If Mandelson’s toxic legacy can wipe out a whole influence firm this fast, what else have they been doing behind those closed doors? Right, so Interpath has been appointed joint administrator to Peter Mandelson’s infamous firm Global Counsel Ltd and well, that’s going to hurt isn’t it? The firm has stopped trading, the clients have fled, and the people who thought they were buying permanence have just discovered how quickly a business built on reputation dies when the reputation turns into poison. Global Counsel has traded for years on one thing, and it isn’t genius strategy or rare insight, it’s borrowed authority. It’s access dressed up as expertise, the promise that if you pay the right people you don’t have to fight your case in public because you can fight it in rooms you’ll never see, the rooms where power and the people who wield it reside. Peter Mandelson’s name has been part of that product because he’s spent decades moving between government, Labour’s internal power games, and the corporate world that pays for those introductions. You don’t even have to hate him for this to be ugly. The point is the same: his name wasn’t decoration, it was part of what the client thought they were buying. Interpath has said the directors had “no option” but to seek administrators after a rapid loss of clients, and it has said the business has ceased to trade while options are reviewed. Those are not the words of a temporary wobble. Those are the words you use when the runway is already behind you. It also tells you the brutal truth of this industry: a public affairs firm can look healthy right up until the moment it becomes untouchable, and then it can die in weeks, not years, because the product is trust and trust is the first thing that runs when the story turns toxic.