If Peter Mandelson is confirmed as our next ambassador to Washington there will be an outcry among swathes of both the right and the left of British politics. There always is when Mandelson lands a plum position. On the left, the resentment began over his transfer of allegiance from Gordon Brown to Tony Blair more than 30 years ago. But it really gained momentum after Blair parachuted him in to be Northern Ireland secretary in place of Mo Mowlam in the autumn of 1999.
Grassroots Labour mythology sprung up around the idea that Mowlam was being punished by Blair for being too popular and that Mandelson had been manoeuvring for her job. He had been sacked from the cabinet late in 1998 over his taking of a secret loan from fellow Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson.
Farage has become an unlikely cheerleader for Mandelson’s latest job search
The more prosaic truth was that Mowlam’s relationship with Unionist politicians had deteriorated to the point that it had become an impediment to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Most of the heavy lifting needed to get the deal signed in the first place had been done by Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell anyway.
Mandelson made a good pantomime villain, but in the event was rather successful during his brief tenure in the job. The Stormont Assembly, the power-sharing Northern Ireland executive and police service reform all sprang into life before Blair sacked him again, this time over the Hinduja passport affair. Later, an inquiry cleared him of wrongdoing and a no-doubt sheepish Blair supported him bowing out of the Commons to become a European Commissioner late in 2004. There were groans aplenty at this, as well as much mockery from those who recalled Mandelson declaring upon his re-election in Hartlepool at the 2001 general election that he was ‘a fighter, not a quitter’.
On the right it is his Europhilia that lies at the root of much of the hostility towards him, something heightened by his support for a second referendum to overturn Brexit. Yet Mandelson also made a success of his European Commission trade portfolio in the noughties, impressing none other than Nigel Farage with his mastery of the brief. Indeed, Farage has become an unlikely cheerleader for Mandelson’s latest job search, recalling his impressive grasp of policy detail during his Brussels years and conceding his possession of ‘a good brain’.
As well as being frontrunner in the ambassadorial stakes, Mandelson is also in the race to become the next Chancellor of Oxford University. With a characteristic degree of modesty, he has pronounced himself capable of doing both jobs at the same time.
His main rivals for the Washington role are said to be Baroness Ashton, a fellow Labour peer and former EU foreign affairs supremo, and David Miliband, the New York-based fellow Blairite whose pitch for the Labour leadership was famously thwarted by his younger brother Ed. Miliband major also has a good brain, no doubt, but seems to regard the demonstration of that as the prime objective of most functions he attends. Mandelson’s advantage is an awareness of the need to draw concessions from the person sitting on the other side of the desk.
It is largely for this reason that I find myself hoping that he gets the job. I cannot imagine a long-time Hillary Clinton fan from central casting such as Miliband endearing himself to the incoming Donald Trump administration. Mandelson, by contrast, will surely understand the key aim of a UK ambassador to the US, once inelegantly set out by the aforementioned Powell as being ‘to get up the arse of the White House and stay there’.
The grim experience of our former man in Washington Kim Darroch during the first Trump administration – he resigned shortly after getting caught being rude about Trump and then the president being rude about him right back – should remind us that handling the incoming POTUS will not be straightforward.
Selling Britain as America’s most important ally while Britain is led by a Labour government that is anathema to Trump in almost every regard will require a masterclass in diplomacy as well as a Machiavellian mind. If anyone can pull it off, Peter Mandelson can.
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