Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s editor, said: “It’s nice to see that Private Eye was getting close enough to the truth fifteen years ago to make some really appalling people – and their fine upstanding legal representatives – nervous.”
Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s editor, said: “It’s nice to see that Private Eye was getting close enough to the truth fifteen years ago to make some really appalling people – and their fine upstanding legal representatives – nervous.🧵3/5
“In our experience, it usually does take quite a while for prosecutors, justice departments and governments to sit up and take notice of what Private Eye has been saying all along.”
“In our experience, it usually does take quite a while for prosecutors, justice departments and governments to sit up and take notice of what Private Eye has been saying all along.”🧵4/5
Individuals operating within the network created by the late Jeffrey Epstein hired numerous people who threatened media organisations which were investigating a vast child abuse and financial corruption racket. One such individual was the Belfast Lawyer Paul Tweed, who wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 calling the magazine Private Eye “an absolute rag” :
This is the relevant magazine cover :
Belfast Telegraph Political Correspondent Sam McBride has done a fine job investigating the murky professional relationships between Paul Tweed, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jeffrey Epstein.
The big lesson here is that the British and USA states ignored credible evidence for many years uncovered by investigators. This “tug the forelock” behaviour must cease. A first step in Ireland is to cease all official visits by members of the corrupt British royal family.
The least we can say is this :
Read here here the carefully chosen recent words of Belfast journalist Suzanne Breen, Belfast Telegraph political correspondent and a frequent contributor to BBC NI politics programmes :
“Chris Moore says William McGrath worked for MI5, and it’s even possible that he was planted in the children’s home as part of an intelligence-gathering operation. The journalist makes a compelling case that MI5 — at the very least — knew about what was happening and kept quiet.
Shamefully, there has been no adequate inquiry into Kincora. Some files have been destroyed, while others have been locked away by the British government to 2065 and 2085.
The most marginalised and vulnerable children were raped by powerful men, allegedly including King Charles’ grand uncle.
The building at the centre of the scandal was demolished three years ago, but the cover up of the crimes committed behind its walls continues. It is long past the time that the full truth was told about what happened in the house of horrors.”
No accident waiting to happen can ever have delivered on its promise so spectacularly as Lord Mandelson, with the continuous revelations of his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The decision by the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, to appoint Mandelson as ambassador in Washington DC always appeared a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But no reward could ever have repaid such risk.
There is a grim fascination in seeing a prominent public figure’s reputation incinerated in real time. Mandelson’s entreating emails to a convicted abuser and trafficker of minors were still quite recently sufficient of an embarrassment before he was then photographed urinating in public.
The new normal is to appear on front pages in his underpants. Next will come questions about the meaning of emails that appear to show him betraying the most cardinal principles of public office, for monetary gain, from a criminal.
Mandelson had clearly started 2026 with the intention of rehabilitating himself and re-entering public life: a Sunday morning BBC interview, columns in the Spectator, an interview in the Times. Journalists’ requests for comment were replied to. No longer.
What was striking across these appearances – given Mandelson’s talents – was his maladroitness. Not to have apologised to the victims of trafficking when pressed in that initial high-profile interview, only to realise his error and concede the following day did not bear the hallmark of a master of public relations.
Sometimes a table can tell a whole story. Against a wall in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, an antique console table boasted more than a dozen framed photographs, including some of the world’s most recognisable people. There is a Democratic president and a Republican president, a leftwing intellectual and a rightwing activist firebrand. There are figures from Wall Street, from Silicon Valley and from the British royal family. The pictures even include Mick Jagger, Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul II.
Jeffrey Epstein’s Gallery
Noam Chomsky, Left-Wing Campiist Intellectual, and Jeffrey Epstein
Peter Mandelson, Sacked British Ambassador to the USA, investigated by Brit Cops
Andrew Mountbatter Windsor, Ex-Brit Prince, with a wealthy Saudi Arabia strongman
US far-right activist Steve Bannon with Jeffrey Epstein
While the core of the Epstein saga will always be his web of sexual abusers and the women and girls they preyed on, every new set of messages released by the US justice department reveals the staggering range of his social network and the relationships he was able to sustain. Epstein’s emails read like a self-help group for the 0.01 per cent. How did a college dropout from a working-class family in Brooklyn manage to do it?
