He came to my house once, many years ago.
Back in 1993, I ran a by-election campaign in Hackney for the Labour Party, occasioned by the resignation of a local councillor who was found guilty of fraud and sent to prison. The campaign included typical canvassing activities such as knocking on the doors of local houses and flats, and talking to the residents to try to identify those voters who were likely to support our candidate. We had selected an ambitious young activist, who was well connected in senior Labour circles, and one Sunday morning he turned up at my house, ready to go canvassing, accompanied by the MP for Hartlepool, who was the Labour Party’s former director of communications.
To his credit, notwithstanding his national profile and reputation, this famous visitor spent a couple of productive hours talking to local electors, he completed his canvass returns accurately, and was friendly towards the six or seven others party members who were out working that morning. Our candidate duly won the by-election and served on Hackney Council for five years, before being elected MP for Rhondda in 2001. He has been at Westminster ever since. His canvassing companion had an even more successful political career – as a Cabinet Minister, a European Commissioner, and more recently as Ambassador to the United States of America – at least until this week, when he was arrested and charged with misconduct in public office. It is now more than thirty years since I welcomed Peter Mandleson into my home, to support our modest efforts in what was a minor local political campaign. I have not spoken with him since, and I have moved house three times, but his public disgrace feels a little bit personal, as if some of his taint still lingers on in my life.
Whether he will be charged and found guilty, and whether he will spend time in prison, remains unknown at present. What seems beyond doubt is that his very public current disgrace – far worse than those previous occasions, in 1998 and again in 2001, when he was forced to resign from Government posts because of the perception of his inappropriate behaviour – has been precipitated by his reckless attraction to wealth. Despite himself holding high office and wielding political power, he seems to have craved the company of very rich men, playing the loyal courtier in the luxury resorts and residences where they flaunt their money. In search of an explanation for this puzzling and self-destructive behaviour, last weekend I re-read The Great Gatsby, written a century ago but still today an insightful account of the compulsive attraction of ostentatious wealth.
Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young man who likes to keep an open mind about the intentions and the character of others, and who is both a leading participant and a detached observer in the story. The central character – a man of slender means from North Dakota called James Gatz, who reinvents himself as the mysterious but fabulously rich Jay Gatsby – has returned from the Great War a decorated hero, has made money through some shady – probably illegal – business deals, but remains besotted with a young mid-Western woman he met several year previously. She – Daisy – is now married to another wealthy man, from Chicago, and the novel’s plot turns on whether the enigmatic and charming Gatsby can lure her away from her boorish and unfaithful husband, Tom Buchanan. As the story progresses, set mostly in Long Island mansions and New York hotels, Nick transitions from being an acquaintance of Tom and Daisy – he was at Yale with the former and is a second-cousin of the latter – to becoming Gatsby’s only friend. Shifting Daisy’s loyalties will, it turns out, prove a harder and more deadly challenge.
The novel is beautifully constructed and I enjoyed being swept along, at a good pace, towards the dénouement and its squalid aftermath. In one sense, this is a story about three spoilt and entitled rich people – Jay, Daisy, and Tom – none of whom deserves our sympathy. But, more pertinently, it is also a story about a man – Nick – seduced through his contact with these wealthy neighbours, who finds himself drawn into their lives and their lies, who watches with regret at the destruction they cause, but who, somehow, cannot walk away until it is too late. In the closing pages of the story, Nick observes: They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made … But he has no words of condemnation for those, like himself, who looked on as eager spectators, while innocent lives were literally smashed up. Nick enjoyed his role as the detached observer, but clearly not as much his active participation in the story.
I have no sense of what it was about Jeffrey Epstein that attracted so many men, all of whom should have known better. Was it his lifestyle, his charisma, his apparent ability to live outside the court of public opinion or the reach of the law, his ability to present himself as utterly original and wholly unlike anyone else, his aura of mystery and unorthodoxy? I don’t know because just about everything I hear or read about him strikes me as repulsive, but clearly many otherwise intelligent, successful, and sensible men were seduced by him. Just as Nick Carraway fell for Gatsby, so too Bill and Larry and Andy and Pete and many, many others fell for Jeff. Just like Nick, they all found themselves on Gatsby’s side.
What was it to be on Epstein’s side? It seems clear that it was only ever the money and what that money could buy. But then, Jeff appeared to have a great deal of money and that buys a great deal, including things not normally available in mainstream retail outlets.
But no amount of money buys respect, and no amount of money buys character, and no amount of money buys virtue. When I think about those aspects of human life that I find admirable, which I might seek to cultivate for myself, or that I might wish for my friends and for my child, the list is long and diverse: honesty, reliability, courage, determination, humour, good taste, creativity, intelligence, friendliness, curiosity, generosity, ambition, a strong sense of justice, and above all of these, wisdom and kindness. When I think of these qualities I note that none of them – let me repeat that – none of them require access to great wealth. And there is no reason to think that someone who has access to great wealth would, as a consequence, be more likely to develop any of these virtues.
To put this another way, while I don’t think that being rich would necessarily prevent someone from being a good person or living a good life, I see no reason to think that being rich provides any advantage in the quest to being a good person and living a good life. And when it comes to choosing our friends and acquaintances, it seems obvious that we are better off spending our time with those blessed by virtue rather than those blessed with wealth.
Death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin tell us, are the only certainties in life. Of these two only one can be persistently evaded. Jay Gatsby died in his swimming pool and Jeffrey Epstien died in his prison cell, after which all those many people who had been happy to hang out with them while they were alive – and paying the many lavish bills – slipped away and hoped that no-one had noticed their regular attendance at court. In the century since Scott Fitzgerald wrote his novel, the rise of electronic media has made that slip-sliding away process a great deal more problematic. Lucky for Nick Carraway, Gatsby did not write any emails. Unlucky for Peter Mandleson, Epstein did. And he will now be asked to explain why it was that he chose to spend his time with, and to use his influence to assist, a man who had no virtues but loads of money. My advice would to him would be to issue this short statement: I was stupid. There is and could never be any defence for my behaviour.
In 1936, Ernest Hemmingway published the first version of his famous story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, in which he wrote: The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him. It would be foolish to agree with everything Hemmingway ever said or did, but on this matter he seems to me to be exactly right.
The only difference between the very rich and the rest of us is that – by definition – they have more money. There is nothing more, and nothing of interest, and really nothing of virtue. So, if you don’t want to get wrecked, you are best advised to keep well away.