State visit Mandelson lauds 'risk-taker' Trump

Donald Trump is a risk-taker sounding a necessary wake-up call to a stale status quo, Peter Mandelson told the Ditchley Foundation in a speech before Trump's second state visit to the UK this month.

- Patrick Wintour

The UK's ambassador to Washington portrayed Trump as a harbinger of a new force in politics at a time when business as usual no longer works for fed-up voters.

The bulk of the speech was focused on a call for a US-UK technology partnership covering AI, quantum computing and rare-earth minerals as part of efforts to win a competition with China that Lord Mandelson said would shape this century.

He said that such a partnership with the US had the potential to be as important as the security relationship the US and UK forged in the second world war, adding: "If China wins the race for technological dominance in the coming decades, every facet of our lives is going to be affected."

The first steps towards that partnership are likely to be announced during Trump's state visit, including new commitments for cheap nuclear energy to power the AI revolution.

Mandelson, although a fierce pro-European, said that Brexit had not made the UK less relevant to the US, but by freeing the UK from European regulatory burdens it made Britain a more attractive site for US investors.

Critics of Mandelson's interpretation of Trump's populism will argue that it assumes a set of common values between Trump's Maga movement and European liberal democracy that is fading.