In the course of Labour’s first year in office, Keir Starmer has been very energetic and effective in one particular area: he’s very good at getting rid of people who fall out of favour for a variety of reasons. Angela Rayner is only the latest. Before her, he sacked health minister Andrew Gwynne. Others who have been forced to step down include Rushanara Ali, Vicky Foxcroft, Anneliese Dodds,Tulip Siddiq, and Louise Haigh.
But while most of these Labour politicians may not be household names, there is one very well known Starmer appointee who for reasons I cannot fathom remains in office.
I’m thinking about the British ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson.
With Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K. coming up later this month, Mandelson’s remarks in a recent speech have received considerable media attention.
“The president may not follow the traditional rulebook or conventional practice, but he is a risk-taker in a world where a ‘business as usual’ approach no longer works,” he said
Trump, Mandelson declared, “seems to have an ironclad stomach for political risk, both at home and abroad – convening other nations and intervening in conflicts that other presidents would have thought endlessly about before descending into an analysis paralysis and gradual incrementalism.”
I am not making this up. No “analysis paralysis” from this president, whatever that means.
The reference to “other presidents” is really quite astonishing, considering that all the steps toward peace in the Middle East from the Camp David Accord through the Oslo Accords were achieved by Democratic presidents. Or that NATO, the bedrock of European security that has prevented a third world war for three quarters of a century, was created when Democrats controlled the White House. One wonders which “other presidents” Mandelson had in mind, the ones who “thought endlessly” unlike Trump, who seems hardly to think at all.
To give a concrete example of Trump’s vision, Mandelson said of Ukraine that this was “where the president has brought fresh energy to efforts to end Putin’s brutal invasion and bring peace to that region.” By “fresh energy” the Ambassador was probably thinking of Trump’s recent failed summit with Putin in Alaska — an event now widely understood to have been a clear win for the Russian President as he unleashes an unprecedented series of drone and missile attacks against civilian targets in Kyiv. Meanwhile, European countries, including the UK, are scrambling to repair the damage and shore up Ukraine’s defences.
Mandelson adores Trump and fawns over him. “He will not always get everything right,” he admits, “but with his Sharpie pen and freewheeling Oval Office media sprays he has sounded a deafening wake-up call to the international old guard.”
Are these the views of the British government? One hopes that they are not.
The job of a British ambassador in Washington is to represent the views of our elected government here on issues like Ukraine and Gaza to the Trump administration. It is not to act as a spokesman for the administration, defending its record.
Of course diplomats are supposed to act, well, diplomatic. But Mandelson has gone far beyond his remit here. His remarks are foolish, ignorant, deeply offensive and designed, one imagines, to drawn attention to himself — as he has very successfully done.
So what is Keir Starmer waiting for? Our ambassador to Washington has gone completely rogue and it is time to add him to growing list of senior Labour figures the Prime Minister has had to sack. And the sooner, the better.
This column appears in this week’s issue of Solidarity.