标签： Europe

LONDON — For British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the name Peter Mandelson has become a political albatross that threatens to end his tenure in Downing Street, just eight months after he swept to power on a promise of clean governance after years of Conservative Party scandal. The deepening controversy around Starmer’s fateful decision to appoint Mandelson, a veteran Labour figure with long-documented ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as Britain’s ambassador to the United States has reignited urgent questions about the prime minister’s judgment and credibility.

Two months ago, Starmer already survived a wave of internal pressure over the 2024 appointment, with senior Labour figures including the party’s Scottish leader calling for his resignation. This time, the crisis is far more severe: Starmer now stands accused of misleading the UK Parliament over whether Mandelson cleared mandatory official vetting to take the sensitive diplomatic post.

The bombshell dropped earlier this week, when The Guardian revealed that Mandelson had originally been denied formal security clearance for the ambassador role — a position Starmer once described as the most coveted posting in UK diplomacy. This directly contradicts Starmer’s previous statement to Parliament that “full due process” was followed during the appointment process. The UK government has confirmed that Starmer and senior cabinet ministers only learned this week that the Foreign Office had issued a negative initial assessment of Mandelson’s eligibility. The fallout has already forced the resignation of Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office’s top civil servant.

Vetting for the ambassador role would have included a full review of Mandelson’s financial history, professional connections, and personal associations, with his long-standing links to Epstein a core point of scrutiny. Starmer has pushed back against claims that he pressured officials to bypass red flags about the 72-year-old appointee, saying he is “absolutely furious” that details of the blocked initial clearance were hidden from him, calling the omission “staggering” and “unforgivable.” The prime minister is set to address Parliament and the public on the scandal Monday.

This controversy is far from an unexpected crisis. Mandelson was always a high-risk pick for the critical US ambassador role: he resigned twice from previous Labour governments over early 2000s ethical and financial missteps, and his association with Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in prison in 2019 while serving a sentence for sex trafficking, was well documented ahead of the appointment. Starmer’s original calculation was clear: he gambled that Mandelson’s well-honed lobbying skills and deep trade expertise would help the UK secure favorable terms with a second Trump administration, avoiding the most punishing tariffs on British exports. For a time, that gambit appeared to pay off.

The narrative shifted dramatically in September 2025, when newly released private emails proved Mandelson had publicly supported Epstein even after the financier was convicted and jailed for sex offenses. Starmer moved quickly to fire Mandelson, hoping to close the chapter on the embarrassment. But a new wave of disclosures followed in January, when the US Department of Justice released millions of pages of court documents tied to the Epstein case. Files included emails showing that while Mandelson served in the Labour government between 2009 and 2010, he passed sensitive, potentially market-moving government information to Epstein.

Starmer has repeatedly apologized to the British public and to Epstein’s victims for trusting what he calls “Mandelson’s lies.” British police have since launched a formal criminal investigation into Mandelson’s conduct: officers searched his two properties in London and western England, and arrested him on February 23 on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He was released on bail after more than nine hours of questioning, and has denied all wrongdoing; he does not face any accusations of sexual misconduct tied to the Epstein case.

Before the latest vetting revelations, political fervor around Starmer’s leadership had cooled. The prime minister had earned moderate public support for his decision to avoid direct British involvement in the Iran conflict, and he had hoped to weather expected heavy Labour losses in May’s local elections, the UK equivalent of US midterms. That calm has evaporated entirely.

“Starmer positioned himself as the leader who always followed the rules, a stark contrast to figures like Boris Johnson, and he won office on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ of the scandal that marred the previous Conservative government,” explained Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “Because he built his entire electoral platform on integrity, the latest revelations from this mess mean many voters now see him as both a liar and a hypocrite — and hypocrisy is one of the most unforgivable sins for any British politician.”

Opposition Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has doubled down on calls for Starmer’s resignation, saying “This scandal is not ending. He has run out of people to sack, he has run out of places to hide, he has run out of authority. The buck stops with him. His position is untenable and he must go.”

