> Peter Mandelson is adamant: “I’ve always been capable of being diplomatic.” Indeed, the Labour peer widely known as the Prince of Darkness, aka the Dark Lord, reveals that his sinuous skills have won the recognition of none other than President George W Bush. “Do you know what he calls me?” Mandelson asks. “Silvertongue.” All this is probably just as well, given that Mandelson has just been assigned to the most daunting job in British diplomacy: His Majesty King Charles III’s ambassador to Washington DC. He is about to become the man charged with keeping alive Churchill’s mystical “special relationship” in the era of Donald Trump.
> Gliding through the Victorian splendour of the Foreign Office in London on a late January morning, Mandelson is preparing for his latest reincarnation in a remarkable career of triumphs, mishaps, resignations and comebacks. He was not the most obvious choice for the top job in British diplomacy. He has never been a diplomat, yet he is about to take on leadership of a team of 800 and the task of managing British relations with the erratic leader of the free world. Nor are Trump and the new ambassador exactly a natural match. Mandelson, a free-trading, liberal, former EU commissioner with strong China links, last week withdrew his “ill-judged and wrong” assertion in 2019 that Trump was a “danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and racist”. Meanwhile Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign adviser, described the new ambassador as “an absolute moron” who should stay at home.
> Mandelson accepts the scale of the challenge, but insists many of his most vocal critics are not speaking for the president. “Young minds ploughing their own furrow on a sea of too much inauguration alcohol,” he purrs, a weak smile barely reaching his eyes. “Some around Mr Trump see me as they view many in Europe. They see me as a leftwing progressive, somebody who might even be anti-business or somebody who might be following the sort of liberalism they’ve just defeated in America. What they will discover is I’m not an uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and I’m pro-market and pro-business.” They will also come to know one of Britain’s most admired and loathed political operators, picked by UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer for his guile, expertise in world affairs and trade issues, and networking skills. His mission is to get in with the US president and stay there. Starmer wants Mandelson to persuade Trump to maintain the American security guarantee in Europe, build commercial ties and avert the threat of tariffs on British exports.
> Starmer is taking a big risk in appointing Mandelson, a Labour grandee whose 40-year political career has been punctuated by scandals, usually involving proximity to great wealth. Instead of opting for a solid career diplomat, he has chosen a politician who is a magnet for media attention. Mandelson insists he knows the rules of his new game: “My job is to stay below the radar, not on the radar.” Mandelson may have spent a large part of his career operating in the shadows, but he also loves the limelight. Over the course of an exclusive interview with the FT on the eve of his departure to the US, beginning at the Foreign Office and taking in a farewell dinner at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he has been chancellor for eight years, he is a mix of intrigue and insights, mischief and mastery of the political dark arts. But one question keeps recurring: can he serve his country from the sidelines and stay out of the headlines? Mandelson insists he can — that he has always proved his detractors wrong. “Aren’t I the eternal comeback kid?”
> Lord Mandelson is now 71 years old. And at times he has felt he would “really like to be a recluse”, cocooned in his home in rural Wiltshire with his husband Reinaldo Avila da Silva and his two dogs, taking walks and working out with his personal trainer (another Keir). Sometimes he feels tired in the early evenings. He is busy in London during the week but then he longs to “return from whence I came and to the sheep and cattle of the Vale of Pewsey”. There’s a twinkle in his eye as he delivers this Hardy-esque paean to English country life: the adjective “arch” was invented for him. The truth is that he has politics in his bloodstream and was never going to pass up the chance to take on the top diplomatic job, nor miss out on the comforts of the refurbished Lutyens ambassadorial residence at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue, or as he describes it, “a superb piece of architecture and diplomatic machinery, put at the service of British interests”.
> Mandelson says the Foreign Office feels like home. He first visited the grand Italianate building on King Charles Street as a child. Born in 1953 and raised in the genteel surrounds of Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London, Mandelson is the grandson of Herbert Morrison, a Labour cabinet minister and briefly foreign secretary in the Attlee government. “I love the institution,” he says. “I’ve been mixing with and working with British diplomats all my political life.” There is no resentment in the diplomatic corps, he insists, about a politician getting the Washington job. “If anything, they think it’s good for the Foreign Office, because it raises the profile and heft of both the post and the office generally. If they’d wanted someone completely anodyne, who wasn’t going to be noticed in anything they said, they would have chosen someone else.”
