KEIR STARMER is trying to contain the Mandelson-Epstein scandal to Peter Mandelson. Some Labour MPs hope to contain it by sacrificing Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. Others rightly say Starmer himself must go.

But even that isn’t nearly enough. The horrific revelations in the Epstein files tell us a lot about the world we live in — one in which the super-rich can commit terrible crimes against women and girls with impunity; one in which politicians dance to the tune of plutocrats.

Mandelson is not accused of involvement in Epstein’s sexual abuse networks, though his indifference to them — demonstrated by his emails expressing sympathy with the convicted paedophile and his staying at his New York residence after his conviction — understandably provokes outrage.

The police investigation focuses instead on his provision of sensitive government information — such as planned sales of British state assets — to Epstein, a financier with extensive Wall Street connections well able to profit from it.

Mandelson was also advising bankers on how to bully the British government into changing policy: so he was working for the banks, not his employer (the public).

The model — using networking in finance, business and politics to enrich yourself — is not only now normalised, with politicians routinely reaping the rewards for their pro-business policies through lucrative directorships and consulting gigs. It is shaking off the formal trappings of democracy and asserting itself, openly, as how politics is done.

It is the daily practice of the sleazy egotistical gangster who heads the world’s most powerful country and to whose whims, tantrums and crimes the whole world is now subjected.

The Mandelson scandal is about Starmer and McSweeney and Labour, but it is also about Donald Trump.

The US president who orders the illegal seizure of a Venezuelan tanker carrying oil to Cuba and says casually when asked what happens to the oil, “I guess we’ll keep it.” Who follows up his mob-style kidnap of the Venezuelan president with a round table of oil execs to decide how to divide the spoils.

Whose so-called peace initiatives, from Congo to Ukraine, are protection rackets in which Washington hints at possible security in return for signing over your natural resources.

Whose special envoy is property developer Steve Witkoff and whose special adviser — playing a key role in discussions on the future of Gaza and holding a seat on the so-called Board of Peace that Trump hopes will usurp functions of the United Nations — is another property developer, his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

US governments have always acted, often illegally and violently, to further the interests of the US capitalist class.

But no US government has blurred the lines between state policy and personal enrichment of the president and his cronies as this one has.

Trump wants the US to “move on” from the Epstein files. No wonder: he features in them heavily. But if we don’t want to be ruled by well-connected sociopaths who see ordinary people and entire countries as their playthings, we have to move on from our “special relationship” with Trump.

Even after the outrageous assault on Venezuela, and the threats to annex Nato member-state territory in Greenland and Canada, Britain assisted an illegal US seizure of a Russian-flagged tanker in the Atlantic and Starmer has offered support for an equally illegal prospective assault against Iran.

This weekend’s Adelante! conference will debate the extraordinary threat Trump poses to the whole of Latin America and to global peace and justice.

Don’t let the powers that be box off the Mandelson scandal. Down with the plutocrats and the sleaze. End the culture of impunity that says some people and some states are above the law.

Force every politician to face it: until we break with Trump, we are complicit in unspeakable crimes. And people have had enough.