When Peter Mandelson was appointed HM Ambassador to Washington, Chris LaChivita, Trump’s campaign manager, was aghast. Mandelson, he fumed, is “an absolute moron”.
That’s terribly unfair. Lord Mandelson isn’t an absolute moron, nor even a relative one. Credit where it’s due, he is much worse.
LaChivita’s epithet would more appropriately describe the man who appointed to that post someone demonstrably unsuited for it. What was Starmer thinking of, other than his gold-plated pension?
He did have a conundrum on his hands, let’s agree on that. The incoming US president sees life in terms of personal relationships conducive to making deals. Sir Keir certainly knew this. What he didn’t know was how to find within Labour ranks a mandarin or any other fruit likely to be accepted by Trump as someone to do business with.
Starmer probably went over the transcripts of the speeches on Trump made by various Labour heavyweights. Alas, if he hoped to find one that would make Trump smile, that hope must have been quickly frustrated.
Lowering his sights, Starmer must have then begun to look for derogative statements that showed some restraint. The bar set by our top diplomat, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, wasn’t high. He described Trump as: “Racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser… a troll… beneath contempt… a tyrant in a toupee… a profound threat to the international order.”
Compared to that, Mandelson’s own diatribe sounded like an epitome of moderation. He only described Trump as a “danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and racist”. Little short, but still short! Ideally, it should have been “way short’, but beggars can’t be choosers. Starmer found his candidate.
The next day he announced that Mandelson would bring “unrivalled experience” to the role and take the UK’s partnership with the US “from strength to strength”.
It’s true that Trump may sometimes overlook uncomplimentary things said about him if the utterer has since redeemed himself in his eyes. JD Vance, for example, once described Trump as “America’s Hitler”, but was still chosen as his running mate, presumably a sort of Trump answer to Rudolf Hess.
However, Vance’s own politics are close to Trump’s, and anyway he recognised the error of his ways long ago, becoming one of Trump’s staunchest allies in the Senate. Hence his unfortunate slip of the tongue was overlooked. Trump is nothing if not a pragmatist, and he knows from personal experience how easy it is sometimes to shoot from the lip.
However, as Terence once wrote, “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi”, which can be loosely translated as, “What Vance can get away with, Mandelson can’t”.
For Lord Mandelson stands for everything Trump loathes in modern politics. Mandelson’s picture belongs in the MAGA dictionary, illustrating the entry for ‘deep-state globalist’. As Trump and his acolytes use those terms, they are fully synonymous with ‘the devil incarnate’.
Mandelson was one of the architects of New Labour, an election-winning term he might have invented. With him guiding Blair’s hand, Labour came to power and embarked on a rampage of constitutional vandalism not yet outdone by any subsequent government, although I fancy Starmer’s chances.
When Mandelson’s corrupt practices came to light, he was thrown out of government on several occasions, but each time he bounced back like a bad penny, or rather a bad euro, to name his beloved monetary unit.
For Mandelson is among the most fanatical Europhiles in British politics, a man who has pushed for a second referendum when the first one had not delivered the result he wanted. He continued to campaign for ‘closer ties’ with Europe, meaning a return to the EU, during the Tory years, and between 2004 and 2008 he served as European Trade Commissioner.
That CV doubtless endeared him to Starmer, yet Starmer’s meat is Trump’s poison. Trump correctly sees the EU as the quintessence of ‘deep-state globalism’. “Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.” More to the point, repudiation of America is one of the EU’s defining features.
Since Trump is lukewarm even on foreign countries visibly friendly to America, never mind those he sees as latently hostile, he is unlikely to treat Mandelson with friendly equanimity. But that’s only part of it.
Mandelson’s “unrivalled experience” is guaranteed to make Trump see red for another reason as well. For Mandelson isn’t only a Europhile but also a Sinophile. As President of international think tank Policy Network and honorary president of the Great Britain-China Centre, he has done his utmost to establish China’s outposts in Britain, trying to deliver even some of Britain’s strategic industries to Xi’s communists.
Rightly or wrongly, Trump sees China as the greatest threat to America’s interests, and in fact the thrust of his foreign and international trade policy is to diminish China’s global influence. Hence Trump’s protectionist policies, ill-advised though they are on purely economic grounds, have a strong strategic aspect.
He probably realises that slapping 40 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports, and 20 per cent ones on everyone else’s, will hurt American consumers. But he is hoping that, where America will bleed, China – and the EU – will exsanguinate. Alas, Britain, though she still belongs to neither China nor the EU (which Trump calls “socialist mini-China”), will be collateral damage in this planned trade war.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has calculated that such tariffs will lead to a 0.8 per cent drop in GDP growth next year, cutting a £21.5 billion hole in our budget. Britain will thus be squeezed by the jaws of a trade vice, with pressure applied from across both the Channel and the Atlantic.
Since Britain has always been America’s most (only?) reliable ally in Europe, in theory there should exist a realistic hope of a trade deal making the UK exempt from the more extreme manifestations of Trump’s protectionist zeal.
Yet that hope is guaranteed to be forlorn for as long as our diplomatic relations with Trump’s administration are in the hands of Lammy and Mandelson – and as long as Britain remains a lapdog to China, hoping to become a lapdog to the EU as well.
Mandelson, to be fair to him, is one of the sharpest political operators of recent decades, a chap who is a spin post-doctor, not just doctor. He is certainly not an ‘absolute moron’, if the term is to be used precisely. He is, however, an evil, utterly corrupt opportunist, who, more to the point, represents everything Trump detests.
Picking a better candidate for the post of HM Ambassador to the US would have been dead easy, but Starmer isn’t a man to look for easy solutions. Instead he chose the worst candidate imaginable, and it takes special talent to do that. Britain’s future is in safe hands.