Photo by Harold Mendoza on Unsplash
Europe finally has a heavyweight ambassador in Washington. A man who knows many of Europe’s leaders, he has devoted his adult life to arguing that the European Union needed more unity, more common purpose and can be a power for good for the world, writes Denis MacShane.
Unfortunately the new Ambassador is not from a EU member state. The new Labour government in England has named Lord Mandelson as Her Majesty’s ambassador to the United States.
For two months the pro-Brexit press in London has been promoting the idea that Nigel Farage was the man London should send to Washington. Farage shares some of Trump’s world view, including a faiblesse for Vladimir Putin, a dislike of immigrants, and a permanent grudge against the political establishment which does not recognise or applaud his genius.
Elon Musk is said to have offered to give Farage’s party, Reform (which keeps changing its name but never its leader), anything up to £1 billion. Farage would use his largesse to campaign against the Labour government, which represents everything Trump and Musk hate.
Now Musk has said the neo-Nazi AfD Party in Germany should take power in Berlin, though German rules are much stricter on foreign money interfering in German politics than the lax British system. Putin oligarchs showered millions on Boris Johnson to help win the Brexit plebiscite in 2016 and then defeat Jeremy Corbyn, the Jean-Luc Mélenchon of British politics, in the 2019 British election.
Farage has watched jealously as fellow xenophobic leaders like Georgia Meloni become Prime Minister of Italy, or Marine Le Pen emerge as a possible president of France.
The English far-Right leader is now in his seventh decade and 50 years of a daily diet of pints of beer, wine and endless cigarettes is beginning to show. Time is running out for Farage. So the idea of staying in the luxury of the British ambassador’s palatial mansion on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington was attractive.
But it was not to be. Instead, the man Farage loathes the most in British politics, Peter Mandelson, is taking over for the Trump presidency.
Mandelson went straight to work for the British Trades Union Congress after Oxford. He became Director of Communications for Labour in 1985. He set about using his communication skills to transform Labour into a party that could win elections, instead of losing them when under the control of the hard Left and the moralising 1968 generation.
The British Left between the 1970s and 1990 defined itself by hostility to Europe and the United States. Its principal enemy was European social democracy.
I wrote the first biography of François Mitterand in English in 1982. It was launched by the then leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, who was cultured and cultivated and loved France. He told the audience that he could not understand how Mitterrand could call himself a socialist and at the same time support European integration.
Mandelson made it his life’s work to oppose this petty leftist nationalism of building socialism in one nation. He helped create a new generation of young pro-European Labour leaders, led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He supported the promotion of women and black or Asian British Labour activists to be members of parliament and become ministers.
He also rejected the primitive anti-Americanism of many on the Left. Mandelson got to know American trade union leaders and the modernising progressives of the Clinton generation, who twice defeated the Republicans in 1992 and 1996.
Blair nominated him to the European Commission where he became Trade Commissioner negotiating difficult trade deals for the EU with the US. Pierre Moscovici is a long serving French socialist minister, who was EU Commissioner for Finance and Economics and is still serving as President of the France’s Cour des Comptes, the powerful oversight body that oversees French budget policies. He says Mandelson is a “friend and a talented man for this important job. His task will be to strengthen the special relationship between the US and UK, but I hope he uses his time in Washington to build new bridges with Europe.”
Mandelson is likely to be an essential port of call for European leaders travelling to Washington to talk to Trump. Britain may be out of Europe, but can still play a key role in transatlantic relations — thanks to its new Ambassador in America.
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The Author, Denis MacShane, is a former UK Minister of Europe under the Blair government.
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