A former NSPCC director says he has ‘sleepless nights’ about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson working together on one of the charity’s biggest ever child abuse campaigns in between visits to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking for the first time the children’s charity’s former director of fundraising Giles Pegram, who was responsible for the groundbreaking Full Stop campaign, said he was ‘absolutely horrified’ when he thought about their association with the convicted sex offender at the same time as Andrew chaired the campaign and Mandelson was vice chair.
The decade-long campaign against child cruelty and abuse launched in 1999 with high-profile support and celebrity backing and raised more than £250million.
Andrew even appeared on the front of a special edition of Hello! magazine alongside actress Nicole Kidman to promote the campaign and remained at its helm until 2004, three years after he was alleged to have had sex with Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre.
Talking about Andrew’s association with Epstein, Mr Pegram said that ‘on a personal basis, as a director of the National Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children for 30 years, I’m absolutely horrified [that] on one visit, he could be helping the NSPCC one moment and then going off with Jeffrey Epstein the next’.
‘I mean, that just sort of gives me horror, personally,’ he said.
Mr Pegram, now 76, also revealed that the first known meeting between the pair was probably when the campaign brought them together for a lunch at Andrew’s Buckingham Palace apartment in 1999.
The previous Christmas, Mandelson had been forced to resign from his post as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after he was embroiled in a financial scandal.
Pictured: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (left) and Peter Mandelson (second from right) at the Palace
It is believed to be in the same year Andrew and Mandelson were pictured together in bathrobes around a table with Epstein in Martha’s Vineyard in a photograph which only surfaced recently in the Epstein files.
The picture was previously thought to have documented one of the first meetings between the pair but the NSPCC lunch pre-dated it, believes Mr Pegram, because the pair did not seem to know each other when they convened for lunch.
Recalling they ate plaice with cream sauce, Mr Pegram said he ‘obviously regretted’ bringing the pair together and would not have done so with hindsight.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, he added: ‘It’s horrible. Can anyone blame me for having brought Andrew and Mandelson together given the circumstances at the time? If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it.
‘If there was a scandal that was related to children, we wouldn’t have come within a mile of it.’
The Full Stop campaign was intended to change public attitudes to child abuse, relying on a hard-hitting TV campaign and crucially the support of the rich, famous and powerful.
Its launch on March 22, 1999, was hosted by Cilla Black at the Theatre Royal in London and attended by Andrew and Mandelson, Tony Blair, then-Conservative leader William Hague, Boyzone and Spice Girl Emma Bunton.
At the time of its inception the previous year, the late Princess Margaret, who was already friends with Mandelson, was the NSPCC’s president.
Andrew (left), Jeffrey Epstein (centre) and Mandelson (right) pictured at Martha’s Vineyard
A steering committee headed by Conservative peer George Magan was formed at a reception hosted by the princess, the late Queen’s sister.
And when it came to looking for a chair and vice chairs, Mandelson apparently appeared a natural choice, recalled Mr Pegram.
He suggested that he would have ‘met or had dinner with at least one of them’ either being suggested as a possible vice chair or offering his services because he ‘liked to be involved with big things and Full Stop was a big thing’.
Mandelson was finally appointed as a vice chairman in early 1999 despite his resignation from the Cabinet after he was exposed for borrowing £373,000 from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson, who was also forced to resign.
Meanwhile, Andrew had been appointed as chairman of Full Stop in October 1998.
Mr Pegram said Andrew and Mandelson did not seem to know each other and did not greet each other as old friends when they met after he had waited with Mandelson in an ante room before being summoned.
Now after devoting ’30 years of my career to preventing cruelty to children’ he said: ‘First and foremost my concerns are with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein – it’s absolutely unforgivable and nothing in the past can make that right.’
The NSPCC said that the continued revelations following the publication of the Epstein files had exposed ‘a world of power, privilege, and wealth where vulnerable women and girls were ruthlessly targeted, exploited, trafficked and sexually abused’.
It said its thoughts were with the victims who had been ‘ignored and dismissed for too long’.
