Gossip about Lord Mandelson being sent to Washington, DC has been circulating for weeks.
“What do you call an ambassador, Peter?” he was teased at a recent social event.
“Your excellency?” someone suggested.
“Oh you wouldn’t like that, would you?” Mandelson’s old friend observed sarcastically.
On paper, Peter Mandelson is the grandest of grandees. He is also the right person for Sir Keir Starmer, in a rare flash of original thinking, to send to represent the UK in the court of Donald Trump.
Mandelson, the grandson of a Labour foreign secretary, has had high office and honours heaped upon him, and has come back from disaster many times in his long career. He is a wily operator – in his own words, “a fighter not a quitter” – dubbed “the Prince of Darkness” by both detractors and admirers for his scheming and fixing as a spin doctor.
His suitability to be the British ambassador to the US, however, lies in the less well noted of his many qualities. He is exceptionally clever, well-liked by his colleagues and those work for him. He is also a British patriot and a dedicated and humble servant of the........