Influencer Mandelson was in his element as he wooed Maga world

Peter Mandelson was in his element. Lounging on a sofa one June evening at Butterworth's, a bistro serving as the gastronomical centre of the Maga movement in Washington DC, the recently appointed British ambassador was being honoured with a plaque that indicated he was easing his way into the conservative circles around Donald Trump.

- Andrew Roth

The appointment of Mandelson, an architect of Tony Blair's New Labour project in the 1990s, had not been without controversy. He was the first political ambassador to the United States in almost half a century and had twice resigned from Labour governments in the past in scandal (not to mention his past association with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein).

So he would have to move quickly to replace the well sourced expertise of his predecessor and build ties with a new administration that had upended all the rules of the traditional Washington establishment.

Mandelson had managed that by leaning into the heady conservative politics surrounding the US president, working old contacts in Trump's circles of businessmen and courting the new media right.

Surrounded by conservative journalists that evening, he said that, while the two leaders' politics might differ, Trump and Keir Starmer were riding the same political winds of upheaval.

Both had received mandates, he said, according to reports in the Times, from "angry people who felt they were being unheard by mainstream politics" and were "angry about the cost of living, angry about uncontrolled immigration and angry about uncontrolled woke culture spreading across institutions".