Their Best Pal

What happens when a useful hanger-on of the well-heeled has to resign in disgrace? They get rehabilitated. Again, and again, and again. How many times has Peter Mandelson been in this position during his career? Everyone has stopped counting. In the space of four months, we've gone from the embarrassing disclosure of his obsequious relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and sacking as Britain's man in Washington, to a leading piece defending Trump's foreign policy in The Spectator, and the chance to exculpate himself on the BBC with Laura Kuenssberg. Some might say people with a sense of shame would keep their heads down.

In his big interview, Mandelson demonstrated how he is useful to the powers that be. Just like the Speccie piece, he laid out his understanding of the Trump doctrine. That the world is a messy place, too many nations are flouting the rules, and the moment requires decisive action by a decisive leader. Venezuela being a case in point, and last year's joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities another. What about the bellicose threats over Greenland, repeated this last week? More theatre. Mandelson argues this is Trump's effort to stop Europe free-riding on US military supremacy. He's trying to force Europeans to spend more on guns, not butter mountains. So, in this case, you might say more Danish and non-American NATO troops in the Arctic suits the White House as it boosts the strength of their far northern perimeter. Of course, what Mandelson doesn't mention is the so-called scramble for the North Pole as the ice disappears is a fantasy for a new great game, the appearance of big power rivalry between the US-led West, and Russia - which can't even defeat Ukraine after four years of bloody war - and a China that has no assets or territory in the region. And Mandelson overlooks how the biggest violator of international rules is the United States itself. No surprises there - this is less a Trump-explainer, and more his condensing the slavishness of the dominant section of British capital. If this is to continue, he's saying, we've got to toady some more and get cranking out those weapons.

On his close friendship with Epstein, we got the hand-wringing. "I never saw anything", "Never noticed young women", "Perhaps because I'm gay he kept me out of the sexual side". On the support he offered after the sex offences conviction, Mandelson said he genuinely believed Epstein's protestations of innocence and what his lawyer was saying. To Kuenssberg, he threw down a challenge: "Do you think I would have stayed friends with him had I known?" Mandelson was canny enough to try and make it about the women who survived Epstein's abuse, but he refused to apologise for continuing the friendship when all facts were out in the open. Obviously, like everyone else we don't know what Mandelson did and didn't see/knew, but because of his character and fondness for prostrating himself before billionaires, I don't for one minute believe he would have let knowledge of Epstein's offences get in the way of warm relations. This is why Mandelson did not say sorry. It's not just that he doesn't feel particularly apologetic, something reinforced by the trained inauthenticity common to Blairite figures he affected, but it signals a willingness to debase himself, and to take a fall if serving the powerful requires it.

Between the article and the interview, Mandelson's laid it all out. He can be sacked, humiliated, live (temporarily) in disgrace. But it doesn't matter. If the wealthy or the powerful need him, he'll still be their best pal.

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