> He was offered the Washington job before Christmas, while recovering in hospital from an operation on an aneurysm. The news was not conveyed by the prime minister but by Mandelson’s closest ally in Downing Street, chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, a tough young Irishman who shares Mandelson’s enthusiasm for wielding power behind the scenes and purging the Labour hard left. Asked whether McSweeney has done more than anyone else, including Starmer, in clawing the Labour Party back from its leftwing former leader Jeremy Corbyn, Mandelson pauses. “I’d have to say yes. I think so highly of him.”
> McSweeney was also instrumental in persuading Starmer to give Mandelson the job, according to Downing Street insiders. The two men are ideological soulmates. Mandelson gave McSweeney, a former head of the private think-tank Labour Together, advice and backing behind the scenes during the party’s wilderness years. Labour Together threw its weight behind Starmer in the 2020 party leadership contest as the candidate most likely to lead the way back to the electorally fertile centre ground. Once installed as Starmer’s chief adviser, McSweeney was determined to put a political heavy-hitter into the DC job, establishing a direct link between Downing Street and Trump’s Washington.
> Not everyone in the diplomatic world was happy. Dame Karen Pierce, the outgoing ambassador, wanted to stay in Washington, where she had established a reputation as “the Trump Whisperer”, credited for smoothing relations between the US president and Starmer. “She did a great job,” says one UK diplomat, noting how the flamboyant Pierce was embraced by the Trump team. “But it blew up in her face. She stabilised things so well that it cleared the way for a more political person to come in.” Some in the Foreign Office believe that criticism of Mandelson in Washington has come from people in the Trump world who feel loyal to Pierce and wished she had stayed on. “Karen courted people extremely well,” the UK diplomat says.
!ping UK
HeardItBowlthWays on
> Prince of Darkness, aka the Dark Lord
I’m glad they clarified that
zanpancan on
My *slightly* corrupt King! Love my gay Blairite kitten so much!
CheeseMakerThing on
Coming across as dodgy as ever, there’s certainly lots for him and Trump to bond over though as they’ve got a lot in common
4 Comments
> Peter Mandelson is adamant: “I’ve always been capable of being diplomatic.” Indeed, the Labour peer widely known as the Prince of Darkness, aka the Dark Lord, reveals that his sinuous skills have won the recognition of none other than President George W Bush. “Do you know what he calls me?” Mandelson asks. “Silvertongue.” All this is probably just as well, given that Mandelson has just been assigned to the most daunting job in British diplomacy: His Majesty King Charles III’s ambassador to Washington DC. He is about to become the man charged with keeping alive Churchill’s mystical “special relationship” in the era of Donald Trump.
> Gliding through the Victorian splendour of the Foreign Office in London on a late January morning, Mandelson is preparing for his latest reincarnation in a remarkable career of triumphs, mishaps, resignations and comebacks. He was not the most obvious choice for the top job in British diplomacy. He has never been a diplomat, yet he is about to take on leadership of a team of 800 and the task of managing British relations with the erratic leader of the free world. Nor are Trump and the new ambassador exactly a natural match. Mandelson, a free-trading, liberal, former EU commissioner with strong China links, last week withdrew his “ill-judged and wrong” assertion in 2019 that Trump was a “danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and racist”. Meanwhile Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign adviser, described the new ambassador as “an absolute moron” who should stay at home.
> Mandelson accepts the scale of the challenge, but insists many of his most vocal critics are not speaking for the president. “Young minds ploughing their own furrow on a sea of too much inauguration alcohol,” he purrs, a weak smile barely reaching his eyes. “Some around Mr Trump see me as they view many in Europe. They see me as a leftwing progressive, somebody who might even be anti-business or somebody who might be following the sort of liberalism they’ve just defeated in America. What they will discover is I’m not an uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and I’m pro-market and pro-business.” They will also come to know one of Britain’s most admired and loathed political operators, picked by UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer for his guile, expertise in world affairs and trade issues, and networking skills. His mission is to get in with the US president and stay there. Starmer wants Mandelson to persuade Trump to maintain the American security guarantee in Europe, build commercial ties and avert the threat of tariffs on British exports.
