The London Bridge — Mandelson, Global Counsel, and the Transatlantic Influence Trade

2002–2026

Peter Mandelson — fired as UK ambassador to Washington in September 2025 over his Jeffrey Epstein ties — ran Global Counsel, the advisory firm that counted Thiel's Palantir and sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska as clients, lobbied for Qatar without clear disclosure, and helped Palantir reach UK government contracts before collapsing when the Epstein files surfaced.

On 11 September 2025 the British prime minister fired his ambassador to the United States. The ambassador was Peter Mandelson — twice a Labour cabinet minister, a former European trade commissioner, and one of the most connected operators in British public life. The reason was a cache of emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee documenting his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. ^[1][CNN · Wikipedia]

The friendship was not incidental. In Epstein's 2003 birthday book Mandelson called him his "best pal"; in a 2008 email — after Epstein's first conviction — he wrote that he "thought the world of him." ^[2][Wikipedia · Britannica]

Before the ambassadorship, Mandelson's instrument was Global Counsel, the strategic-advisory firm he co-founded after leaving office. Its client list reads like a condensed version of this book: Nestlé, Bank of America, Vodafone — and Peter Thiel's Palantir, alongside the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. [openDemocracy · British Brief]

Global Counsel's reach ran straight into government. The firm was reported to have helped arrange a meeting between Palantir's chief executive and Prime Minister Starmer, after which Palantir won UK public contracts; the Chartered Institute of Public Relations called for full disclosure, warning that the lobbying system was "failing the public." [CIPR]

The opacity was structural. Britain's lobbying regulator opened an investigation into Global Counsel over potentially inaccurate filings after it emerged the firm had lobbied UK ministers for the state-backed Qatar Free Zones Authority. [openDemocracy]

The transatlantic traffic was not only influence; it was hardware. The UK Ministry of Defence awarded a £30 million contract to Anduril UK — the British arm of the defense-technology company in Peter Thiel's Founders Fund portfolio — and in 2025 awarded Palantir an MoD contract that, by this platform's own finding, broke a 2021 public-consultation pledge. [UK Defence Journal · Goblin House finding]

AnalyticalANALYTICAL: The public framing is ordinary statecraft — a seasoned diplomat, a respectable consultancy, a special relationship. The documented reality is a single conduit through which American surveillance-and-defense capital reached British government contracts, through which a foreign state and a sanctioned oligarch reached British ministers without a paper trail, and at the center of which stood a man whose closeness to Jeffrey Epstein was finally enough to end his appointment. When the Epstein files surfaced, Global Counsel went into administration. The bridge, for now, is down. [SOURCE: Democracy for Sale]