“[His Majesty’s Ambassador to] Washington is one of, if not the, most important overseas Ambassadorial post,” Cabinet Secretary Simon Case wrote to the Prime Minister in November 2024. “This is due to the central importance of the relationship with the US to the UK’s national interest” he continued. “HMA Washington has a large team of over 1000 UK based and locally engaged staff spread across the US presenting UK interests, composed of several Consulate Generals as well as the Embassy in Washington where most government departments have direct representation as well as many embedded within US institutions.”
In a nutshell, here is what the civil service thought was at stake when Keir Starmer was deciding who to appoint to be his ambassador to the new Trump administration. The files released by the Cabinet Office lay bare the anxiety within the civil service at putting the so-called special relationship at risk. Case laid out the dilemma facing the Prime Minister: whether to take a risk and appoint a politician like Peter Mandelson to the post, or to play it safe and give the job to a career civil servant. The gamble was that Mandelson would be more creative than a civil servant at connecting with the administration. The civil service report cites that Mandelson had described Nigel Farage as “a bridgehead, both to President Trump and to Elon Musk and others”. Indeed, Farage told me on Saturday that he had said to Mandelson when he was appointed – “to his face” – that he was willing to help behind the scenes in any way possible. Those offers of help went unheeded.
Mandelson’s appointment carried risks beyond his association with Epstein. It was asked in Washington at the time why Karen Pierce, Mandelson’s ebullient predecessor, could not stay on. She was trusted by the Trump team because she was seen as unideological and pragmatic. As one Maga figure put it to me, in a typically grotesque way, at the time: “I’d rather have a conservative hag than a liberal fag”. Mandelson’s connections with Epstein were also part of the conversation in Washington prior to his appointment, not least because the Maga base had spent the 2024 campaign claiming that Trump would release the “Epstein Files” once he got into office.
Ironically in the end, the Epstein issue was not a big problem for Mandelson in Washington itself. Trump’s own involvement with Epstein meant that Maga had placed an omerta on the topic. How could the administration criticise Mandelson when they themselves were in the same boat? Instead, it was the uproar in Westminster that brought Mandelson down, and with it exposed the Prime Minister to the accusation that he had made the wrong decision. In the meeting in No 10 to discuss Mandelson’s removal as ambassador, we now know that David Lammy, who is close to the Vice President, said that the context of the decision must be made clear to the US. The civil service’s worst fears had come true, and the Prime Minister’s gamble had failed.
[Further reading: John Healey: “There’ll be no repeat of Iraq’s mistakes”]
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