Cheerleader in chief Mandelson sought to offer Britain a rationale for Trump

On Saturday, as the late summer afternoon sun glistened across the lawns of Ditchley Park, the cream of the British foreign policy establishment gathered in a vast marquee to hear the ambassador to Washington give the 61st annual Ditchley lecture on how Donald Trump's re-election revealed something profound about an elite that had lost touch with a modern, fed-up electorate.

- Patrick Wintour

After a glowing introduction from Lord Hill, Peter Mandelson picked up on the Conservative peer's description of his career as durable, laughing and saying "that captured it to a T". His career had indeed been durable, but it emerged five days later not to be indestructible.

Mandelson's speech, and the off-the-record question and answer session that followed, illustrated why he had been appointed ambassador in the first place.

He had a self-confidence and style that made him a big hitter in Washington at a time when a British Labour government could easily find itself largely shunned, or even worse ignored as irrelevant.

Indeed, much of his speech was a warning that the UK could not assume the special relationship would endure. Britain had to keep earning America's respect by providing goods the US wanted, including science and technology, and a willingness to "saddle up" and go to war by its side.

Though he insisted he was not Trump's explainer-in-chief, Mandelson clearly hoped to make himself useful to the administration by providing to a British audience an elegant rationale for Trump that the president himself could not make.