Amid the avalanche of Peter Mandelson disclosures, one thing is notably missing: namely evidence that he made any difference to transatlantic relations. And that raises a question. Do ambassadors matter much in our age of instantaneous government-to-government negotiation on all the big things?
It is striking that virtually the entire Mandelson controversy has been about the fact of his appointment, given his friendship with Epstein and general political baggage, rather than anything Mandelson did in the role after he was appointed. This jogged in my historian’s memory the two previous celebrated cases of non-diplomats being appointed to the Washington embassy over the past century, where the same was true.
Lord Halifax was already foreign secretary when Winston Churchill appointed him to the top diplomatic job across the pond in December 1940. The biggest of the big “political beasts” at that time, Halifax would serve as ambassador to the US for the rest of the war. Yet virtually all accounts of his tenure have him being “sent” to Washington by Churchill merely to get him out of the Foreign Office and the War Cabinet.
Halifax was an arch appeaser. It was Neville Chamberlain who had made him foreign secretary before the war, to help fashion the policy of placating Hitler through major concessions. But, far more alarming to Churchill, who replaced Chamberlain in May 1940 just before the fall of France, was Halifax’s continued defeatism. He urged an armistice with Hitler and proposed to explore peace terms with Mussolini as an intermediary.
This was kept secret at the time, and Halifax’s status as the grandest of Tories—and Churchill’s rival for the premiership in May 1940—made him hard to dislodge. But once the immediate crisis of the Battle of Britain was over, Churchill seized an unexpected vacancy at the Washington embassy to ship his rival far away from Whitehall in a blaze of glory.
Halifax immediately disappeared as a major player in foreign policy. This left Churchill to coax FDR to take part in the war unabated, personally sending letters and telegrams to the president and arranging many face-to-face meetings with him, including four lengthy visits to Washington.
A second instance was former foreign secretary David Owen’s bizarre decision, in 1977, to make an economics journalist, Peter Jay, US ambassador. Jay lacked any real experience as either a diplomat or politician, but he happened to be the son-in-law of the prime minister, Jim Callaghan, which appeared to be his only real qualification. This made the appointment hugely controversial, although nothing Jay actually got up to in Washington—apart from, ironically, his marriage breaking up—attracted much notice whatever.
In the case of Mandelson, Keir Starmer and his key Number 10 adviser Jonathan Powell decided from the outset of Trump’s second term that effusive appeasement was the name of the game. This started before Mandelson’s arrival in Washington—indeed, it was part of the reason for his appointment—and it continued after his departure, shifting to less effusive appeasement when Trump impulsively went to war with Iran in February.
So what does the modern ambassador actually do in a major country like the US? They entertain. They run a grand hotel for visiting ministers, top officials and royals, and fix meetings for them. They lobby for government policy and on behalf of British business. They run consular services for British visitors, students and ex-pats. They gather intelligence—not for the most part secret intelligence, rather the stuff of observation and meetings—and feed it back to London, much like a journalist. They do lots of “meet and greet”. If they are so inclined, as was Mandelson, then they appear in the media, for good or ill. Oh, and from time to time, they have diplomatic conversations with key decision-makers in the country where they are posted in pursuit of policies generally agreed beforehand in London.
All of these are important jobs and affect the standing of the UK, which is the reason we still have ambassadors. Apart from the latter, they don’t much affect foreign policy and don’t for the most part involve overt diplomacy.
But they do require the ambassador to act diplomatically and not become a source of controversy and negative media coverage. Among the people least suited to the job, therefore, are major ex-politicians.
