The Paradigm of Peter Mandelson

“We’re living through unprecedented times”. So went the mantra six years ago when a pandemic raced around the world faster than the contestants on the hit BBC series. Fast forward to 2026 and I can’t help but think every day is unprecedented. Whether it’s waking up to see Indians protesting about Modi included in the Epstein files, to the splintering of Brand Beckham, the old world order appears to be crumbling around us and our natural response appears to be to keep calm and doomscroll on. 

When I work with leaders, I often talk about old paradigm and new paradigm thinking. Old paradigm thinking draws on the previous patterns we hold, the stories we tell ourselves and the limiting beliefs that keep us trapped in certain behaviours and responses. It also relates to the old paradigm of how the world was - encompassing everything from heading into an office five days a week, to presumed gender roles in raising a family.

The new paradigm feels precarious, but is it really unprecedented?

When we look back to times of economic unrest and social liberalism such as the Weimar Republic, we see how the strongholds of those seeking creativity and fairness can be easily undermined by loud promises and claims of a better economic future. These claims are playing out in front of our very eyes today. Collectively we’re dropping down the monopoly of life and of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs - do not pass go and certainly do not collect £200. 

Here in the UK, the government sits at the heart of a promised better economic future, but the old paradigm of power is being questioned very loudly. While the first batch of Epstein files captured Andrew formally known as a prince, the second batch will highlight, what some in LGBTQ+ circles have claimed, ‘an A Gay’ - Peter Mandelson. Ever quick to purport a hot take, my Linkedin feed on Saturday was awash with his front cover on The Times magazine. 

‘A sign of The Times’, according to Andy Nairn, who claimed it was a terrible lack of judgement from the editorial team, while Claire Coleman set out her take on the inner workings of the press and why the cover was inevitable. This is the time we’ve entered - a time when our brains are so stretched and strained from everyday work, everyday survival and thus the time and attention we need to actually delve into what’s going on is unavailable to us. Just another ten minutes on TikTok and I’ll get to it. 

Sitting with discomfort

However, when I sit with it, as I trundle down to Brighton on a train, I sit with the discomfort of knowing too much about some things and not enough about others. I know too much about how legacy media is in a race for attention and relevance - with print on its last legs and the dominance of online threatening business models. I don’t know enough about the full extent of what’s been happening in closed corridors of power and what, to me, appears to be moral corruption. 

A front cover these days is a cultural symbol, more often used as a symbol for social media than to be grabbed off the shelf in the supermarket. Millions of people who never read the interview, or would never have planned to, still reacted. The boundary of print has been overcome by social media and the cultural effect is amplified around the world. It creates a sense of outrage: how could he be given such prominence based on what we now know to be true of his poor decisions and bad behaviour? 

When we look beyond the cover, we look at the language. ‘Underage women’ has often been used in coverage. That language is subtly yet incredibly powerfully deceptive. There is no such thing as underage women. They are girls. They are children. We listen to the discomfort in newsreaders’ voices when they refer to ‘the sex offender Jeffery Epstein’ while in other stories we hear of Asian ‘grooming gangs’. When power and money enters the chat, the moral temperature drops and the abuse becomes background, rather than substance. 

While it is important to get to the truth about exactly what happened, by whom and how, what we do know is that many girls have suffered. We’ve been amazed at how little their stories have been covered and how quickly their abuse seems to be referred to as if it is a simple by-product of having such powerful people in cahoots. With this, as with the rhetoric and riots about asylum seekers and migrants - is it ever actually about the women and girls? Though with this case in particular, the focus on the victims themselves and the misogynistic systems and society that made this possible seems conspicuously absent. 

New rules, new paradigms

It starts to create a feeling amongst the public that the rules are different depending on who is involved. It’s not necessarily because the outcomes differ - it’s because stories are framed differently. In a more fractured and transparent media landscape, I’m starting to get the sense the tide is shifting as we enter the new paradigm. 

The old playbook meant institutions would hunker down to manage how harm is described. Addressing the damage becomes more about managing reputational risk as an outcome, rather than getting to the root causes. Looking at root causes means harder questions about how and why this could be allowed. It means questioning the old paradigm in more detail and asking ourselves: what do we want to take into the future?