Hope you’ve all had a good week – I am feeling uncharacteristically grotty! Aching head, sneezing and that sense that there is a layer of cotton wool between me and the world. A shame, after such a wonderful week in the mountains, but that’s February for you!
I got absolutely soaked and freezing wandering between meetings in rainy London on Tuesday, which probably caused my lurgy…and I’ve had quite the week doing columns for The Independent and The Telegraph about aspects of Mandelson, Epstein and the ongoing horrorshow.
The more of the Epstein email cache that emerges, the more sick I feel about how in the upper echelons of our political and financial system it is still a grimly male world. Women here are at best a kind of exotic sashimi to be shared around after dinner, at worst orifices to be pounded and discarded. Older women are regularly described as ‘hags’ (unless, like Ghislaine Maxwell, they are providing fresh flesh for the hungry beasts). That toxic locus of sex money and power is alive and kicking.
It’s as if all those weird conspiracy theories have turned out to be partially true; there was a paedo ring of rich powerful men abusing vulnerable girls and covering up for each other. There’s Richard Branson saying, ‘Bring the harem’, and Bill Gates with his arms round young women with their faces blacked out, accused of catching an STD from Russian prostitutes and allegedly asking Epstein how he could give his wife antibiotics without her knowing, not to mention the constant exchange of insider information and goodies between all these powerful chaps, egging each other on.
No wonder it is hard for women to penetrate the top corridors of power if these guys are the gatekeepers.
And then there are women like Sarah Ferguson, who give us all a bad name.
Sarah Ferguson’s letters say it all
The emails show her begging Epstein for money: her greed overriding any scruples. She writes, ‘I am at your service. Just marry me”. She writes that her ‘pretty’ 22-year-old goddaughter ‘needs a bed in New York, and an internship with somebody’. She writes that she wants a job herself to ‘organise your houses’. What was she thinking in taking her young daughters to stay with him in Palm Beach as soon as he got out of prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor?
And in the background, behind all the tittle-tattle and political fallout, the drumbeat of all the girls that were horribly abused, raped and hurt and blackmailed into serving the dark desires of powerful men. I have to say I loved Marina Hyde’s article in the Guardian about how we are forgetting the abused women in all of this – it’s well worth a read.
Don’t forget what Mandelson’s appointment did
I was asked by Victoria Harper, a great friend of NOON and mine, to write for The Independent about the casual sacrifice of a brilliant Queenager (our former Ambassador to Washington, Dame Karen Pierce, 66) who was kicked out for the dreadful Peter Mandelson. (Click here to read it.)
My personal experience of Mandelson
I know Mandelson. He was part of the landscape of my childhood because of his friendship with my stepmother Tessa Jowell. He’s the kind of man who is all over you like a rash when your face is in the sun and the world loves you – but you won’t see for dust if your life takes a difficult turn.
He’s also a total power/money termite…what he’s doing in the Labour party I have no idea. You might have thought that since his last 2 big jobs ended in ignominy and resignation, the Prime Minister might have been a bit more wary about giving him another big gig. Hmm
Fast, thoughtful, and loud: Reader response was immediate
I’m always interested in how super competent Queenagers (midlife women) so often get canned for a male leader’s mate. The article really hit a nerve on my socials.
So here it is, as originally penned, a bit different from what ran in the paper, especially for y’all. I’d love to hear about instances you know where something similar has happened.
My article as penned:
What you don’t know about the Mandelson scandal
In all the furore about Peter Mandelson, there is a glaring omission. Oh yes, I know THAT picture in the white Y-Fronts is unforgivable (as is the treasonous handing over of UK secrets to hostile operators in the middle of the banking crisis). But in all the fuss there is a huge elephant in the room that nobody is talking about.
The truth is, Peter Mandelson never needed to be appointed Ambassador to Washington. We already had a brilliant midlife woman doing the job. Her name was Dame Karen Pierce and before the ghastly Peter ever got to the American capital, she had been hailed as The Trump Whisperer because of her excellent relationship with the President. In all the stupid fuss about treacherous Mandelson, please spare a thought for the amazing Dame Karen Pierce DCMG, a career diplomat with a superb record, who was flung out of the job she loved so that preposterous Peter could have her gig.
