When Mandelson met Maga: how Labour lord charmed Trump’s inner circle

Peter Mandelson was in his element. Lounging on a sofa one June evening at Butterworth’s, a bistro serving as the gastronomical centre of the Maga movement in Washington DC, the recently appointed British ambassador was being honoured with a plaque that indicated he was easing his way into the conservative circles around Donald Trump.

The appointment of Mandelson, an architect of Tony Blair’s New Labour project in the 1990s, had not been without controversy. He was the first political ambassador to the United States in almost half a century and had twice resigned from Labour governments in the past over scandals (not to mention his past association with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein).

So he would have to move quickly to replace the well-sourced expertise of his predecessor and build ties with a new administration that had upended all the rules of the traditional Washington establishment.

Mandelson managed that by leaning into the heady conservative politics surrounding the US president, working old contacts in Trump’s circles of businessmen and courting the new media right. Surrounded by conservative journalists that evening, he said that, while the two leaders’ politics may differ, both Trump and UK prime minister Keir Starmer were riding the same political winds of upheaval.

Both had received mandates, he said that evening according to British media reports in the Times, from “angry people who felt they were being unheard by mainstream politics” and were “angry about the cost of living, angry about uncontrolled immigration and angry about uncontrolled woke culture spreading across institutions”.

It was a textbook performance for the once-dubbed “Prince of Darkness” who was testing the lines between ambassadorial deference and open flattery. In public, a favourite adjective for Trump was neutral but weighty: “consequential”. In private, he tended away from criticism of the new administration, even as the White House leaned toward Vladimir Putin and flirted with authoritarian measures at home.

His firing now amid new details of the Epstein scandal – one that the Trump administration has sought to outrun – plays out just days before Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom, when Starmer must seek to influence Trump over the war in Ukraine, continue negotiations over a US-UK trade deal, deflect concern over a potential UK recognition of Palestine, and more.

“[Mandelson] has his own independent stature and status, and that was a good thing, but it carried risks, and now it’s gone wrong,” said Alexandra Hall Hall, a former British diplomat who resigned while serving as lead envoy for Brexit in the US in 2019. “And now it’s gone wrong on the worst possible topic at the worst possible time.”

In Washington, the British ambassador’s Edwin Lutyens-designed residence, where Mandelson lived with his partner and “diplo-dog” Jock, hosted parties that saw an influx of the new conservative media elite in Washington. At a White House Correspondents’ Dinner co-hosted by the Daily Mail in June, new media influencers like Natalie Winters, seen as a protege of the rightwing firebrand Steve Bannon, rubbed shoulders with established journalists from across the media spectrum. It reflected the White House’s own inclusion of conservative bloggers among accredited correspondents as a counterweight to a perceived liberal bias among the media.

At a celebration for King Charles’s birthday that month, Mandelson wryly inserted jokes about Trump as guests mingled among cigar and whiskey stations, drawing laughs as he recognised a leader “associated with grand ceremonies and golden aesthetics. So happy birthday, President Trump”.

It is precisely what Mandelson was sent to Washington DC to do: charm the Maga faithful around Trump while bringing the political heft that would allow a UK envoy to negotiate in the name of the prime minister.

He replaced Dame Karen Pierce, a veteran diplomat who was already a regular at Mar-a-Lago and one of the best-sourced foreign ambassadors in Trumpworld. Some, like Bannon, had rejected Mandelson as a “terrible choice” because of his past remarks about Trump and links to establishment politics in the UK.

Yet Mandelson proved the doubters wrong, as at least one conservative outlet put it. His main success was the outlines of a US-UK trade deal, which was feted at an Oval Office meeting with Trump where Mandelson was complimented by Trump for his “beautiful accent” and given the floor in a rare show of deference to a foreign ambassador.

The White House team around him laughed as he described Trump’s “typical 11th-hour intervention by you with your phone call demanding even more out of this deal than any of us expected”. He then channelled Winston Churchill as he added: “For us it is not the end, it’s the end of the beginning.”

His absence will be noted as Trump arrives in the United Kingdom for the controversial state visit that Mandelson’s quick-found relationship with the US president could have helped to smooth.

After the Oval Office meeting with Trump, Mandelson left with a souvenir – a handwritten note in Trump’s distinctive marker scrawl and unmistakeable signature.

“Peter,” it read. “Great Job!”