Individuals operating within the network created by the late Jeffrey Epstein hired numerous people who threatened media organisations which were investigating a vast child abuse and financial corruption racket. One such individual was the Belfast Lawyer Paul Tweed (see below, a devastating story written by the Belfast Telegraph’s Sam McBride).
Jeffrey Epstein became a convicted criminal in 2008.
Belfast lawyer Paul Tweed and ex-Prince Andrew Mountbatten Windsor
Don’t you dare call Epstein a paedophile:
Inside story of leading NI lawyer’s work to clean up vile billionaire’s image… threatening the media on his behalf
I take this opportunity to recommend this excellent article from Kavita Krishnan which she published in early December. (see below).
Noam Chomsky could afford terrible statements about the systematic mass murders and genocidal wars in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Syria. Even during the Russian mass terror against the Ukrainian people, he raised more understanding of the aggressor than the attacked population.
His support for Epstein reveals the same pattern. The Indian feminist Marxist Kavita Krishnan puts his behaviour into the broader context.
This email from Chomsky to Epstein proves that he wasn’t just giving his friend the benefit of doubt, not knowing the full nature and extent of his crimes. He was actively colluding with Epstein, strategising about how to deal with the revelations about those crimes in the press.
It’s not that Chomsky was incapable of empathy – he was, but he had empathy only for the unfortunate predator, victimised by a journalist who was nuisance enough to put faces and voices to a gaggle of female accusers generating a ‘hysteria’ of solidarity.
What Chomsky calls ‘horrible’ treatment of Epstein by the press, was the November 2018 piece in the Miami Herald, ‘Perversion of Justice’ – Julie Brown’s stellar investigative journalism exposing the secret deal struck a decade ago that betrayed scores of children trafficked and abused by him, who had found the courage to help police build a cast iron case.
This email must go on his tombstone, it must feature in every obituary when he passes, it is not just a stain on his political legacy, it IS integral to his legacy. His collusion with Epstein is a result of the same abstract geopolitical doctrine that passed for his politics, one that allowed him to deny the humanity of victims of horrific mass crimes against humanity – in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, Ukraine, China.
(Edited the post for accuracy, people pointed out he was calling his accusers hysterical, not the girls. He does use hysteria again, to refer to the public response to accusations of abuse of women.)
Organisations linked to former USA Senator George Mitchell are removing the man’s name from their projects :
US-IRELAND ALLIANCE TO REMOVE NAME OF SENATOR GEORGE J. MITCHELL FROM ITS PRESTIGIOUS SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM
February 1, 2026. The board of directors of the US-Ireland Alliance has unanimously agreed that its George J. Michell Scholarship program should no longer bear the former Senator’s name. The decision was made due to new information that has come to light as part of the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein by the Department of Justice on Friday, according to Trina Vargo, founder and president of the US-Ireland Alliance.
A bust of Mitchell on the grounds of Queen’s University Belfast is gone – from February 2 2026.
The bust of George J Mitchell on the grounds of Queen’s University Belfast has been removed. PICTURE: MAL MCCANN
Credible accusations detailing Mitchell’s alleged Epstein links have been on the public record for more than four years – but the former Senator’s Irish establishment supporters took no action.
Here is an extract from a story published on this blog in January 2022.
A British Tory statement about their former colleague Suella Braverman (and recent government minister) stated she had mental health problems. Some trusting souls may believe party leader Kemi Badenoch and her colleagues sincerely regret that low blow. Possibly, if bad publicity becomes a serious difficulty, a very junior staffer will be blamed and sacrificed. But don’t hold your breath.
Let’s remind ourselves of a similar, and famous, Lyndon Baines Johnson dirty trick which allegedly crushed an election opponent in 1950’s Texas.
“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested.
“Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that”. “I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the son of a bitch deny it.”
LBJ went on to greater things and became President of the USA in 1963 after John F Kennedy was assassinated.