How Karen Pierce owned D.C.
Dame Karen, 66, was a roaring success as our woman in Washington. She was a Foreign Office lifer who’d already done two tours in the US capital having already wowed everyone as the top British diplomat at the UN – including Donald Trump, who described her as ‘fab’.
Long before Mandy fawned into the picture, Karen was already known in diplomatic circles as the woman with the rapport with Trump. The morning after Trump was elected, Pierce posted a picture of herself with the Donald in an orange dress (appropriately matching his fake tan) in the Oval Office.
When Starmer came to power, the media were full of praise for Pierce, hailing her as a secret weapon because of her “adeptness at the delicate art of handling Trump”. She got the newly fledged PM Starmer a one-on-one call with the Donald just after he survived his assassination attempt. The call, which was supposed to be short, morphed into a two-hour dinner meeting. When David Lammy got into trouble when old tweets showed he’d called Trump a Neo Nazi, it was Dame Karen who steadied the ship and got the special relationship back on track. Indeed, the basis of the unlikely semi bromance between Sir Keir and the Donald, was Dame Karen. And fat thanks she got for that!
So what happened?
The chaos over Mandelson is entirely of Starmer and his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s making. Karen Pierce was already the Trump Whisperer, lauded in Washington and in diplomatic circles for the hard yards she had put in cultivating the Republicans. Her jolly midlife style found her at ease with Trump, her vivacious bubbly personality winning him over and her steely, but silky diplomatic skills paving the way for a new era of the special relationship. But as so often happens to extremely capable older women in a man’s world, all Karen’s hard work and a lifetime of skill was sacrificed on the altar of installing McSweeney’s old mentor, Mandelson, as the ambassador in her stead. It’s a story as old as the hills: sixty something professional, woman kicked out in favour of a male boss’s crony. Pierce was slung out so that Number Ten could give a job one of their boys; McSweeney admits being a protegee of Mandy. Maybe that’s why he totally overlooked the fact that his beloved mentor had already had to resign TWICE from public life in disgrace… and that the man formerly known as Lord Mandelson is actually entirely unsuited to high office.
This current Mandelson scandal is a totally self-inflicted wound for Starmer and his coterie, born of not having enough trust in a midlife woman. Shame on them: I feel extremely sorry for Dame Pierce who was pushed out of the job she loved in favour of a bounder and a cad with no principles.
I can’t see Dame Karen being photographed in her undies in a paedophile’s lair – she’d have too much good sense. I doubt, also, she would lie while being vetted by the civil service, or conveniently ‘forget’ having received £75,000 from a man like Epstein. And I know that she would NEVER have taken money like that ever – or traded UK government secrets and broken her promise to the British people.
This headline may be out of date by the time you read this!
McSweeney: Mentored by Mandelson
McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, is open about having been one of Peter’s friends, groomed in his stinky stable of spin and sleaze. I hope now he is ruing the day he overlooked the fact that Mandelson had a terrible penchant for sliming up to billionaires. Remember how he once said he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting stinking rich?’ And a distinctly murky relationship with the truth. Mandy may be a great political strategist, but he has no personal integrity and no sense of where to draw the line between his own self advancement and the national interest.
The big question…
How did Starmer and McSweeney ever think he would do better than Dame Karen? Why install a man with such a chequered history into such a crucial job at such an important time – when there was a brilliant woman already in place?
What makes me particularly furious is how often I have seen this exact scenario play out: a competent, experienced midlife woman, chucked out of the job she has spent her whole career aspiring to, because some man decides he’d rather install his mate.
It’s so boring that male leaders would rather deal with a chap like them than a brilliant, proven woman. It’s 2026 – when are we finally going to tackle the gendered-ageism which is killing off female careers just when they should be flourishing?
