12 September 2025 - 7:00am
Keir Starmer’s “Phase Two”, launched less than a fortnight ago, is off to a rather shaky start. Hot on the heels of the departure of Angela Rayner comes the dismissal of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the United States. This is the third time the Prince of Darkness has had to leave a senior post; older readers will recall that he ran into trouble twice in Tony Blair’s first term, before being shuffled off to Brussels for a stint as an EU Commissioner.
Inevitably, questions are being asked about his replacement. Given that Mandelson was a political appointee rather than a career diplomat, there will presumably be pressure within the Government, and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, to return to normal and appoint someone from within the Civil Service: a safe pair of hands, who knows the ropes and has spent the last 30 years beavering quietly away in British missions around the world rather than accumulating cupboards full of skeletons. FCDO insiders have been the norm at the British Embassy in Washington for several decades now — before Mandelson, the last non-career diplomat to hold the post was Peter Jay in the late Seventies.
There is a strong argument for relying on Civil Service lifers for such positions. They will have the skills, experience and instincts to sustain and develop the transatlantic alliance. They will have contacts with other countries’ diplomats, and a strong understanding of how to get things done. The late Sir Christopher Meyer’s enlightening and often funny book DC Confidential, based on his six years in post during the Clinton and Bush eras, illuminates this well.
However, there is also much to be said in favour of political appointees in certain positions. These are, after all, individuals who are directly accountable to democratically elected leaders for carrying out particular policies, rather than being immersed in the culture of the modern Civil Service and therefore subject to internal incentives and expectations.
In this context, it is important to reflect on a remark made by the former head of the Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, in 2011. He stated that during his time at the Treasury from 2002-5 he had pushed for liberal immigration laws because he thought it was his job “to maximise global welfare not national welfare”. Given the political culture in the universities from which civil servants tend to be recruited, and the inexorable rise of institutionally Left-wing forms of HR training, that mindset is almost certainly more entrenched at the highest levels of the Civil Service — including the FCDO — than it was 20 years ago.
It seems unlikely that there are many political conservatives among the ranks of those eligible to be promoted to represent HMG in the US capital. No one is suggesting that we should send over an out-and-out MAGA hat-wearing populist; but someone who is at least open to the Trump project, and can talk sympathetically with key members of the administration, would be an asset. Fundamentally, governments should have the latitude to install ambassadors who can support their foreign policy priorities, and if that means looking outside King Charles Street, so be it.
This doesn’t just apply to the USA, naturally. There are numerous countries where we might need a representative who is not bound by the conventional prejudices of the Blob about how the British national interest is an outdated and immoral concept. It is no use supporters of the status quo appealing to cliches about the careful and pragmatic neutrality of the man or woman in Whitehall. The relentless politicisation of the last quarter-century has rendered such complaints moot.
