Record of MI6/SIS head dining with Epstein scrubbed from Daily Mail site

A Daily Mail article that reported the then-head of the Special Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS), along with his wife and disgraced former royal Andrew, dining with serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein – after Epstein was convicted of paedophilia – has disappeared from the Mail’s website. And from all archiving services.

The Mail reported in 2015 that:

In February 2011, the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, and his wife, Shelley, attended a dinner party at Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in New York, an event also attended by Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell. ​ This meeting was first revealed by The Mail on Sunday in 2015, sparking controversy due to the security risks of the intelligence chief associating with a known sex offender.

Why did the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers attend a dinner with Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew at Epstein’s New York townhouse, after Epstein had been convicted of child sex abuse?

Why did Sawers go on to broker a deal between Palantir and UK govt, in 2019?

We need answers pic.twitter.com/vf9zcSP20k

— Jon Harding (@_i0n) February 19, 2026

Screenshot saved here in case the original X post is deleted.

Epstein meeting article seems to disappear

However, the url for that article – https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2894345/Head-MI6-dined-paedophile-billionaire-Jeffrey-Epstein-s-townhouse-Prince-Andrew-massage-girl-friend.html – now routes to an anodyne article about billionaire Elon Musk’s electric vehicles. The change appears to have been a rewrite of the page and a re-routing of the original link to the ‘new’, bland one:

Jon Harding, who noted the original 2015 post while it was still active, pointed out yesterday that the post is now gone and asked – presumably rhetorically – “Why would MI6 want to scrub this”.

Head of MI6 dined at paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse with Prince Andrew and his ‘massage girl’ friend

Author: Simon Walters

Date: January 3, 2015

Original URL (Likely Broken): https://t.co/r5LoCRjU5l

Why would MI6 want to scrub this

— Jon Harding (@_i0n) March 7, 2026

(Screenshot here).

While the post was still live, Harding pointed out that AI platforms, including X’s ‘Grok’, both confirmed the Sawers-Epstein reports one day – but the next, were acting as if they’d never heard of it:

Grok only wants to talk about this, todayhttps://t.co/zkeiXcfvRU pic.twitter.com/NZJFr1Wi6W

— Jon Harding (@_i0n) February 21, 2026

Web searches and searches of archive.org and archive.li similarly now reveal zero relevant results, except for pointers back to Harding’s threads – with the archiving sites merely offering an option to save the now-scrubbed replacement:

John Sawers later brokered a deal between the UK government and notorious US spy firm Palantir, a company whose founders appear around 4,500 times in the Epstein files released so far – reportedly only around two percent of the total.

Sawers also appears in the latest files released, with a redacted sender emailing Epstein with a link to a Telegraph article mentioning Sawer meeting with Ehud Barak, a close associate of Epstein whom now-deceased victim Virginia Giuffre accused of raping her – apparently brutally.

Sawers is now an adviser at arms industry-funded, security services-aligned think-tank Chatham House and a visiting professor at the Israel-aligned King’s College London.

Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli spy as well as serial rapist and trafficker or children and young women, and almost certainly even worse. He was convicted of paedophilia in 2008, three years before the reported dinner with Sawer and his wife.

Read Jon Harding’s threads here and here, as long as they remain online.

Skwawkbox writer Steve Walker is not, never has been, and never will be suicidal and does not use drugs.

Featured image via the Canary