Terry Prone: Peter Mandelson abandons his principles for a magnificent Trump back-pedal
Peter Mandelson went on Fox News to to abandon his previous belief that Donald Trump poses a danger to the world.
No disrespect to the Chinese, who believe that this is the Year of the Snake. Actually, it’s the year of the back-pedal, most of it generated by America’s recycled president.
Take Britain’s new ambassador to Washington, one Peter Mandelson, a former minister in what was once called New Labour, mainly because guys like Mandelson were determined to re-brand the British Labour Party as something cool, groovy, and down with the kids.
Mandelson is now a peer, which is what you get from retiring prime ministers to whom you have shown outstanding loyalty. (What you get in the United States from retiring presidents for the same service are preemptive pardons to keep you out of jail.)
Mandelson knows how to craft and utter a headline-grabbing statement. He really does. Always did. He may not be quite as smart when it comes to strategic thinking, but headline-grabbers rarely are. Not saying anything about Justin Trudeau and the blackface episodes.
A little while ago, Mandelson described Donald Trump as a bully, adding that he was reckless and a danger to the world. Now, let’s be honest here. Many of us might agree with Mandelson on this, but one person who would not would be The Donald.
Although it’s fair to suggest that President Trump may not give a sugar about what a retired British minister says about him — up to a point, that point being the day when the current Labour administration decides it would be a wizard wheeze to send one of the architects of Cool Britannia to the US as King Charles’s ambassador.
That’s when such colourful statements, once, perhaps, considered by Mandelson as inarguable, became just a little problematic.
A quote variously attributed to Winston Churchill and economist John Maynard Keynes, in response to an attack on either of them for not holding firm to a previous position, goes like this: “When the facts change, I change my mind, Sir/Madam. What do you do?”
The problem facing Mandelson is that the facts haven’t changed. They really haven’t. Nothing Trump has done or said since the peer decided he was a bully and a danger to the world has undercut that evidence-based judgement but rather confirmed it.
How, then, can Mandelson back-pedal? Magnificently is the short answer. Even the selection of media outlet was smart. If you’re a posh Brit wanting to grovel about saying the wrong thing, which is the best platform to do it on? Fox News, maybe? That’s where Lord Peter pitched up to abandon his previous beliefs.
“I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong,” he told them. “I think that times and attitudes toward the president have changed since then. I think people have been impressed not just by the extraordinary second mandate that he has received from the American people, but the dynamism and energy with which he approached not just the campaign but government as well. I think that he has won fresh respect. He certainly has from me, and that is going to be the basis of all the work I do for His Majesty’s government as ambassador.”
He was confident enough to add that nobody within the Trump administration had raised the smallest objection to his appointment. He failed to note that this is partly because once you’ve surrendered to Trump, he steps over you and moves on. He’s stepped over Mandelson and moved on to attacking the mental health of air traffic controllers, which in turn earned him worldwide coverage, thereby proving that the old stuff about logical organic well-conceived policies is down the tubes, arguably for good.
Impulsivity rules.
Trump is indefatigable when it comes to “flooding the zone”. It may have been Steve Bannon, seven years ago, who when stating his belief that mainstream media was more important as opposition to Trump than the Democrats, added: “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
That is precisely what Trump has done since he took on the presidency for the second time, and the media has predictably followed whatever he has pumped out, even if they believe that the US coming to blows with Denmark over Greenland is as likely to come to fruition as his promise, last time around, to build a wall between Mexico and the US that Mexico would pay for. He didn’t and it didn’t. But it flooded the zone.
Robert F Kennedy Jr isn’t as good as Lord Peter at back-pedalling, but he’s up there. He was facing a pre-emptive strike by Caroline Kennedy, who read a bad statement to camera badly. The statement was bad because it was irrelevantly snide — talking about her cousin keeping predators as pets because he’s a predator himself — and also because it was awash in detail like feeding mice into liquidisers which may be gag-making but no matter when it comes to how qualified he would be to run the US Health Department.
Sure hadn’t he had his own children vaccinated? He also back-pedalled on one of the few things that seemed to hold out some promise that he might be a decent Health lead. He hadn’t been bad on ultra-processed foods, but his back-pedalling took that in, too. Trust me, was the message, I’m not going to be an enemy of fast food. Perish the thought. Bring on the burgers, lads.
Of course, he should not have been allowed to get away with it, but he was. The questioning, as too often happens with politicians, was all over the place, giving him escape hatches, opportunities for dramatic confessions and free passes for back-pedalling on what makes him dangerous to America’s public health.
Back-pedalling has a long and proud history, perhaps best exemplified by a Frenchman roughly 80 years ago.
When the Germans brought the French effectively to their knees in the Second World War, one of the leaders who had promised to die fighting, Francois Darlan, did a speedy turnaround when Marshal Petain, then setting up the Vichy administration to collaborate with Hitler, invited Darlan to join as Minister of Marine.
Darlan abandoned his much-vaunted position, much to the horror of a previous colleague, General d’Astier, who, when they met days after Darlan’s treachery, reminded him of their joint promise to continue fighting.
“But Admiral, just yesterday you were telling me...” General d’Astier started to recall to Darlan, only to be shut down with the unanswerable riposte: “Yesterday, yes. Today, I am a minister.”
That sums it up: today’s prestigious new role may vastly outweigh yesterday’s principles.
