Peter Mandelson will need to make his “the most important voice” in Donald Trump’s ear when the US president-elect returns to the White House next month if he is to best represent Britain’s interests with the potentially chaotic administration, one of his predecessors has said.
Kim Darroch, who was the UK’s ambassador to Washington for four years from 2016, said Lord Mandelson would also need “a thick skin” to weather regular attacks such as that by a key Trump campaign adviser calling him an “absolute moron” after his appointment.
The senior diplomat, who resigned from the role in 2019 after leaked communications revealed he called the first administration “inept and insecure”, warned that Trump’s second term would be “like a 24/7 bar-room brawl” – but said Mandelson was an experienced political operator.
Mandelson was confirmed on Friday as the UK’s ambassador to the US, a job that will place him in the frontline of UK-US relations as Trump threatens a global trade war with huge implications for the British economy.
Lord Darroch is the most high profile of a number of senior diplomats who have dismissed insults aimed at Mandelson by Trump’s allies, saying he has more than enough experience in the hard world of diplomacy to succeed as ambassador to Washington.
Foreign Office sources rallied to Lord Mandelson’s defence on Saturday after confirmation of his appointment, which prompted Chris LaCivita, a consultant who was one of the main architects of Trump’s presidential campaign, to call him “an absolute moron”.
In an interview with Sky News, Darroch said he “wouldn’t take all of this stuff too seriously”, adding he did not think the adviser involved was in Trump’s White House team and that he doubted he “cleared his lines with the president-elect before he tweeted what he did”.
He added: “Peter Mandelson will speak for the British government, and Donald Trump, ultimately, is interested in power, and he will know that Keir Starmer has a huge majority in the British parliament and is likely to be prime minister for the whole of Donald Trump’s second term.
“So I wouldn’t, if I were Mandelson, worry too much about other voices in Donald Trump’s ear, that’s just going to happen. What you’ve got to do is make yours the most important voice.”
Darroch added: “This is what life is going to be like under Trump 2.0, like a 24/7 bar-room brawl. You get this sort of stuff going on all the time, you need to have a thick skin and you need to manage it.
“To get through it, to weather it, as it were, so Lord Mandelson is a very experienced politician. I’m sure he can cope with this kind of stuff.”
He advised the next ambassador to be ready for Trump’s “5am tweet storm”, when he would wake early and take to social media, leading to panic back in London, where it would be 10am.
Darroch also said the government would have to accept that Nigel Farage’s relationship with Trump would play a role in relations between the two countries. “It’s just going to be part of the landscape,” he said.
The Reform UK leader told the Telegraph on Sunday that he would be willing to act as a “bridge” for Mandelson to build relations with Trump, given how important the relationship with the US was to Britain.
In his podcast last month, Mandelson said the government should “swallow your pride” and “get into” Trump’s political networks, even if that meant using Farage as a link. Ministers have previously rejected the idea of the Reform leader playing a role in intergovernmental relations.