Will Peter Mandelson thrive in Trump’s Washington?

Amid the blizzard of earth-shaking Trump news, the appointment of a new British ambassador may not seem the most pressing story coming out of the nation’s capital. Yet today, Peter Mandelson will hand over his credentials to the Chief of State Protocol in Washington, DC and his arrival as His Majesty King Charles III’s man in America is certain to keep the “special relationship” gossip mill whirring for months to come. It could prove a brilliant appointment. Or it could blow up in the British government’s face. The proof will be in the diplomatic pudding.  

In getting the job, Mandelson, who missed out on being chancellor of Oxford University late last year, has seen off a full-throated campaign against his appointment by high-level sections of the Make America Great Again movement in the US and members of the Conservative and Reform parties in Britain.

In an interview in the Financial Times last week, Mandy brushed off his would-be blockers as “young minds plowing their own furrow on a sea of too much inauguration alcohol.” He also insisted that he is “not a wokey-cokey sort of person… I’m pro-market and pro-business.”

Shrewd though he undoubtedly is, Mandelson, a 1990s and 2000s centrist operator par excellence, may not have quite appreciated the true nature of his very 2020s opposition. They’re not all young — or drunk.

Around the same time that Mandelson was sitting down with the FT, Steve Bannon, the teetotal septuagenarian and pre-eminent unofficial voice of the MAGA movement, gave an interview to GB News in which he said “we’re stunned that you could send Lord Mandelson if you want to have a great relationship. I think I can probably come up with twenty people that I would pick to come over that were not Lord Mandelson… it sends a totally wrong signal to MAGA because this guy is against everything we’ve ever stood for.”

Soi-disant insiders like to say that Bannon does not really have the ear of the president, but that’s not necessarily true. Moreover, the resistance to Mandelson came from within the new administration: senior MAGA and State Department figures were troubled by his connections to China and the European Union. And yet President Trump, who is said to be more sanguine about Keir Starmer’s Britain than many of the people around him, seems less bothered.

There is a kind of perverse logic to Starmer’s decision to send Mandelson, the so-called Prince of Darkness, the man George W. Bush called “silver tongue,” to Trump’s Washington. It’s a disruptive move at a time when Trump 2.0 is turning democratic politics in the English-speaking world on its head.

Karen Pierce, the outgoing ambassador, had done good diplomatic work smoothing relations between Trumpworld and the United Kingdom. By contrast, Mandelson’s haute-globalist past — not just his business ties to China, his devotion to the EU, but his former association with the criminal sex monster Jeffrey Epstein — makes him almost perfectly antithetical to the MAGA worldview. Yet Mandelson understands how power really works and knows very well that flattery can get him almost anywhere.

In an oddly phrased statement released yesterday, he said: “President Trump’s administration is shaping up to be one of the most consequential periods in Modern America.”

And he did some groveling on Fox News earlier, saying his past criticisms of Trump were “ill-judged and wrong.” Bannon called that performance “embarrassing.” Yet for other influential Trumpworld figures, shame is an elusive concept — and Mandy’s blatant toadying actually went down well.

The times they have a-changed — but some things stay the same. Given Trump’s tempestuous fall-out with Sir Kim Darroch, the British ambassador in Washington in his first 100 days in 2017, it will be interesting to watch how Mandelson fares in the undrainable swamp that is DC.

This is an edited extract of Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which comes out every Thursday. To sign up, click here.