Pensions secretary Torsten Bell described his brief as a gig that was “safe politically”, and an “interesting” area when it came to matters of policy, during an exchange of messages with the disgraced former Labour peer Peter Mandelson.
The message come from a second trove of documents made public following scrutiny over the decision to appoint Mandelson in spite of his previous friendship with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In the messages, Bell says to Mandelson: “I’m fine. Pensions ministering is a safe politically gig, and an interesting one policy wise. Then just help [Chancellor] Rachel [Reeves] and [Prime Minister] Keir [Starmer] out when asked on the side.”
In his role as pensions minister, Bell has been instrumental in seeing through the passing of the Pension Schemes Act, which became law in May of this year. The bill had seen pushback in Parliament on several contentious areas, including the power of government to mandate the investment practices of pension fund.
In the conversation with Mandelson, Bell also responded to the former European Commissioner for Trade’s claim that the “current government doesn’t do policy” by replying that this was “definitely true, everyone seems to think it’s someone else’s job to get the policy right… which is very odd.”