Peter Mandelson launched a hush-hush operation to dig into the personal lives of his new EU colleagues after Tony Blair sent him to Brussels, 20-year-old papers reveal By CLAIRE ELLICOTT and SAM GREENHILL Published: 00:01 GMT, 31 December 2024 | Updated: 00:27 GMT, 31 December 2024 e-mail 1 View comments The last time Britain sent him off to foreign lands, Peter Mandelson launched a hush-hush operation to dig into the personal and political lives of his new EU colleagues, files from 2004 reveal. Now poised to be our ambassador in Washington , Lord Mandelson will be discreetly researching his likely allies and enemies, if history is anything to go by. For when the last Labour government sent him to Brussels as an EU commissioner in 2004, he asked the Foreign Office to quietly check out the backgrounds of his fellow commissioners from the other EU nations, the National Archives papers reveal.
Among the reports he got back was about how his Hungarian counterpart had a mistress who was ‘a former elite prostitute’. In the summer of 2004, after the now Lord Mandelson had twice been forced to quit in disgrace as a Cabinet minister, he was given a political lifeline by Tony Blair who made him Britain’s choice as an EU commissioner. Behind the scenes, Mandelson – nicknamed ‘the Prince of Darkness’ due to his Machiavellian manoeuvrings – wasted no time in getting the Foreign Office to start digging.
A Downing Street letter dated August 23, 2004, reveals: ‘He would like .