PETER MANDELSON’S latest resignation (this time from Labour rather than top diplomatic or ministerial posts as on the last three occasions) cannot be allowed to spare the party “embarrassment,” as he puts it.

Keir Starmer — belatedly trying and failing to sound tough by saying Mandelson should no longer be a lord, while as usual disclaiming any ability to act — was aware of Mandelson’s longstanding ties to Jeffrey Epstein when he appointed him ambassador to the United States.

Whether or not he knew of the details in every leaked email is moot — it was already a matter of record that Mandelson continued to associate with Epstein after the latter’s conviction on a child sex offence. There are abundant reasons for Starmer himself to be forced from office, but his indifference to this sordid story until it became a political headache is one.

The question forms part of the broader problem alluded to by Blyth & Ashington MP Ian Lavery: that “few individuals have shaped [Labour’s] current direction more” than Mandelson has.

He has played a key role in corrupting the entire party, helping, as Lavery points out, forge a culture that has forced hundreds of thousands of members out, to install the current leadership and, we should not forget, to undermine the previous leadership.

The Mandelson who bragged of doing something “every day” to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and the movement he led is the same man who was intimate with the mastermind of a sex abuse ring of staggering reach.

Mandelson is not accused of involvement in those offences, but his place among the shady network of world-famous business tycoons and political leaders who accepted hospitality, gifts and long-term friendship from the paedophile billionaire is clearly corrupting, and incompatible with high office in any party that aspires to represent working-class people.

The politics and the corruption go hand in hand. The email exchanges showing Mandelson, while a minister in a Labour government, was advising the JP Morgan bank, via Epstein, to threaten that same government over a tax on bankers’ bonuses are of still greater significance than any money he may have received.

Because of the circles he moved in, and the promise of riches they held (further emails show him touting for “discreet” work for JP Morgan because he “[does] not want to live by salary alone,” and also reference Tony Blair’s paid work for the bank within a year of leaving Downing Street) Mandelson acted for Wall Street banks against the policy of a Labour government he was part of. The same interests were at play in his intense relaxation about the “filthy rich,” and his extreme hostility to the socialist left, shared with close ally Morgan McSweeney, who planned Starmer’s rise to power and remains at the heart of government.

There is a risk that amid the vast mess of partly redacted documents that are the Epstein Files, we are distracted from drawing the proper conclusions.

This is not about bad apples. Nor is it about Russian honey traps, as desperately proposed by some on the right: if Russia was carefully compromising all these senior policy-makers for its own ends, why has it never tried to expose any of them and why has the anti-Russia consensus across British politics remained so monolithic?

No, this is a shocking exposé of the moral depravity at the heart of the British and US establishments, of the poisonous influence of the rich over our societies. A scandal that must be brought home to our own ruling class.

Labour MPs who still believe their party can act in the interests of the many, not the few, and the party’s affiliated unions, cannot restrict their response to the fate of Mandelson himself. The entire Blairite project and the current ruling clique are sunk in this swamp. Without a total overhaul, the party could soon be history.