PETER MANDELSON is to be Keir Starmer’s chosen ambassador to the court of Donald Trump.
No 10 sources brief the PM is picking a political heavyweight with decades of experience in trade relations — which could be stormy under an incoming president vowing to slap tariffs on imports from rivals and allies alike.
An unspoken subtext points to what Mandelson certainly has decades of experience of: fawning on the super-rich.
Ethical considerations weigh little with him: the JP Morgan bank filed reports in a US court last year, amid lawsuits concerning its own dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, which named Lord Mandelson alongside Prince Andrew as the British figures the dead paedophile was closest to, reporting that Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan house even while the child abuser was in prison for soliciting a minor.
Starmer’s indifference to such a record speaks to the moral vacuum at the heart of his politics, but a cynic might see it as an additional qualification.
Trump, after all, was also friendly with Epstein. And a key figure in his administration will be the world’s richest man Elon Musk. A lifetime schmoozing rich crooks will leave Mandelson feeling right at home.
We should still raise hell about this appointment, however, and what it tells us about the direction of the Starmer government.
On whose behalf will Mandelson cosy up to Trump? Politicians who court tycoons rarely do so in the “national interest.”
Mandelson has been embroiled in conflict of interest scandals before, twice having to resign from the Blair cabinet, and being accused of giving Russian aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska trade concessions after partying with him and then shadow chancellor George Osborne on a yacht in the Mediterranean back in 2008: one of those sordid episodes that expose the nexus of wealth and power that corrupts both Britain’s parties of government.
The risk is high that Mandelson’s root commitment to privatisation combines with Starmer’s desperation to keep close to a volatile president, happy to threaten trade wars, results in a surrender of our interests to US oligarchs.
We know from Trump’s Project 2025 that his administration wants NHS services to be on the table in any trade deal.
We know that Musk, tasked with shredding US “bureaucracy,” is hostile to all regulations or restrictions on corporate activity — he has joined a lawsuit to have the US National Labour Relations Board itself ruled unconstitutional, in his mission to smash unions and employment law.
He’s on record supporting the armed overthrow of elected governments if it benefits corporate interests (“we will coup whoever we want,” he tweeted after the Bolivian military overthrew Evo Morales) and he takes a public interest in promoting the British far right, mulling an unprecedented $100 million donation to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
And Starmer’s answer to this is to appoint the world’s second-ranking Blairite after Blair himself to suck up to these people.
Already European leaders’ response to the threat of Trump is to offer him whatever he wants. EU chief Ursula von der Leyen says we could ramp up fracked shale gas imports in return for being spared tariffs; the environment can go hang. Leader after leader pledges ever more money for the US-controlled Nato war alliance, if only Washington won’t cut us loose.
The “special relationship” has been disastrous enough in the past, drawing Britain into horrendous crimes like the invasion of Iraq.
We now have a Labour government preparing to do whatever it takes to appease a hostile, hard-right US regime eyeing up our public assets while actively encouraging the British far right.
We don’t need a Blair-era relic determined to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there,” as Blair told his own ambassador to the US.
We need an independent foreign policy and a government prepared to stand up to Trump. This appointment shows we have neither.