> Starmer is taking a big risk in appointing Mandelson, a Labour grandee whose 40-year political career has been punctuated by scandals, usually involving proximity to great wealth. Instead of opting for a solid career diplomat, he has chosen a politician who is a magnet for media attention. Mandelson insists he knows the rules of his new game: “My job is to stay below the radar, not on the radar.” Mandelson may have spent a large part of his career operating in the shadows, but he also loves the limelight. Over the course of an exclusive interview with the FT on the eve of his departure to the US, beginning at the Foreign Office and taking in a farewell dinner at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he has been chancellor for eight years, he is a mix of intrigue and insights, mischief and mastery of the political dark arts. But one question keeps recurring: can he serve his country from the sidelines and stay out of the headlines? Mandelson insists he can — that he has always proved his detractors wrong. “Aren’t I the eternal comeback kid?”
> Lord Mandelson is now 71 years old. And at times he has felt he would “really like to be a recluse”, cocooned in his home in rural Wiltshire with his husband Reinaldo Avila da Silva and his two dogs, taking walks and working out with his personal trainer (another Keir). Sometimes he feels tired in the early evenings. He is busy in London during the week but then he longs to “return from whence I came and to the sheep and cattle of the Vale of Pewsey”. There’s a twinkle in his eye as he delivers this Hardy-esque paean to English country life: the adjective “arch” was invented for him. The truth is that he has politics in his bloodstream and was never going to pass up the chance to take on the top diplomatic job, nor miss out on the comforts of the refurbished Lutyens ambassadorial residence at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue, or as he describes it, “a superb piece of architecture and diplomatic machinery, put at the service of British interests”.
> Mandelson says the Foreign Office feels like home. He first visited the grand Italianate building on King Charles Street as a child. Born in 1953 and raised in the genteel surrounds of Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London, Mandelson is the grandson of Herbert Morrison, a Labour cabinet minister and briefly foreign secretary in the Attlee government. “I love the institution,” he says. “I’ve been mixing with and working with British diplomats all my political life.” There is no resentment in the diplomatic corps, he insists, about a politician getting the Washington job. “If anything, they think it’s good for the Foreign Office, because it raises the profile and heft of both the post and the office generally. If they’d wanted someone completely anodyne, who wasn’t going to be noticed in anything they said, they would have chosen someone else.”
> He was offered the Washington job before Christmas, while recovering in hospital from an operation on an aneurysm. The news was not conveyed by the prime minister but by Mandelson’s closest ally in Downing Street, chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, a tough young Irishman who shares Mandelson’s enthusiasm for wielding power behind the scenes and purging the Labour hard left. Asked whether McSweeney has done more than anyone else, including Starmer, in clawing the Labour Party back from its leftwing former leader Jeremy Corbyn, Mandelson pauses. “I’d have to say yes. I think so highly of him.”
> McSweeney was also instrumental in persuading Starmer to give Mandelson the job, according to Downing Street insiders. The two men are ideological soulmates. Mandelson gave McSweeney, a former head of the private think-tank Labour Together, advice and backing behind the scenes during the party’s wilderness years. Labour Together threw its weight behind Starmer in the 2020 party leadership contest as the candidate most likely to lead the way back to the electorally fertile centre ground. Once installed as Starmer’s chief adviser, McSweeney was determined to put a political heavy-hitter into the DC job, establishing a direct link between Downing Street and Trump’s Washington.
> Not everyone in the diplomatic world was happy. Dame Karen Pierce, the outgoing ambassador, wanted to stay in Washington, where she had established a reputation as “the Trump Whisperer”, credited for smoothing relations between the US president and Starmer. “She did a great job,” says one UK diplomat, noting how the flamboyant Pierce was embraced by the Trump team. “But it blew up in her face. She stabilised things so well that it cleared the way for a more political person to come in.” Some in the Foreign Office believe that criticism of Mandelson in Washington has come from people in the Trump world who feel loyal to Pierce and wished she had stayed on. “Karen courted people extremely well,” the UK diplomat says.
!ping UK
> Prince of Darkness, aka the Dark Lord
I’m glad they clarified that
My *slightly* corrupt King! Love my gay Blairite kitten so much!
Coming across as dodgy as ever, there’s certainly lots for him and Trump to bond over though as they’ve got a lot in common