Influential people and high dignitaries often willingly get into honey-traps or sex rackets to seek pleasure using their positions. The Dutch dancer Mata Hari used her charm and sexuality during World War I as part of her spying weapon to ferret out secrets from her targeted victims. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi organised the infamous “bunga bunga” parties between 2010 and 2011 in his private villa in Arcore, near Milan, for alleged erotic entertainment, including striptease acts by young women, some of whom were reportedly aspiring showgirls. But all these pale into insignificance compared to the sexual exploits of influential men from different continents allegedly indulged in as favours from the dubious American financier and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. This is because national secrets and trade and commerce have never before been compromised on such a scale as the Epstein files unearthed by US investigators, have revealed.
These documents demonstrate that unlike Mata Hari or Berlusconi, Epstein and his rich and powerful friends did not remain limited to just sex with young women but more importantly it was the gruesome acts of pedophilia mixed with abominable practice of child sacrifice, drinking the blood of tortured and terrified children and infants and multiple acts that cannot be understood or comprehended, leave alone believed by common people.
Epstein files contain names, references and details of many top world leaders, not just limited to politicians like ministers, Presidents, Prime Ministers, but also judges, top officials, industrialists, business tycoons and billionaires from the US and across the world, including India. Hushed whispers even go as far as to connect the recent US-India trade deal as a product of pressure generated by ‘Redacted’ Indian names that hold the power of disturbing the power structure in this country. The UK also is also currently in the grip of a severe political crisis in the wake of the disclosures that threaten the survival of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The latest casualty is Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney who has resigned after taking responsibility for backing the appointment of Lord Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US, despite what was known about the peer’s friendship with Epstein.
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The resignation was hoped to be a calculated gamble to let the PM off the hook for the role he played in the appointment of Mandelson. But it has compounded matters for Starmer with a call for his own resignation given by Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader in Scotland with ambition to step into Starmer’s shoes. Starmer had earlier sought to deflect the criticism for vetting Mandelson’s appointment and indicated that he would move to tighten rules on lobbying, following revelations that Epstein used Mandelson as a conduit for influence and inside information. But McSweeney’s exit shows there is deep trouble within the ranks of the ruling Labour Party.
Many within the ruling establishment are said to be willing to share Sarwar’s view that over the past year and a half there have been “too many incidents where wrong judgment calls have been made.” PM Starmer still has some chance to successfully weather the storm since his would-be challengers are keeping their cards close to their chests. It seems unlikely that any of them would relish the prospect of their party suffering a debacle in elections to several counties in May. Whatever happens, there is no denying the fact his government has now lost control over how events will unfold in the coming months. The Epstein scandal in which two of Starmer’s close men have got involved, has come as a shot in the arm of the Far-Right political party, Reform UK, of Nigel Farage which seems to have already captured the imagination of a large number of people in that country. PM Starmer has tried, in the past few days, to insulate himself against the wave of outrage that threatens to engulf him. He condemned in unequivocal terms Mandelson’s apparent leaking of market-sensitive information as a cabinet minister in Gordon Brown’s government. He has now announced Mandelson will be removed from the Privy Council. The Epstein scandal has unnerved Starmer so much that he has been forced to accept the proposal from Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition, that all documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment should be made public.
However, this has landed him in fresh troubles with his own party colleagues questioning the decision to open sensitive documents for public scrutiny. At the moment, there has been a flurry of denials and unconvincing self-defence by many of the bigwigs whose names have figured in the Epstein files for alleged moral turpitude, child trafficking and selling classified information for sexual favours. They have acquired political overtones as an influential elite group of people seemed to have believed itself to be beyond the law, or, as some claim, so very powerful that no law anywhere can touch them. Time, like many such exposés earlier, may very well never tell whether they were correct, since the law is never equal for the weak and the powerful.
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