The ultimate fate of Starmer’s leadership now hinges on the mood of his own Labour Party lawmakers. So far, only a small handful of senior party figures have openly called for him to step down. But ahead of Starmer’s Monday parliamentary address, political observers are watching closely to see if more Labour representatives break ranks after this weekend’s local campaign events with voters. Should more party members publicly withdraw their confidence, Starmer’s position could become unsustainable almost overnight. Confidence in political leaders can evaporate in an instant, a lesson Britain learned just a few years ago: Boris Johnson won a landslide parliamentary majority in 2019, only to resign as prime minister and lawmaker three years later amid a cascade of overlapping scandals.

Hungary’s political landscape has undergone its most seismic shift in nearly two decades, after newcomer Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party secured a dramatic landslide victory in last Sunday’s national election, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16 years of uninterrupted governance. With final vote counts set to be formalized this Saturday – including recounts for closely contested constituencies and the tabulation of overseas ballots – preliminary results give Tisza 52% of the popular vote, translating to roughly 140 seats in the 199-seat National Assembly, enough for a commanding two-thirds supermajority. Orbán’s long-ruling Fidesz party has plummeted from its previous 135 seats to just an estimated 55, a collapse that has sent shockwaves through the party that once dominated every level of Hungarian politics.

Within days of the victory, Magyar moved quickly to lock in a timeline for power transition. He secured a commitment from Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok to bring forward the convening of the new parliament to the week starting May 4, when the body will vote to install the new Tisza-led government. In a marked break from the past two years, when state broadcasters largely sidelined or attacked Magyar, he gave fiery interviews to public television and radio, and has pledged to introduce legislation to suspend the outlets’ current programming until independent, impartial editors can be appointed to replace the outgoing leadership aligned with Fidesz.

Buoyed by his supermajority, Magyar has also announced plans to retroactively cap the number of consecutive terms a sitting prime minister can serve at two. With Orbán already having held the post for five terms, the reform would permanently block the former leader from returning to the country’s highest office, effectively closing the book on his decades-long political dominance.

It was not until late Thursday, four days after the election defeat, that Orbán finally broke his public silence in an interview with his party’s Patrióta YouTube channel. Acknowledging the historic shift, the ousted prime minister called the result “the end of an era”, saying he would accept the outcome with dignity. He opened up about feeling “pain and emptiness” from the loss, and took full personal responsibility for the defeat, though he offered little in-depth analysis of the campaign’s missteps beyond highlighting the years-long delay of the Russian-designed Paks 2 nuclear power plant, which is now six years behind its original completion schedule.

Orbán met this week with the Hungarian president, but slipped into the building through a side entrance to avoid questions from the press. Fidesz has scheduled a top leadership meeting for April 28, ahead of a full party congress in June, where the party will chart its future as an opposition bloc. Orbán indicated that he would be willing to stay on as party leader if re-elected by members, but admitted the party requires “complete renewal”. Of Fidesz’s 55 incoming parliamentary seats, only 12 are won by individual constituency candidates, with the rest coming from party lists. Orbán argued that many of the list-based deputies need to be replaced, as they have no experience working in opposition, a rare admission of weakness for a party where public dissent has long been uncommon.

Within Fidesz, there is no clear successor to Orbán, and no current figure matches his unique political skill and charisma for unifying competing factions within the party. Senior party insiders told the BBC that Fidesz faced an impossible structural challenge after 16 years in power: it could not credibly position itself as a force for change, even as voters grew hungry for turnover. Campaign advisers from the U.S. and UK had already criticized Fidesz’s core slogan, “the safe choice”, for alienating the large bloc of young Hungarian voters hungry for change. To counter this perception, Orbán leaned heavily on two younger senior cabinet members – 47-year-old Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and 51-year-old Transport Minister János Lázár – to headline campaign rallies, but the strategy backfired: their energy only highlighted how aged and worn Orbán, who turns 63 next month, appeared after 38 years of frontline politics. The result is a mood of fear and internal recrimination sweeping through the defeated party.