Very little political substance divides the Badenoch tories and the Nigel Farage reformites.
A correspondent notes “Suella Braverman is clearly a bloody awful figure but (it is) a low blow for the Tory leadership to comment on her mental health.” “The Conservatives did all we could to look after Suella’s mental health” is all a bit “she looks tired.” Braverman is a careerist racist. That’s more than enough to criticise.”
Mainstream British politics is in deep sewers.
This sludge has dangerous implications for Ireland. As things stand now Reform is on course to win the next British general election in 2029.
Most recent election news from the British state has been very depressing. A labour party government led by Keir Starmer regularly responds to the electoral rise of the far-right Reform outfit led by Nigel Farage by attempting to be more racist and right-wing than the racists themselves.
This political instability is damaging ancient foundations of the British state – Scottish politics in the 21st century has been dominated by the rise of political separatism – and now Cymru/Wales is following that trend.
This will have, and is having, important side-effects in Ireland.
How do we explain an extremely welcome Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) electoral triumph in Caerffili?
Welsh Independence MarchPlaid Cymru PoliciesLindsay Whittle, Plaid Cymru By-Election Winner
Geoff Ryan’s interesting report is below – one of the factors he highlights is
The women of the small Ukrainian community played an important role in combatting the lies of Reform.
A feminist, anarchist, and poet living in Ukraine delivers a personal and political address to the leader of Your Party, inviting reflection on what contemporary anti-fascism and genuine strategies of solidarity with the oppressed might look like.
Galina Rymbu’s poems employ history as a discursive tool to understand the present—stories of revolution, movement in time and space, life, and livelihood emerge. Rymbu seeks a radical feminist and leftist poetics that does not condescend to the oppressed, but rather embraces the complexity of every emotion and political position, and of language itself. She opens her poetry to the violence of propaganda, biopolitical manipulation, ideological pressures, as well as the violence of personal intimacy. Life in Space is Rymbu’s first full-length collection in English translation and includes poems selected from her three books as well as more recent work.
Galina Rymbu – Feminist, Anarchist, and Poet from Russia Living in UkraineGalina Rymbu – Feminist, Anarchist, and Poet from Russia Living in Ukraine
Dear Zarah,
Recently, several journalists and left-wing activists reached out to me asking for a comment on your position regarding the suspension of political and military support for the Ukrainian people. Whilst reflecting on how to respond, I decided to write you a personal letter instead. As a leftist and feminist activist from Russia who has been living in Ukraine for the past eight years, this seemed more appropriate than offering a dry neutral comment.
I am addressing you personally also because I see how people like you — those who appear on the global political stage — become a source of hope for many of the oppressed, whose voices and cries are still being drowned out by the speeches of dictators and the “pragmatic” calculations of capitalists who prefer to continue doing their dirty, bloody business with them.
For many younger generations of leftist activists, your name is associated with a promise of future and progress, as so many are tired of politics being made behind the closed doors of elite “men’s clubs,” to which we will never be invited. I know how important this is for my comrades in the UK, and during my visit to London on the eve of the pandemic, we spoke a lot about it —reading political poetry in squats and arguing in small bars about the future of our planet.
From birth until the age of 27, I lived in Russia. I grew up in Western Siberia, in the workers’ settlement of Chkalovsky in the city of Omsk, in a poor working-class family of mixed Moldovan, Romanian, and Ukrainian descent. We lived below the poverty line; we didn’t even have money to pay for electricity, so our home was often dark and without food. My parents still live in Chkalovsky, in a place that successful Europeans would probably call “the social bottom.” My friends, classmates, and lovers still live there. I am now 35, and I am still poor. I remain connected to my class and to the people who are losing their minds in this “prison of nations.” Since childhood, I have faced multiple forms of discrimination and persecution based on my ethnicity—simply because of my name, surname, and appearance. Later, I lived in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where I studied literature and then turned to research in the “philosophy of war,” seeking to understand the foundations of the idea of transforming an “imperialist war into a civil one” (a development best traced in Lenin’s Clausewitz Notebook). [1]
Tomás Ó Flatharta 