IT IS the pantomime season.

That is the only plausible explanation for the news that Britain is going into 2025 with its strategy for averting being embroiled in inter-imperialist conflict pivoting on a partnership of Peter Mandelson and Nigel Farage.

This combo is the pantomime horse from hell, uniting the progenitor of New Labour with the ascending leader of right-wing nationalist populism.

Mandelson and Farage are to be charged, it appears, with dissuading the incoming President Trump from being too beastly to Britain as he threatens trade wars with US allies across the globe.

The two men — indeed, all three — could bond over a shared hatred of socialism and a weakness for the filthy rich.

Whether Mandelson, our new man at the embassy in Washington, and Farage, our old bloke at the bar of Mar-a-Lago, can persuade the America-Firster in the Oval Office to cut Britain some slack when it comes to dishing out trade sanctions may seem doubtful.

Certainly Trump is in the mood for conflict. War by Twitter and tariff has been declared.

“When goods don’t cross borders, armies will,” the old saying — attribution disputed — goes, and it errs only in attributing too much pacific consequences to free trade.

But Trump has all ends covered. The only issue seems to be which border he has in mind for his first intrusion.

So, one cheerful scenario for 2025: Nato states have to activate their mutual defence clause — against the United States, as Trump attacks alliance member Denmark in order to seize Greenland.

He has declared the vast territory as vital to US security interests.  Having failed in a scheme to purchase it during his first term in office, Trump no longer seems to be planning on paying.

There is the Panama Canal, which he is demanding be returned to US control despite having relinquished it by treaty with Panama many years ago. Trump is desirous of redeeming it from a Chinese occupation which no-one else in the world had noticed.

There also seems to be some issue involving a hotel and taxes in the background.

And then spare a thought for Canada, which the president-elect is trying to charm by referring to its premier, who has enough troubles of his own, as “governor” of what should be the 51st state in the union.

In the context of all this land-grabbing, import duties on Scotch whisky and other British goods may look like this country is getting off lightly.

However, Keir Starmer very much does not want his final flickering hopes of economic growth to go up in the flames of a transatlantic trade war. 

Nor does he wish to have to choose between Britain’s war alliance with Washington and making up with the European Union being, to quote Boris Johnson, very much in favour of having his cake and eating it.

Enter our lurid duo of Mandelson and Farage, who one could make a case for saying have had more impact on our national politics than almost anyone else over the last 30 years. Mostly for ill, it should be added.

The one speaks to the terminal disorientation of social democracy, its mortification at the hands of neoliberalism. The other to the populist sleight-of-hand, to the draping of the power of money in the raiment of cultural retribution.

Mandelson is most at home on an oligarch’s boat while Farage is, believe it or not, a brand ambassador for a gold bullion firm among other gigs.

They are both skilled and sinuous flatterers, experienced butlers to the less scrupulous representatives of the international bourgeoisie. They shake hands over the tomb of democracy, with the cringe before the rich man’s frown their natural resting face.

They are therefore made for the court of King Donald and its times.  The adoration of these wise men following the star of British finance capital from afar would be a painting worthy of Leonardo Da Vinci, although perhaps Hieronymus Bosch would do just as well.

It all has a rather last days of Rome ambience to it. Mandelson and Farage are the sort of deracinated figures that emerge as politics becomes the mystification of a system in terminal decay, as rouge applied to the cheeks of the dying.

They may secure scraps from the table as the imperialist powers fall on each others’ throats, with tariffs the first squall. But that these two can stop the impending conflict, or keep Britain out of it — no, that is too much even for the panto season.

It’s not behind you. It’s staring us in the face. Imperialism means war, and we now have the first pantomime horsemen of the apocalypse.

Centrist drips

2024 sprung several surprises.

A Tory leader launched an election campaign in a downpour without an umbrella, and then proceeded to the Titanic Centre for his next act, a saturated study in cluelessness.

The Reform party apparently overtook the Tories in terms of mass membership.

Keir Starmer’s Labour secured fewer votes than under Corbyn at his worst, never mind his 2017 peak.

Starmer then became the least popular newly elected prime minister in history, and in record time.

Labour and Tory aggregated can now claim the support of little more than half the electorate, and an electorate little disposed to vote in many cases at that.

Internationally, an election was held in France, and the losers then formed the government.

But perhaps the real harbinger of things to come was in Romania, where an election result was cancelled because Establishment judges did not like the result, blaming it on too much TikTok.

When centrists claim that the political choice is between democracy and populist authoritarianism, think on that.

All this has a common root. Liberal centrism is flogging an economic system so expired, in terms of capacity to satisfy the people, that it makes Monty Python’s parrot look like an exemplar of vitality.

Its cohesion appears to come from the negative virtue of not being right-wing populists — that and war, with prolonging the Ukraine conflict and sustaining Israel’s genocide in Palestine being global centrism’s particular calling cards.

So little wonder that voting is no longer working so well for its remaining advocates. Who will next follow where the Romanian Supreme Court has led?

Tories trailing

I ASKED an intelligent and generally clued-up young person what her peer group thought about Kemi Badenoch.

“Who’s that?” she responded.

No-one asks that about Nigel Farage. The Tories are a long way off a comeback.