valdavi
I feel a bit cynical about it all.
Certainly Andrew charging massages to the taxpayer as "expenses" is nauseating, & Mandy shouldn't have given Epstein the heads-up.
They both knew it was against rules so why did they do it? Almost certainly because "everyone else does it" & I don't believe every powerful player will behave in this way, but I imagine a helluva lot of them do and if their private emails were forensically excavated from decades ago, there wouldn't be many composed faces.
I do not agree that these two did what they did ^ because every one else was doing it^, although that is the motive for some people.
These two did it because they both had an overwhelming sense of their own importance. Andrew because he was a Royal Prince and the Son of The ueen of England and also, he aspired to have a standard of living that he could not afford.
Mandelson did it because he prided himself as being so much more clever and devious than anyone around him. To be fair, other people said the same. He has been known as 'The Prince of Darkness' since the mid 1980s. Even when he was found out taking loans from someone his department was investigating and other revelations he still had this overwheening confidence in his own cleverness and deviance.
