 'Who's Bobby?' and then later we discovered it was Peter Mandelson."

Kilfoyle had suspected that the 'Bobby' nickname was a reference to Bobby Kennedy, the brother of assassinated US president John F Kennedy, and a nod to the way the early days of the Kennedy administration had been framed as a youthful, progressive movement on which New Labour liked to model itself.

"I rang Blair up and I challenged him about it, and he said words to the effect that Mandelson could get to people in the lobby that others couldn't get to."

Mandelson has long been credited with being one of the architects of the New Labour movement. But in the early days of the 1997 government he found himself embroiled in successive scandals, firstly for taking a loan £373,000 interest-free loan from Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson.

He resigned his post as Secretary of State for UK Trade and Industry.

He later found himself having to resign from government again amid allegations he had tried to fast-track passports for Indian businessman Srichand Hinduja.

After leaving the Commons in 2001, he became an EU commissioner in 2004.

He returned to government under Gordon Brown in 2009 as First Secretary of State.

But questions about his relationships with a series of wealthy figures dogged him, and it was his relationship with his "friend" Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire paedophile, that led to him being sacked as the UK's ambassador to the US last year.

Kilfoyle said Mandelson's connections with the rich and powerful "raised red flags", adding: "Anyone with half a brain should have questioned how he was able to live that kind of lifestyle.

"He once said he was 'intensely relaxed about the filthy rich'. All these things had been flagged up and they still gave him jobs."

Kilfoyle's successors as Merseyside MPs have been vocal in recent days about the Mandelson affair, with Wavertree MP Paula Barker saying she believed Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's judgement had been "questionable" over Mandelson.

Starmer said this week he had known about Mandelson's friendship with Epstein, but that "none of us knew the depths and the darkness of that relationship".

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