What are the Mandelson Files?

The Mandelson Files are 505 documents released by the UK government under a House of Commons Humble Address (HC 1774) concerning the appointment and subsequent removal of Lord Mandelson as HM Ambassador to Washington. They cover his links to Jeffrey Epstein, Cabinet Office due diligence, a £75,000 severance, communications with No.10 and WhatsApp threads with ministers. They were released in two volumes: Volume I on 11 March 2026 and Volume II on 1 June 2026.

Where can I read and search the Mandelson Files online?

Data Dump News provides a free, full-text searchable explorer of all 505 HC 1774 documents at datadump.news/mandelson.html, with a timeline, a who's-who and visual tools. Every document links to its official government source PDF so you can verify the text against the original.

How much was Mandelson's severance payout?

The documents record a £75,000 severance: £40,329.50 in lieu of notice and a £34,670.50 special payment. The underlying settlement papers are linked to their official source PDF in the explorer.

When was Mandelson Files Volume II released?

Volume II was released on 1 June 2026 under the same HC 1774 Humble Address, adding over 1,000 further pages including WhatsApp and email threads with Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden and material on the DV-clearance vetting gap.

About this resource. This is an independent, non-partisan index of the documents the UK Government released in response to the House of Commons Humble Address of 4 February 2026 concerning Lord Mandelson's appointment as HM Ambassador to Washington. It adds no commentary. Every item links to the original government PDF so you can read the primary source yourself. Some text is recovered by automated OCR and some summaries are auto-generated — these may contain errors; verify against the source before quoting.

The documents, organised and searchable

505 released documents across two volumes — emails, letters, WhatsApp messages, meeting records and official advice — every one linked back to the official source on GOV.UK.

Key facts, with sources

Timeline

What is not in these documents

Material the Government judged prejudicial to national security or international relations was referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee and withheld; redactions were directed on 5 March 2026.
Routine redactions remove junior officials' names, third-party personal data, legal professional privilege, and some of Lord Mandelson's personal data.
Reporting indicates some cleared documents may be held back at the request of the Metropolitan Police.
This site indexes what was published; absence of a document here does not imply anything about its contents.

All documents

Who's who

Named individuals appearing across the documents, with the job titles recorded in the papers. Click anyone to see their documents.

Visual tools

Three ways to explore the same primary-source material. Each is reconstructed from the published documents and links back to the originals.

MAP

Conversation network map

Who communicated with whom across all 505 documents — an interactive force-directed graph, filterable by organisation, channel and date.

WA

WhatsApp thread viewer

The 36 WhatsApp / text-message threads (1,130 messages) rendered as readable chat conversations, verbatim from the documents.

@

DD-Mail

341 emails in a familiar mailbox layout, with full text (recovered by OCR where needed) and a link to each source page.

About, method & sources

What this is

An independent, non-commercial-origin index built to make a large public document release easier to read. It takes no editorial position. It is not affiliated with the UK Government, Lord Mandelson, or any party.

Sources

Method

Primary text is extracted directly from the published PDFs where they contain machine-readable text.
Scanned pages (a large share of the release) are converted using automated optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is accurate but not perfect — it can mis-read names and characters.
Summaries on some items are generated automatically and are indicative only.
Redactions in the source are shown as REDACT. This site never attempts to reconstruct redacted text.

Licence & reuse

The source documents are Crown copyright, released under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits reuse (including commercial) with attribution. The original-value additions on this site (the index, structuring, tools and summaries) may be reused under CC BY 4.0 — please credit and link back.

Corrections

Spotted an OCR error or mis-attribution? Corrections welcome at newsdesk@datadump.news.

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