In Budapest, widespread anger at the outgoing government has already boiled over into public view, with nearly every Fidesz campaign poster defaced across the city center. Most have the word “Vége” – Hungarian for “the end” – spray-painted across Orbán’s face, while others have been torn down or covered in expletives. The sudden collapse of Fidesz’s public popularity, even among some former supporters, has been one of the most striking aspects of the election result.

For Magyar and his incoming administration, the top immediate priorities are stopping capital flight by oligarchs closely aligned with Fidesz – many of whom are rumored to be moving assets to popular destinations like Dubai – and preventing the destruction of corruption evidence in government ministries. While some outgoing officials have been shredding documents in government offices, two Tisza insiders told the BBC that multiple current civil servants have already reached out to the incoming team, offering digital copies of incriminating records on USB drives in exchange for job security or immunity from future prosecution. Tisza also alleges that in the final week before the vote, as polls consistently predicted a large Tisza majority, Fidesz rushed through dozens of no-bid contracts for IT, infrastructure, and research projects to hand-picked allied companies, locking in public spending commitments that will carry over to the new government.

The tough rhetoric coming from Tisza leadership is both a reflection of popular anger and a calculated political move, after two years of sustained demonization of Magyar and his party by the Fidesz-controlled Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma), which controls 476 media titles including roughly 50 major news outlets. Beyond media reform, Magyar has already reaffirmed key campaign pledges: establishing a dedicated office to recover state assets stolen under the previous government, and bringing Hungary into the Luxembourg-based European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), a move designed to signal to the European Union that the new government is serious about tackling corruption.

Magyar has already held talks with Zsolt Hernádi, CEO of Hungarian energy giant MOL, which operates critical refineries serving both Hungary and Slovakia. On energy policy, the incoming prime minister agrees with Orbán on one urgent priority: the reopening of the Druzhba oil pipeline from Russia, which has been closed since late January. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated this week that flows could resume by the end of the month, though Magyar has stressed his commitment to diversifying Hungary’s energy supplies, particularly by expanding capacity on an alternative pipeline from Croatia’s Krk Island.

Exit polling estimates show nearly three-quarters of voters aged 18 to 29 backed Tisza, a generational rejection of Orbán’s long rule. Réka Szemerkényi, a former Hungarian ambassador to the U.S. under Orbán who is now based at Budapest’s Equilibrium Institute, told the BBC that young voters sent a clear policy message with their votes. “The chants were ‘Ria, Ria Hungaria’ – meaning we love our country – then ‘Europa’, and the third I heard repeatedly was ‘Russians go home’. These three together are like a foreign policy agenda,” she explained.

International reaction has been swift, with a high-level delegation from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s office arriving in Budapest on Friday for informal talks with Tisza’s leadership. The new Hungarian government stands to unlock €17 billion (£15 billion) in frozen EU funds that were withheld from the Orbán government over concerns about rule of law and corruption, but will need to meet 27 strict benchmarks on judicial independence, anti-corruption enforcement, and media freedom to access the money. With Hungary’s economy already mired in a deep recession, Magyar and his team have made clear they know they need to deliver results quickly to meet the high expectations of voters who swept them into power.

The Trump administration is set for a pivotal, high-stakes meeting with Anthropic’s top leadership on Friday, marking a major turn in a months-long public and legal conflict between the U.S. government and one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence developers. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles will open discussions with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, centered on the company’s newly unveiled Mythos model, a cutting-edge AI system that has drawn unprecedented federal scrutiny over its far-reaching implications for both U.S. national security and economic competitiveness.

