The 71-year old Peter Mandelson was recently fired as Britain’s ambassador to the US amid more revelations of his close ties with the late US financier and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
Mandelson had described the paedophile billionaire as his “best pal”, urging him in 2008 to fight his prison sentence (Epstein later died in controversial circumstances in jail in 2019). The timing of Mandelson’s sacking could not have been worse, coming a few days before a controversial state visit to Britain by US President Donald Trump.
Mandelson is remembered in the Global South as the patronising and prejudiced EU trade commissioner (2004-2008) who railroaded the signing of economic partnership agreements that forced open African, Caribbean and Pacific markets in sensitive areas. These 78 states accused Brussels of pursuing “mercantilist interests” over their own “developmental and regional interests”.
Widely known as “the Prince of Darkness” and one of the “Three Musketeers” — with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — who led “New Labour’s” modernisation between 1994 and 1997, Mandelson was Blair’s unscrupulous master of the dark arts. He was forced to resign as trade and industry secretary in 1998 after revelations that he had failed to disclose a £373,000 loan from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in London’s Notting Hill.
The warmongering Blair brought Mandelson back as Northern Ireland secretary less than a year later, starting the sharp decline of standards in British public life that would culminate in the tawdry prime ministerial buffoonery of Boris Johnson two decades later. Mandelson was forced to resign again a year later amid allegations of his role in the improper issuing of British passports to two Indian millionaire Labour donors, for which he was later exonerated. Astonishingly, Gordon Brown brought Mandelson back into cabinet for a third time as business secretary in 2008.
Mandelson was thus already damaged goods, a flawed character and amoral, spineless spin doctor with a clear lack of any ethical framework, easily seduced by wealth. His appointment as Britain’s US ambassador rightly raised questions about the judgment of accident-prone Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
On the hustings last year Starmer’s solution to managing Britain’s immigration challenges during strikingly inane debates with Rishi Sunak was to repeat ad nauseam that he would “smash the [migrant] gangs”, as if rote repetition of this mantra would somehow miraculously transform it into concrete policy.
Mandelson had previously described Trump as “a bully” and “white nationalist” who was “reckless and a danger to the world”. He would later recant these statements as “ill-judged and wrong”.
Trump was said to be wary of Mandelson’s close links to Chinese companies through his Global Counsel lobbying firm. However, the opportunistic British ambassador soon started portraying Beijing’s “technological threat” as the 21st century’s greatest challenge, which he argued Washington and London must unite to vanquish.
Trump surprisingly accepted Mandelson’s ambassadorial appointment, despite having in effect terminated Kim Darroch as British ambassador in 2019 after leaked revelations that Darroch had described the first Trump administration as “inept and insecure”.
Delusional British pundits often portrayed Mandelson as a “big hitter” and “Trump Whisperer”, exaggerating his influence in an era in which technology has rendered the role of plenipotentiaries less essential. Many Britons also continue to fantasise about a “special relationship” that has always been more special to its obsequious junior partner.
Britain likes to pride itself on having a “Rolls-Royce” diplomatic service. However, rather than a seasoned career diplomat, London instead sent a broken-down jalopy to its most important foreign posting: the first political appointee in Washington in 46 years.
Mandelson’s eight-month ambassadorial tenure was an accident waiting to happen, the chronicle of a fiasco foretold.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
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