19m ago 14.08 GMT Mandelson engaged in ‘shocking’ betrayal by leaking information to Epstein, says Labour peer Catherine MacLeod, a former special adviser to Alistair Darling who is now a Labour peer, has said that it was “awful” to learn that Peter Mandelson was advising banks how lobby against a tax on bonuses being proposed by Darling when he was chancellor. Referring to the revelation that Mandelson, via Jeffrey Epstein, suggested that it would be good for JPMorgan to “mildly threaten” Darling (see 9.38am), MacLeod told Radio 4’s the World at One: 44 It is awful that one of Alistair Darling’s colleagues was suggesting this ... Quite a lot of important and influential bankers employed whatever tactics they thought would get them somewhere with Alistair Darling. She also said that revelations about Mandelson leaking internal government information when he was business secretary to Epstein were “absolutely shocking”. (See 12.41pm.) She said that this amounted to “betrayal” and that Mandelson was letting down his colleagues. “There is nothing that can be said in its defence.” A vast trove of Epstein documents has been released in the US, and reporters are still going through them. One shows Mandelson forwarding a memo written by one special adviser to Gordon Brown, the then PM, to Epstein. There is at least one other example of Epstein having a business-related internal goverment memo from around this time, without it being clear how Epstein obtained it.