This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Suppose Peter Mandelson was still British ambassador in Washington, and had not been sacked last September following lurid revelations about his relationship with the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

Would the continued presence of Mandelson as UK envoy in Washington have benefited Britain in any significant way? Sir Keir Starmer and his now-sacked chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, clearly thought so, otherwise they might not have devoted such major, and ultimately self-destructive efforts, to getting their chosen emissary in place in time for President Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, 2025.

His appointment is now condemned universally, if hypocritically, as an obvious timebomb bound to detonate in the Government’s face, though at the time most UK media lauded the move as a deft bid to insinuate our very own Machiavel into the good graces of the Trump White House. Even then, this would not have been as clever as it seemed because Mandelson’s previous closeness to Epstein might have made him toxic to Trump, who was seeking to minimise his own past connection to Epstein.

But was Mandelson ever up to the job? He was even more sympathetic than Starmer towards Israel during the destruction of Gaza. Going by his past record, he might have been privately supportive of the US-Israel attack on Iran, as is his former boss Tony Blair. Would the arch intriguer have been the right person to respond robustly to a US threat to review its support for de facto British control of the Falklands?

The visit by King Charles to the US next week is taking place against a background of anti-British jibes and insults from Trump, and may further convince him and his crackpot lieutenants that the UK is a pushover in all circumstances. I am not suggesting any high-minded refusal to bend the British knee to King Trump on grounds of national pride, but rather as a matter of realpolitik. As the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, famously skillful in dealing with Queen Victoria, said: “Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.”

The problem is that with Trump this simply does not work. On the contrary, his track record is that he enjoys the self-abasement of others, but interprets it as a sign of weakness to be mercilessly exploited. The deeper Starmer’s kowtow, the more Trump abuses him and appears to regard him as a convenient punch ball or a figure of fun. From Ottawa to Beijing and Tehran to Minnesota, the lesson learned in any confrontation or fight with Trump is that it is better to resist him and avoid compromise until he backs off and chooses a softer target.

Having achieved the status of British national scapegoat, displacing Boris Johnson........

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