Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 16th February 2025.
Is that brimstone I can smell? Has someone lit the hand of glory again? Because someone in Westminster must have been practising the dread necromantic arts this week. The political dead are afoot – and they walk abroad amongst us.
In the choice of his principal emissary to the golden court of the mad emperor, Sir Keir Starmer would have had his pick of eminently appointable mandarins and Foreign Office lifers. For your ambitious diplomat, the role of Britain’s pre-eminent mouthpiece in Washington presumably remains a coveted gig. The accommodation is superior. You have a proximity to power and history inaccessible to the stipendiary British consul for remoter rocks in the Pacific. In this case, you also have a ringside seat for whatever happens next. Many ambitious people like a challenge.
If Starmerism had or has any political core to it – and if you find yourself slurping your morning coffee sceptically at that, I don’t blame you – then it was a pitch to put the professionals back in charge. Sir Keir offered a commitment to stable rule by a middle aged and dutiful apparatchik class, embodied best by the PM himself – the career prosecutor turned MP, who thinks ideological commitments in a politician are the sign of an insufficiently flexible mind, and who imagines that saying things like “I just want to get things done” smacks of just the kind of plain home cooking and common sense Britons are crying out for.
Policy, pragmatism and service, he said, were the watchwords of a Labour government which wanted to “tread more lightly” on people’s lives. Unless, I suppose, you are an irregular migrant, a recipient of social security, or smoke cannabis in urban areas – in which case you may find the British state will be doing considerably more treading on your life. All for the benefit of the Home Office cameramen capturing the suffering human face of the latest crackdown, you understand.
But instead of putting the bureaucracy back in charge of the bureaucracy, for his American emissary, Sir Keir decided to strangle the black cockerel, circle the cauldron three times in an anti-clockwise direction – and has reached into the underworld to pull Peter Mandelson back into public consciousness as the UK’s ambassador to the United States in a cloud of ozone and sulphur.
Start with a very simple question. Who exactly is this appointment for? What is it intended to communicate politically? As for Lord Mandelson himself, sleek and assured in his ambassadorial chair, he looks pleased as punch that Trump has decided to accept his credentials this week and he can start having people call him “his excellency” again. But expand our circle of concern beyond this constituency of one – and the decision looks much more perplexing.
To suggest there’s been less than a full-throated clamour for Mandelson’s return might be what Americans call British understatement. Insofar as Mandelson retains any purchase on the public consciousness, it is as the walking, talking, scheming essence of everything that was unattractive about the New Labour project. It is tempting to psychologise the role he played in Blair’s team. Unable to recognise any of the darkness in himself, Mandelson seems to have become the spiritual receptacle for all the shadow matter Tony couldn’t accommodate in his idea of self.
During the early stages of the French revolution, a craggier politician observed the infant Robespierre speaking and judged that “that man will go far” because “he believes everything he says.”
Mandelson’s career is a monument to precisely the opposite political insight – demonstrating how far you can climb by disbelieving everything you say. Henry Wotton memorably defined an ambassador as “an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” In those terms at least, I have to admit Mandelson is at least partly qualified for his new job stateside.
But like all politicians dubbed The Prince of Darkness, Mandelson and his fans seem to confuse a clear facility for telling brazen lies – while looking like you’re lying, and enjoying lying, to an audience who knows you’re lying – with political talent.
If you take the Hooded Claw as your spirit animal, if you obvious revel in everyone thinking you are forked-tongued, cheerfully dishonest, and infinitely flexible in your views and commitments, if you are capable only of managed self-presentation and your relationship with others seems almost exclusively characterised by a transactional and manipulative attitude – then you’ve basically translated from an pathological political operator into a pantomime villain.
But in American terms, there’s also the humiliation value of this appointment. Trump reputedly enjoys watching his former critics recant and bend the knee. Pre-eminent in that regard is his new vice-president JD Vance, who secured Pence’s vacant VP spot on the ticket by disavowing all his previous criticisms of the terracotta Weeble and his plans for the United States and the world.
Recognising that this is the price of doing business with this White House, the serpentine Mandelson has cheerfully rearranged his coils with no sign of regret whatever, telling Fox News that “I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong,” he slurped. “I think that times and attitudes toward the president have changed since then.” His mortifying grovel is worth relating in full:
“I think people have been impressed not just by the extraordinary second mandate that he has received from the American people, but the dynamism and energy with which he approached not just the campaign but government as well. I think that he has won fresh respect. He certainly has from me, and that is going to be the basis of all the work I do as His Majesty’s ambassador in the United States.”
If that doesn’t make your skin crawl, nothing will. But these deeply embarrassing and unnecessary contortions are only necessary because Sir Keir Starmer decided this New Labour ghoul is once again the indispensable man.
I should say – other explanations for the pick are available. A native impulse for Labour party factionalism, backstabbing, and a quotable turn of phrase can turn you into every political reporter’s favourite contact. Another theory about Mandelson’s elevation is that it is intended to banish one of the Starmer government’s anonymous critics to the outer darkness – sparing the struggling party some bad headlines based on the latest indiscretion “senior Labour sources” feed the lobby. But if the only way you can think of to convince a leaky party grandee to stop sending journalists anonymous briefings against you is to make them your ambassador to Washington – well, I have questions.
If you aren’t entirely persuaded political life in Britain looked like an episode of Tales from the Crypt this week, former Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander turned up in London on Thursday to collect the peerage she has inexplicably been given.
The newly-gazetted Baroness of Cleveden was solemnly trudged into the House of Lords by Helen Liddell – a throwback among Scottish Labour throwbacks, looking characteristically gloomy despite the Santa suit she was wearing.
I’ll leave you to formulate your own gags about the intellectual contortions needed to convince your average democratic socialist that the fight for social justice absolutely requires them to accept reactionary feudal titles and to add scarlet and stoat to colour-palette they wear regularly. If experience is anything to go by, ex-Labour politicians yield remarkably easily to the charms of a magic name and £361-a-day job for life. It is unstunning that Alexander is no exception.
But again I ask you, who precisely is this kind of appointment meant to please? Who is the audience for this? What are the punters meant to make of the Starmer government’s sudden impulse to dig through Scottish Labour’s history of losers and failures, dishing out gongs to folk who ensured their party was unelectable twenty years ago?
In Alexander’s case, the timing also couldn’t be more political insensitive. Since she left frontline politics, Alexander has been working in the University sector. She has been vice-principal for international at the University of Dundee for just under a decade.
Dundee is currently in institution in acute crisis. The discovery of a £30 million deficit in the university’s accounts last December prompted the immediate departure of the institution’s principal, who had recently been written up for splurging over seven grand on international travel among other expenses.
Reports of Wendy Alexander’s exit from the university executive which presided over this deficit came just one week after Dundee revealed plans for huge job cuts to plug the multi-million black hole in its budgets.
Wendy must be tickled pink by the ermine parachute her party has stitched up for her, allowing her to float away from the wreckage of an institution she was a core leader of for a decade, just as staff and students are asking searching questions about the strategic choices that executive team made, and how they contributed to putting this critical civic institution in its present awful predicament.
But this being the UK, none of this apparently matters and almost nobody is mean enough to taint this exciting personal milestone by raising awkward questions.
Andrew Tickell 