Note to our male leaders (and men are still by far the majority of leaders; remember that of our 100 top companies, only 6 are led by women. And we have only ever had 3 female prime ministers). If a woman has got to the top of her profession, she is likely to be way better than any of her male counterparts; she has to be, because it is still so damn hard and rare to get there.
It’s still a boys’ club
The corridors of power are still a blokey club (just read the Epstein emails) which is where women run into trouble. You see, by the time we’ve accrued thirty years of experience and high office, we reckon we’ve earnt the right to speak truth to power. Hell, Pierce might even have dared to disagree with Sir Keir or McSweeney; she might have had a different – better – perspective.
Maybe given her more-than-three decades in the job, the fact that she had been COO of the Foreign Office in London, served in Afghanistan as well as Washington twice, she knew a few tricks that the chaps back in London didn’t…no matter. When the boys’ club
decided Mandy was their man, Dame Karen was out on her ear. On the scrap heap. Done. Sent off to Siberia (actually the West Balkans). All her hard work forgotten. It’s the oldest and saddest trope in the book.
Sure, Dame Karen Pearce didn’t look like one of the boys. She is diminutive and cherubic; similar in style to Trump’s chief of staff, Susan L Wiles. She was famous in Washington for her sparkly headbands, parties fuelled by rocket strength Pimm’s and ability to get on with everyone. Perhaps the only ones who didn’t see her worth were the grey, dreary chaps who rule the Downing Street bubble.
What the insider Queenager say
I’ve heard so many women MPs moaning about the ‘boys club’ around Sir Keir and McSweeney; we can see it in the fear Number ten obviously has of another strong woman, Angela Rayner. And so it came to pass that Pearce who had managed to get Trump onside and get him and Sir Keir off to a flying start was sacrificed for the odious Mandelson.
I hope he goes to prison just like his disgusting ‘best buddy’ Epstein. But let’s not forget the other tragedy in this tale: how a great woman got sacrificed so Mandy could get his dirty, corrupt mitts on the Ambassador’s gig.
Bring back Dame Karen! And a moment to remember all the other great women who get whacked!
Join me at the Essex Circle Launch – open to members and non-members alike
At last this story is coming out!
I suppose the only glimmer of hope in all of this is that at last the truth is emerging. We women can’t be dismissed as making it up. Our generation were given the lanyard to enter this man’s world and told/gaslit that we had equality. That wasn’t true.
We were allowed in on sufferance as long as we were pleasing and did what the men wanted. The system was created by, designed for and ruled by men. It still is.
I’ve lost count of the men I know who have failed upwards, into a cushy sinecure or a board role – looked after by a web of other chaps. The women? Nope. We tend to get sent to the West Balkans if we are lucky, or pushed out into the cold to reinvent, to start our own businesses to do what we can. (This is what we see so many NOON Queenagers doing and it’s truly inspiring!)
I’m happier since I was pushed out…but still….
Personally, that worked pretty well for me. I am seriously so much happier now than I was in that old world: I love being able to say what I want, to help other women going through difficult times – to be able to see the workings of the system of which I was a part and to write about them. I now see it with new eyes.
We are in a period of intense change; let’s hope that ripping off the lid of the world Epstein and Mandelson ruled will stop it being able to flourish in the way that it did. But I wouldn’t bank on it; the new AI-fuelled, tech bro–dominated future is upon us…and it’s not looking that much better.
But I wouldn’t bank on it; the new AI-fuelled, tech bro–dominated future is upon us…and it’s not looking that much better.
In the meantime let’s not forget the real victims in all of this. Not Keir Starmer and his political troubles, or the powerful men with their names redacted, but the girls and young women they abused with alacrity for so long, with no remorse.
And now…a good-news alternative
If you’d like something a bit more cheery, do come to our NOON Circles this month.
I am going to Colchester tomorrow to launch our Essex Circle – And there are many more this month, as well as our NOON Writing Circle. Book via the button below 👇👇👇.
Our theme this month is – appropriately – about what we would do if we weren’t afraid.
Come join us!
And with that, I’m going back to bed!
Eleanor
