Can Peter Mandleson become our man in Washington?

A speech by Peter Mandelson in the House of Lords is a rare event – he's spoken only once in the chamber in the past 12 months. But he is not averse to taking full advantage of the networking opportunities the Upper House has to offer.

So it was that Mandelson was spotted in deep conversation in their Lordships' bar the other day with none other than Lord Alli,the media tycoon.

Alli, worth a reputed £200million, was at the centre of the 'freebies' row that engulfed Labour after it emerged he had given Sir Keir Starmer more than £30,000 of designer suits and spectacles. Mandelson, who happens to be a close friend of Alli, could soon be in need of a new wardrobe himself if his hopes of becoming the next British ambassador to Washington come to pass.

The present incumbent, Karen Pierce, will see her tenure of the most coveted posting in diplomatic circles come to an end in the months ahead. And Mandelson, a former Labour Cabinet minister, has emerged as the frontrunner to replace her.

Given that he is impeccably well-connected, Mandelson inevitably has powerful friends arguing his case. They include Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, who more than any other minister will have the ear of the Prime Minister as he makes the final choice.

It did not go unnoticed that when Reeves made her keynote speech to last year's Labour conference, Mandelson was the first to his feet leading the standing ovation after very publicly taking his place in the front row of seats reserved for the Shadow Cabinet.

This consummate political operator supposedly suffered a setback this week when he failed to become Chancellor of Oxford University, a position that went instead to William Hague.

But Mandelson's many supporters argue that he is undaunted – they point out that the fact he made the shortlist of five for arguably the most prestigious post in British academia underlines the gravitas of a statesman who has held three major Cabinet posts and served as EU trade commissioner for four years.

 Happily, they dismiss as irrelevant his two highly controversial forced resignations from the Labour Cabinet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, of which more later.

As part of his campaign to become Chancellor of Oxford, he pledged to raise millions for the university from his bulging list of contacts, gained not just from his time in government but through his international 'public affairs consultancy' Global Counsel.

When he was a minister, Mandelson famously declared that New Labour was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'. He followed through by founding Global Counsel in 2010, after Gordon Brown lost the general election, as he carried out his ambition to join the ranks of the rich. It has worked: Today he is reportedly worth £20million.

Global Counsel offers to help corporations 'see opportunities in politics, regulation and public policy' and has offices in London, Berlin, Brussels, Doha, Singapore and Washington. Mandelson has never declared a single client of Global Counsel in the House of Lords register of interests, despite several rule changes intended to achieve greater transparency.

What is clear, however, is that he has connections with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Mandelson served as a non-executive director of the Russian conglomerate Sistema, which is itself the majority shareholder of RTI, a defence technology company. RTI produced radar and satellite communications for Russia's land-based missile early warning system and its chairman was one Yevgeny Primakov, a Putin ally and former prime minister. Mandelson remained on the board until June 2017, long after Putin's annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Then there are his Chinese links. The website of Global Counsel still contains his flowery account of his October 2018 meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Headlined 'Tea with Xi', he waxed lyrical about the Communist ghoul and urged stronger links between Europe and Beijing.

The man once nicknamed 'the Prince of Darkness' gushed: 'For a very powerful head of a huge and centrally controlled nation, President Xi Jinping of China has a remarkably relaxed air about him. He exudes composure, in public at least. In a receiving room of the Great Hall of the People, Xi welcomed a small UK group which I joined this week to commemorate the anniversary of the Icebreakers ... a mission of business people who took Britain's first trade mission to China in 1953.'

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He also wrote: 'Ten years ago, as the EU's trade commissioner, I said China was in danger of becoming a runaway juggernaut in the international trade system and that reciprocity in market opening was vital if a Western backlash was to be avoided. Chinese leaders listened and attempted to apply balm, but since then the juggernaut has not exactly slowed.'

The praise of Xi – condemned worldwide for human rights abuses in China and the brutal suppression of democracy in Hong Kong – was presumably designed to show potential clients how well-connected Mandelson is.

Some in Westminster ask if his support for closer trade links with China could end his hopes of becoming ambassador in Washington, where he would have to court the Trump administration just as it plans massive trade tariffs on Beijing.

But Dan Mullaney, a former assistant US trade representative under Trump who crossed paths with Mandelson in Brussels, does not think so. 'Having someone from the UK in Washington who knows all three systems – the EU system, the UK system, the US and knows trade – is a very useful skill set for the challenges that are to come,' he tells me.

Through Global Counsel's office in Washington, Mandelson has forged valuable relationships. They include Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been announced as Trump's Treasury Secretary. Bessent is close to Mandelson – and would be an important ally on Capitol Hill.

But there are still questions about Mandelson's long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier found dead in a prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on new charges of sex trafficking minors.

As far back as 2002, New York Magazine described his presence at an intimate dinner party at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, and in 2022 a photo emerged of Mandelson and Epstein celebrating a birthday at the financier's lavish Paris apartment in 2007.

This was followed by a report, made public only last year, that describes repeated meetings between the serial child rapist and the politician he affectionately knew as 'Petie'.

The internal 2019 report by JP Morgan was filed to a New York court in 2023 and suggests that in June 2009, when Mandelson was business secretary, he stayed at Epstein's even as the financier was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

The report also declared: 'Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew... and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government.'

Mandelson is rightly ashamed of his association with the paedophile. Last year a spokesman said: 'Lord Mandelson very much regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein. This connection has been a matter of public record for some time. He never had any kind of professional or business relationship with Epstein in any form.'

And yet, he remains untainted by these questionable links. Indeed, it is extraordinary in one sense that people are talking of him as the next ambassador to America at all after a career so replete with self-inflicted setbacks.

As I said, this is the man whose dealings with the super-rich twice forced his resignation from Tony Blair's Cabinet. The first was in 1998 after the disclosure of a secret £373,000 loan from former millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson, which he used to buy a house without telling his mortgage company.

He quit again in 2001 after being accused of helping one of the billionaire Hinduja brothers secure a passport in return for a £1million donation to the government's Millennium Dome project. He was later cleared by an inquiry.

Not that this has hindered his business ventures. In April he took a step back from his commercial operations when he sold a 20 per cent stake in Global Counsel. The deal valued the business at £30million, meaning the 35 per cent stakes held by Mandelson and business partner Benjamin Wegg-Prosser could be worth around £10.5million each.

Mandelson has made no secret of his desire to be our man in Washington and appears unfazed by the incoming Trump administration. He's already come up with a plan to build bridges with Elon Musk, a close ally of the President-elect, who has been highly critical of the Starmer administration.

'I'd be asking the embassy in Washington to find out who [Musk's] British friends are. And they've got to be used as a bridge to Musk,' he has said. 'You cannot just continue this feud indefinitely. You've got to get over it.'

To the consternation of some Labour MPs, he even suggested talking to Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, who is close to Trump. 'You can't ignore him,' he has said. 'He's an elected MP, a public figure, and bridgehead to President Trump and to Elon Musk.'

And Farage, who as an MEP regularly crossed swords with Mandelson, had an equally surprising take.

'We are politically miles apart,' he told me. 'But Peter Mandelson is highly intelligent, a clever political operator, he is always on top of his brief as I discovered when he was the EU commissioner. He has a huge intellect. And has to be a serious contender to be the next ambassador.'