You would think that politicians of all people would be masters of the art of persuasion. They want us to believe that, if elected, they will work in our best interests and that their ideas will produce the best of all possible worlds. Our experience does not entirely accord with that vision. In practice, the policies promoted by the various parties get diluted or even reversed when in power. Our resulting disillusionment rather blunts their persuasiveness.

We also have a certain cynicism regarding their motives. We suspect them of wanting power and riches. It may well be however that our cynicism is overdone. I suspect that those wanting to become politicians, at least initially, will be motivated by a large degree of idealism rather than personal profit.

No doubt many aspiring politicians dream of being more than back-bench fodder, but the path of a politician is hard to predict. Who knows where it will lead? And if elected they do not have very much control over their careers. Although nominally we vote for the candidate, MPs are mainly elected on the back of the popularity of their party in that area. All of which means that politicians need to follow the party line rather than telling us what they really think.

A politician may be good at persuading the people who matter that he or she is capable of toeing the party line, but there is little opportunity to persuade us voters that he or she has much else to offer. Most voters do not go to the debates between candidates and do not even know who their representative is.

The real experts in the art of persuasion are instead to be found in what we might generously call the private sector. They have more than just an MP’s salary at stake.

Although Bernie Madoff was perhaps the best known proponent of the rip-off, Ponzi schemes are named after the Italian con-artist Charles Ponzi. It is a form of fraud that pays supposed ‘profits’ to investors from the money that they have actually ‘invested’. From the money remaining the promoters of the scheme are buying mansions and yachts.

The key to all this is the promise of an above normal return on the investment and the continual expansion of the investor base and so a continued inflow of money. The likes of Madoff have an innate ability to persuade, but ultimately investors are drawn in by their greed and credulity. Their egos are massaged by being told that they are putting money into a scheme to which only the favoured few have access.

Unsurprisingly, the church is not exempt. In the mid-1990s, Gerald Payne the leader of his huge ‘Greater Ministries International Church’ bribed other US church leaders to be part of his Ponzi scheme. Nearly 500 million dollars had been received from 18,000 people by the time it was shut down by federal authorities.

The scam, called “Double Your Blessings”, targeted Christian communities. It was based on a verse from the gospel of Luke which they interpreted as promising potential investors large returns from their ‘gifts’ to the church. They were told that they would double their investments in 17 months. It collapsed in the late 1990s, and Payne and other Church leaders were convicted of fraud. Payne was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

But there are more subtle ways of conning people. Currently we are hearing a lot about the (late) paedophile and businessman, Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t think he quoted scripture, but did he, like Signor Ponzi, offer fraudulent investment opportunities to his circle of ‘friends’? Well certainly not at the outset. But we can see a pattern of behaviour becoming established.

Born in New York, Epstein was considered a maths genius but never graduated, despite attending university. He left education for education - to teach teenage boys and girls, without qualifications, at a private school that was attended by children of many of New York's elite. After being fired - for lacking teaching skills - Epstein was given a job at the investment banking giant Bear Stearns by its soon-to-be chief executive Alan Greenberg, who had children at the school.

Epstein worked his way up over five years but left Bear Stearns in 1981 over a trading violation he committed. In 1987, he became a consultant to the Towers Financial Corporation. He left in 1989, four years before it was exposed as a Ponzi scheme. He earned $25,000 per month for his role at Towers and was never charged over the $450m fraud. So then, a little on the edge.

The investment companies he later created were based in the Virgin Islands and so information about them is sparse. However, one of them, J Epstein & Company, founded in 1988, was where the big bucks started to appear. He also started, in 2011, Southern Trust Company which latterly became his main source of income.

He had two main billionaire investors whose funds he managed and he took at least $360m in dividends from his companies between 1999 and 2018. The Virgin Islands jurisdiction enabled him to receive the dividends virtually tax-free. And he certainly evaded regulations covering financial advisers, lawyers, and accountants globally by painting himself as simply a consultant.

We also know that he had to pay $100m to his former client Lex Wexner in 2008: while Epstein had power of attorney over his personal financial affairs, Epstein himself had bought real estate from Wexner's portfolio at a discount. He also suffered big losses in the wake of the financial crash later-on in 2008.

But at the date of his death, he apparently still had an estate worth about $500 million. How accurate that is though we simply don’t know.

So what gave Epstein his hold over so many important, influential people? Jeffrey Epstein had power and influence because he had money. His empire once included the largest residential property in Manhattan, two sun-soaked islands and three jet planes. I have an image in my mind of Epstein as a puppet-master cynically pulling the strings of so many well-known people, a position which gave him a public persona as a global player.

Of course many of his puppets, although rich were not super rich. And, like Mandelson, they were easily fooled by Epstein into thinking that they were far more important as ‘players’ on the world stage than they were. In turn, this put them into his debt, perhaps not literally, but psychologically.

Mandelson could display his importance at the top table of politics as a cabinet minister and later as European Commissioner by providing market sensitive Information to Epstein, information apparently handed over without any substantial payment in return – or any thought as to its legality. But by providing such information to his ‘friend’, It would mean that he would remain his friend and so connected to Epstein’s big players’ world.

The ex-prince might have felt that he was not just a spare, but a person of importance, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, travelling in private jets and of course having a supply of girls available to him.

The many photographs published of so many people open up the possibility of blackmail being a factor. I doubt though that they were needed, such was the stupidity and cupidity of Epstein’s ‘marks’.

All of this was of course against a background of lavish hospitality on those private islands and the trafficking of girls.

And as we can see, money can be used to influence different sorts of people in different ways. So for those at the bottom of the heap, he created numerous philanthropic foundations designed to give grants or bursaries to people of modest means.

This meant that not only could the rich be provided with the backdrop they craved, but Ghislaine Maxwell, in order to service the rich men, was able to offer the opportunities wanted by the pretty young girls whom she approached and so draw them into the spider’s web.

They were told that they were beautiful or intelligent or both and offered what they thought they wanted – such as modelling careers or bursaries to get them through university. Except that the price they ended up paying was much higher than they expected. And now the rich and famous too are paying a higher price than they expected.

12 February 2026

Paul Buckingham