Heavy Lifting

That was certainly Mandelson’s view when he spoke to the Financial Times about his new job. If anyone from Trump’s inner circle was hostile toward him, it could only be the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding that would soon be cleared up:

Some around Mr Trump see me as they view many in Europe. They see me as a left-wing progressive, somebody who might even be anti-business or somebody who might be following the sort of liberalism they’ve just defeated in America. What they will discover is I’m not an uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and I’m pro-market and pro-business.

Indeed, nobody familiar with Mandelson’s career would suspect him of being an “uber-liberal” in the US sense of the term. However, the ambassador’s choice of terminology does remind us of his lucrative dealings with Uber, one of many corporate clients nurtured by Global Counsel, the business advisory firm that Mandelson established with his associate Benjamin Wegg-Prosser.

Uber hired the services of Global Counsel to assist with its efforts to crack the Russian market by forging ties with Kremlin-linked businessmen, as Harry Davies of the Guardian reported:

In 2015, Uber was seeking “strategic allies” in Russia and had begun approaching politically connected oligarchs it believed could help lobby for the company’s interests. Emil Michael, one of Uber’s top executives at the time, had described the company’s goal to colleagues: “We want someone aligned with Putin.” For advice on navigating Russia’s business elites, Uber turned to Mandelson and Wegg-Prosser.

At one point, Uber’s legal team raised concerns about a payment to the Russian lobbyist Vladimir Senin, fearing it could fall foul of US anti-bribery laws. Wegg-Prosser railed against “idiot lawyers in the US who think that the world should work like a suburb of Seattle” and urged the company to press ahead with the payment. For his part, Mandelson arranged a meeting between Uber representatives and Herman Gref, the head of a state-controlled bank with close ties to Putin.

One Uber executive wondered if Global Counsel’s assistance was worth as much as the firm was charging for it: “These guys are extremely pricey and kind of breaking the budget.” Wegg-Prosser responded by insisting that he and Mandelson were doing “the kind of heavy lifting” for which figures like Madeleine Albright or Henry Kissinger would charge hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A Particularly Close Relationship

You might expect British journalists to bring up episodes like this at every opportunity when Mandelson appears in public. But there seems to be a tacit consensus that Mandelson should not be troubled with such impertinent questions. He has also faced remarkably little scrutiny for his ties with the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

According to an internal report for JPMorgan, Epstein had “a particularly close relationship” with two figures: Mandelson and the British royal Prince Andrew. In Mandelson’s case, this involved contacting Epstein multiple times after he had already been jailed for soliciting an underage girl. One 2010 message to Epstein concerned an event in Shanghai at which Mandelson was speaking, with “the entire Chinese banking fraternity” expected to be in attendance: “Isn’t it something that JPM should be represented at if they want to spread their wings in China?”

To be clear, there has never been any suggestion that Mandelson was implicated in Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes. But he continued to associate with Epstein after his proclivities were a matter of public record. To his credit, George Parker of the Financial Times broke the taboo on the subject in his recent profile of Mandelson, eliciting the following response:

I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women. I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?

The fact that Mandelson responded with such petulance to a question he should have been ready to answer gives the lie to a widespread view that he is unusually gifted when it comes to the art of politics.

The British commentariat often discusses Mandelson in a tone of breathless sycophancy. One 2009 column by the Guardian’s Martin Kettle compared him to Winston Churchill in the first paragraph and Erwin Rommel in the second — “a man who can change the game, a lucky general, an infinitely wily opponent.” As it turned out, Mandelson’s return as a Labour government minister made absolutely no difference to the party’s fortunes, and it went on to lose the next general election.

If Mandelson has often been successful in his political endeavors, it is because he invariably takes the side of wealth and power. Like a man who always bets on the favorite in a horse race, he can rely on the law of averages to boost his overall score. We should read Mandelson’s claim that he wants Labour to be “an electorally successful, modern, centre-left, national party of government” in this light. In reality, he only wants Labour to win elections if it can be relied upon to serve the interests of his corporate clients.

MAGA’s Little Helpers

Less than a year after its return to government, Labour has already trailed behind the Reform Party of Nigel Farage in several opinion polls this year. With Mandelson’s protégé Morgan McSweeney in the driving seat, we can expect Starmer’s government to prostrate itself before Trump at every turn while clearing the way for Trump’s British allies to make big political gains.

Elon Musk’s recent talk of channelling $100 million to Reform might or might not prove to be a serious long-term plan. But that question would be academic in any case if Labour had gone ahead with a scheme to prohibit foreign donations for electoral campaigns in Britain. One of Starmer’s wealthy benefactors, Lord Waheed Alli, intervened to scupper the proposal, keeping the door open for Musk (or any other wealthy vandal) to interfere with British politics if and when he pleases.

Larry Ellison, another Trump-supporting tech billionaire and the man who helped bankroll Musk’s takeover of Twitter, recently announced plans to donate more than $300 million to Blair’s Institute for Global Change. The Daily Telegraph described this as “something of a hit to the billionaire’s MAGA credentials.” In fact, it merely showed us once again how little there is to separate Blairism from Trumpism when the chips are down. Blair’s faithful consigliere shouldn’t have any trouble settling down in Washington while the government that appointed him presides over Britain’s ongoing decline.