The decision to anoint Peter Mandelson as the UK’s chief interlocutor with the Trump Administration has introduced unnecessary drama into a potentially tense period of relations between the United States and its trans-Atlantic ally.
Labour’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had plenty of options for the posting including an array of career civil servants, former intelligence agency heads or less controversial Labour figures if he wanted to go down the political appointee road and overturn the long-held convention, observed since 1977 that Britain sends officials and not politicians to DC.
There is nothing wrong with sending political beasts to fill diplomatic roles, in fact, in most cases it is desirable. A good political appointee will have their prime minister on speed dial and share the ideological motivations of their government. They can get to work with more authority and carry an imprimatur approaching the job that a neutral civil servant can never exhibit even if they share the governing party’s views.
But that doesn’t make Peter Mandelson a wise or even suitable choice as the drama that Starmer has invited, for no reason, by appointing the Labour peer to the job demonstrated this week.
Mandelson, 71, has a long history in British politics. He began as a Labour party spin doctor in the 1980s and served in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments and resigned from cabinet twice in scandal.
Max Hastings bemoaned ever falling for Mandelson’s lies, recounting the first 1998 scandal when as editor, he forced his investigative journalists at the Evening Standard to stand down a story they were writing about Mandelson having failed to declare borrowing money from his cabinet colleague Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house.
As Hastings recalled in a column for the Times, Mandelson rang him and said: ‘“I hear you’ve got hold of a story about me getting money from Geoffrey Robinson.” “I can tell you categorically that it is untrue. I borrowed the money from my mother.”’
After the story was proven true but broken by another outlet, Mandelson again phoned Hastings.
‘What must I do to convince you that I am not a crook?’ Hastings said Mandelson asked him.
Hastings responded: ‘Your problem, Peter, is to convince me that you are not a liar.’
‘After a discernible pause, he said: “I always intended to buy the house with family money,”’ Hastings wrote.
This shiftiness has followed Mandelson like a stench. Despite his dual cabinet resignations, in 2004 he was rewarded with a posting to Brussels to serve as EU Trade Commissioner until 2008.
Here controversy followed. As the Daily Mail investigative journalist Richard Pendlebury documented, Mandelson was brought undone over the false timeline he provided about when he first met the Russian steel oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Mandelson instructed his spokesman to say that it was around 2006. But this was blown apart when it was revealed that he’d met Deripaska much earlier.
They in fact had jaunted together in January 2005 on Deripaska’s private jet to Siberia for a game of friendly football, birch slapping and sauna, and, oh a visit to Deripaska’s smelter. Mandelson was in charge of EU metals tariffs at the time.

That visit, which began with a dinner in Moscow arranged in Davos by Nat Rothschild, was exposed in glorious detail in a libel case brought by Rothschild who lost the case and in the process gave the world a glimpse into the way the elite’s influence networks operate.
Mandelson was back at this week. In a story I wrote for The Nightly, I learned that a dossier compiled by Chung Ching Kwong, a researcher at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China had been passed by concerned US Senators to the FBI ahead of the mandatory security vetting that all diplomats posted to the US, ambassadors included, must undergo to take up their posts.
This dossier was compiled using open-source information, that is information freely available on the internet, specifically the Chinese internet.
Having read this dossier, it became apparent that Mandelson had been working, through his private advisory firm Global Counsel with many Chinese companies. In one instance he was referred to as an ‘advisor’ to a Chinese-headquartered global investment bank China International Capital Corporation (CICC) and this had not been listed on his House of Lords register.
So I asked him if he was confident of passing the US security check given his business dealings in China.
His answer was astonishing.
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