Did Mandelson make money from the Chagos deal?
As the Mandelson scandal goes stratospheric, the US State department’s publication of the Epstein files mentioning most of the 1980-1990s western elite in different ways, it was only a matter of time before it touched the Chagos issue.
Did Labour Lord Peter Mandelson make money, or help make other people money, out of the Chagos deal? Did he influence high level negotiations as British Ambassador to Washington? Who else followed his corrupt, two-faced, greedy, secretive, undemocratic lead? And should we care? asks Tessa Clarke, Editor, THE CHAGOS FILES.
Today the Great British PAC, a cross- party organisation of British patriots opposed to the Chagos Islands sovereignty deal, has launched a petition titled, “Halt the Chagos deal. Demand transparency.” They call for the treaty Bill to be stopped “until Mandelson’s involvement is fully examined.”
This seems laudible. Who doesn’t want to have information to hold their leaders – especially the unelected ones - to account?
THE CHAGOS FILES has long pointed out the lack of transparency on the issue. There is an urgent need for the democratic accountability of our leaders to us the people, including the Chagossians. This is why THE CHAGOS FILES was set up. But more transparency is not all the campaigners are demanding.
The “Halt the Chagos deal. Demand transparency” petition wants minutes, mandates, advice and proposals advanced by the peer to be published. It’s unclear when they mean such is the attractive political opposition idea of automatically linking a bad treaty deal with a scandalous peer. Do they mean evidence dating back to Mandelson’s first ever role in government as Minister Without Portfolio in 1997 or, simply during his recent term as Ambassador to Washington DC [10 February 2025 to 11 September 2025] during the final months of UK-US treaty deal negotiation?
Supporters of the petition want to know the legal advice given to Government and the names and legal chambers of any external counsel. The implication is that because many Labour-adjacent and party-supporting international lawyers are already known to have worked for the Mauritian government, this may have skewed any legal advice they gave the UK government and Foreign Office officials. And perhaps there are more lawyers who are hiding behind Government client privilege that we should know about too.
Even if all this information is published, the Great British PAC are clear they suspect foul play already. The fourth of their petition demands information about the role the peer played “in shaping” Britain’s foreign policy and an immediate “reset of negotiations to the position that existed before Lord Mandelson became engaged in the process.”
Yet why not wait for the evidence – if there is any – that Mandelson did other than his job in post last year? It seems the Great British PAC can’t wait. If there is no evidence of corruption by Mandelson over the treaty - or none serious enough that warrants the upending of a negotiation four years in the making by Labour and Conservative governments, countless civil servants, diplomats and lawyers – their fourth demand implies the mere association with Mandelson is enough to kill, if not go back in time on, the state leaders’ negotiations.
But why should the public support a petition that demands transparency but then kills the democratic spirit of it by not allowing the public to make up their own minds about Mandelson first based on evidence rather than speculation by campaigners whose minds are made up already?
There is already a lot of information published already regarding the British international lawyers who worked for Mauritius and other legal and political advisors visiting the country. For many campaigners against the deal the fact that some leading British international lawyer worked for Mauritius at all is enough to label them “traitors.” Yet working for foreign governments isn’t illegal. Decolonisation in principle isn’t necessarily against British interests or reveals a lack of love for country. It’s debatable.
Of course serving politicians and civil servants have codes of conduct we expect them to abide by. We would want to know of any shady backroom financial deals promised to individuals or companies. Yet the biggest problem with this treaty deal in terms of transparency isn’t that there may be financial fraud or secret trade deals going on; it’s that the public were not kept fully informed about the deal BEFORE it was agreed back in October 2024 in the first place. The biggest fraud on all of us is the undemocratic process leading to this treaty and its contents masquerading as a democratic one.
Why is the clear democratic failure by Government leaders on this deal more damning than any corruption by an individual we still don’t know exists? The 55m British people, of which 48m are registered to vote, should have known what significant foreign policy decision they were asked to consider at the last General Election. They were not.
The Labour Party offered zero transparency before before and after being in Government. There was no mention that the party in government intended to sign a treaty only a few months after taking office in their 2024 Election Manifesto. On-going treaty negotiations were secretive even after their was agreement in principle by London and Port Louis.
Perhaps the Labour Party hierarchy were scared that they wouldn’t win the General Election on an issue of sovereignty? If people knew that Keir Starmer, as previous Shadow Brexit Secretary not only agitated for a second Referendum vote on sovereignty and the European Union (because he didn’t like the results of the first vote) but also as leader of the Labour Party wanted to hand sovereignty of a British overseas territory to another state, perhaps his party wouldn’t have won. You don’t need evidence of a potentially fraudulent Mandelson to know that this was an undemocratic omission by a political party vying for the highest position of power in Britain.
It wasn’t just the British public kept in the dark either. Even Labour MPs and the Chagossian campaign groups in opposition to Mauritian sovereignty were not told about this foreign policy before the agreement. How contemptuous can politicians be of the people they claim to represent and care about the rights of?
We need to know about fraud and the character of our leaders. But the Mandelson controversy is a distraction from the main issues to do with this deal: the ideological basis for it and the lack of democracy in achieving it.
The trouble with the Great British PAC petition is that it is in danger of replacing political discussion with a corruption-obsessed world view, neatly sidestepping the cause of the Chagossians which they claim to support.
What if Mandelson and some civil servants get exposed as being a Trump whisperer that led to the Presidents numerous U-turns? Or if Mandelson offered a bribe to a Republican senator opposed to the deal to change course? A few bad apples, even important ones, can be dismissed. Lord Mandelson was sacked from his influential diplomatic position as soon as the Epstein Files were published last year. The Labour Party, with its support for the treaty deal that leaves out guaranteed rights for Chagossians, is still in power. What’s left are the harder arguments about the Chagos issue and democracy still to deal with.
If you don’t agree in decolonisation of British territory and handing it to a foreign state in the interests of democracy and international justice, than let’s interrogate why in favour of a more democratic and just outcome. Most rightwing anti-treaty deal campaigners talk up national security, the threat of China and the corruption of the Mauritian state (and now the corruption of Mandelson) as reasons to oppose the deal. Yet it’s unclear how the Chagos Islands remaining British keeps democracy alive on this issue. Previous British governments did nothing for the Chagossians apart from offer them British passports to live in mainland Britain, facilitated occasional visits to the islands and meetings over the years that involved civil servants merely “listening” to their grievances.
Focusing on bad actors and corruption does nothing much to advance the Chagossians’ cause in practical terms either. Whether the sovereignty treaty is pulled or not, there are no coherent policy plans by the Government or any British political party to give the Chagossians self-determination and the guaranteed right to settle on the islands.
Lipservice is made by some leaders of course. Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel MP’s amendment to the treaty bill to inject the process with more democracy is still waiting to be heard. Reform UK has made rights for Chagossians part of their pledge if they win power.
But where are the worked through policy plans the public can all read and discuss? Can we read a political report in to exactly how resettlement could happen? Should there be a new parliamentary Bill with changes to the sovereignty treaty deal to include Chagossian rights? Is there anyone writing proposals for how there could urgently be a Referendum for the Chagossian people around the world to finally have a say on what they want? And where is the chance for British people to say what they think?
A General Election can’t come soon enough.
Tessa Clarke/11 Feb 2026