A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity to detail private planning for the gathering, confirmed that the current administration is proactively engaging with leading advanced AI research labs to review new model capabilities and assess software security protocols. The official emphasized that any AI technology under consideration for future federal government use would first undergo a rigorous, extended technical evaluation process to verify safety and functionality before any official adoption.

This planned meeting comes after months of escalating friction between the Trump administration and Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI firm that has long prioritized building guardrails around advanced AI development to mitigate catastrophic risk while advancing potential benefits for the U.S. The dispute erupted earlier this year when President Donald Trump issued a public social media order banning all federal agencies from using Anthropic’s flagship chatbot Claude amid a bitter contract conflict with the Pentagon. In the February post, Trump declared the administration “will not do business with them again!”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doubled down on the administration’s pressure, pushing to designate Anthropic as a federal supply chain risk—an unprecedented move against a domestic U.S. technology company. Anthropic has challenged that designation in two separate federal courts. The core of the dispute centers on Anthropic’s demand for binding assurances that the Pentagon will not use its AI technology to develop fully autonomous weapons or conduct mass surveillance of U.S. civilians, while Hegseth has insisted the company must permit all lawful uses the Pentagon deems appropriate. In a landmark March ruling, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin blocked enforcement of Trump’s original ban on federal use of Anthropic products, handing the company a major legal victory.

What has reignited cross-government and global attention on Anthropic in recent weeks is the April 7 launch of Mythos, a model the company describes as “strikingly capable” of outperforming professional human cybersecurity experts at identifying and exploiting critical software vulnerabilities. Because of this unprecedented capability, Anthropic has restricted access to Mythos, only rolling it out to a small, curated group of vetted customers.

While some tech industry analysts have questioned whether Anthropic’s warnings about Mythos’ power amount to a calculated marketing tactic, even prominent critics of the company have acknowledged the model likely represents a meaningful leap forward in AI capability. David Sacks, the White House’s own AI and crypto czar and a frequent Anthropic critic, told listeners of his popular “All-In” podcast that the claims around Mythos should be taken seriously. “Anytime Anthropic is scaring people, you have to ask, ‘Is this a tactic? Is this part of their Chicken Little routine? Or is it real?’” Sacks said. “With cyber, I actually would give them credit in this case and say this is more on the real side.” He added that the logic of advancing AI capability holds: as coding models grow more powerful, they naturally gain improved ability to find security bugs, chain multiple vulnerabilities together, and develop functional exploits that can compromise protected systems.

The model’s unique combination of transformative benefits and catastrophic risk has drawn attention from global policymakers beyond U.S. borders. The United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute, which conducted its own independent evaluation of Mythos, concluded the model is a clear “step up” from already rapidly improving earlier AI generations. The institute warned in its report that “Mythos Preview can exploit systems with weak security posture, and it is likely that more models with these capabilities will be developed” across the global tech sector in the coming years. European Union officials also confirmed Friday that Anthropic has held ongoing talks with EU regulators about Mythos and other advanced, unreleased AI models.

Alongside the launch of Mythos, Anthropic unveiled Project Glasswing, a cross-industry collaborative initiative bringing together tech giants including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, plus major financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, to harden global critical software infrastructure against the risks posed by next-generation AI systems like Mythos. The company says restricted access to Mythos allows key public and private sector organizations to use the model’s own capability to find and patch unaddressed vulnerabilities before bad actors can exploit them.

Speaking at this week’s Semafor World Economy conference, Anthropic co-founder and policy chief Jack Clark stressed that Mythos, while ahead of current industry curves, is not an anomaly. “There will be other systems just like this in a few months from other companies, and in a year to a year-and-a-half later, there will be open-weight models from China that have these capabilities,” Clark said. “So the world is going to have to get ready for more powerful systems that are going to exist within it.”

The meeting between Wiles and Amodei was first reported by Axios. Anthropic declined to comment on the planned gathering ahead of time. Reporting for this article was contributed by AP business reporter Kelvin Chan from London.