THIS February Peter Mandelson’s lobbying company Global Counsel became so toxic its top clients abandoned it, forcing the firm to collapse.

But last year top government officials were very keen to spend time with the firm, according to official “transparency releases.” Global Counsel acted as a key gatekeeper between government and corporations.

Mandelson founded Global Counsel in 2010 with his assistant Ben Wegg-Prosser, to cash in on his political contacts. Global Counsel said it would — for a big fee — help corporations “see opportunities in politics, regulation and public policy.”  

Mandelson’s association with US financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein finally collapsed Global Counsel. Especially when it was revealed Wegg-Prosser had, like Mandelson, sought Epstein’s advice in how to run the company.

Data released this March in government “transparency releases,” covering the end of 2025, shows top civil servants were late to spot this scandal.

Officials working for Business Secretary Peter Kyle were especially comfortable with Global Counsel. Last October Gareth Davies, then permanent secretary at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) had dinner and a meeting with Global Counsel “to discuss industrial strategy.”  

Caleb Deeks, DBT director general for “competition, markets and regulatory reform” also met Global Counsel “to discuss regulation” and Amanda Brooks, DBT director general for trade negotiations met Global Counsel to “discuss the future of trade policy.”

Gwyneth Nurse, director general for financial services in the Treasury also had an October dinner with Global Counsel. Nurse enjoyed a Global Counsel breakfast last July.

Most of these transparency records are not very transparent. They list Global Counsel meetings without revealing which current or prospective clients they brought with them.

Documents I obtained via freedom of information about previous DBT meals with Global Counsel give a flavour of these events: in June 2025 DBT’s Gareth Davies went to a Global Counsel dinner and breakfast. The dinner was held in the private dining room of luxury Mayfair hotel, The Twenty Two.

Global Counsel brought along executives from 11 corporations, including JP Morgan, “crypto investment” tech firm Blockchain, private equity companies CVC and Bridgepoint, Berkeley Homes and Shell.

The notes say Davies was going to “set out a coherent government offer to business” to “make government overall easier” for companies “to navigate and partner with.”

The breakfast was held at Global Counsel’s offices, with executives from 16 firms including JP Morgan, drugs giant GSK and Shell.

The notes show Davies wanted to discuss subjects including NHS drug pricing and North Sea oil drilling permits. It seems the DBT was outsourcing its business consultation to Global Counsel, so it wouldn’t have to go through the bother of selecting which firms to meet and could have meetings in upmarket locations for free.

However, this also made Global Counsel gatekeepers, giving it a lucrative cash-for-access business.

Global Counsel has exploded in scandal, but the DBT and other departments look set to simply allow other lobbying firms to take its place.

Labour cannot claim to be ‘anti-racist’ while echoing Reform on migration

LABOUR is promoting itself as an “anti-racist” party, arguing this is one of its reasons to reject both Reform and the Greens.

But it is doing this at the same time as its leader makes speeches with nods and winks to racism.

More importantly, Labour have a specific, dangerous, Reform-apeing racist policy. They have convinced themselves that they represent an idealised version of their party, which seems to leave them confused and angry about why voters are rejecting the real, actual Labour Party.

In a particularly confused and angry column for The House magazine — the in-house journal of the House of Commons — Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi launched into a self-pitying criticism of Hannah Spencer, the new Green MP.

Spencer noted in passing that it was bad that MPs have so many bars in their workplace and vote after drinking, a minor observation that has enraged many Westminster-Bubble-Dwellers.

Key to Antoniazzi’s argument was that Spencer was being “populist” and making MPs a “scapegoat” over their drinking habits. It was — rightly — a widely ridiculed article. One sentence that stood out for me was Antoniazzi’s claim that Labour rejects this scapegoating, while “For Reform UK, the scapegoat is immigrants. For the Greens, it’s the so-called ‘Establishment’.”

Many noted that it was weird to equate Reform attacking migrants with the Greens being against the “Establishment.”

But it was equally striking to me that a Labour MP thinks that only Reform scapegoats immigrants. Labour’s Prime Minister gave a speech about the dangers of migrants, which had Enoch-Powell-y phrase that migrants would make us into an “island of strangers.”

Starmer also claimed migrants caused “incalculable” damage to the economy and public services.

This wasn’t just rhetoric. Starmer’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has a nasty plan to make migrants working in Britain wait 15 years — three times the current length — before they can “earn” indefinite leave to remain.

This will create a big pool of migrant workers with fewer legal rights, dependent on their employers for their right to live here. It discriminates against migrants , mostly from racial minorities. By creating a bigger group of workers with second-class rights, they will put downward pressure on all workers’ conditions.  

Labour can’t convincingly proceed like this and claim to be an “anti-racist” party that doesn’t scapegoat immigrants. So it is going to make the claim unconvincingly instead.

Communities Secretary Steve Reed raised the temperature before the local elections by saying people shouldn’t vote Green because “I don’t think racists should be running councils.”

The inflammatory claim was made by his — often tenuous and exaggerated — claims that Green candidates made racist anti-Jewish comments. It was particularly striking from Reed as in 2020 he had to apologise after calling a wealthy Jewish Conservative donor a “puppet master,” in what sounded like his own antisemitic smear.

But Reed is making the broader claim on the basis that Labour is, as the party website claims, an “an anti-racist party.”

The problem is they can’t do this convincingly as well as having Starmer’s Reform-y speeches and Mahmood’s discriminatory policy. As the election results showed, voters are not convinced.