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Lord Peter Mandelson is set to be confirmed as Britain’s ambassador to Washington, said multiple people familiar with the matter.
The US has approved in principle the Labour peer’s appointment, a key condition of him becoming taking up the post, they said.
Mandelson, a former government minister, is expected to travel to Washington to take up the post early next month, the people added.
In recent days he received “Agrément” from the US government to serve as the UK’s chief representative, which means he is unlikely to be blocked by Donald Trump’s administration even though the diplomatic process is still ongoing.
Good relations between the two nations are crucial at a time when Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on global imports, and has been overtly critical of Europe, especially on defence spending. The president recently praised Sir Keir Starmer, saying the UK prime minister had done a “very good job so far”.
The diplomatic process has been expedited to allow Mandelson to get started swiftly at the beginning of the new Trump administration, overriding the usual timeframe for approvals.
A recent precedent went in the other direction; the UK government sped up its approval of Jane Hartley — Joe Biden’s pick for US ambassador to the UK — in the summer of 2022 in order to allow her to attend the late Queen Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee festivities.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Downing Street declined to comment.
Starmer’s choice of Mandelson as ambassador has not been uncontroversial in Trump’s circle and the wider Republican party, in part because of his past business links to China.
Chris LaCivita, a senior campaign adviser to Trump, called the former cabinet minister an “absolute moron” last month, questioning why the UK government was installing him to replace a “professional universally respected ambo”, a reference to the outgoing UK representative Dame Karen Pierce.
She has been touted as a “Trump whisperer” for the close bridges she built with his team, which helped facilitate a phone call between the president and Starmer last July following an assassination attempt on Trump, as well as a trip by then-UK foreign secretary Lord David Cameron to Mar-a-Lago last April.
Mandelson will still hold shares in the lobbying firm he co-founded as he takes up his new post as the UK’s ambassador in Washington, despite the company’s work for Chinese clients such as TikTok, the Financial Times revealed earlier this month.
He is expected to sell his stake in Global Counsel over time but has not set a deadline for fully divesting.
Several US senators unhappy about Mandelson’s appointment on Tuesday handed a document to the FBI detailing his connections with China, according to Australian news website The Nightly.
The document, seen by the FT, was a compilation of open source information pulled from the Chinese internet and was drawn up by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a cross-party group of global lawmakers concerned about Beijing.
Mandelson will have an important role in trying to protect the UK from US tariffs, as well as handle potentially contentious issues such as the proposed deal on the future of the Chagos Islands, which are home to a crucial joint UK-US military base.
In their first phone call on Monday night, UK foreign secretary David Lammy and US secretary of state Marco Rubio discussed the proposed deal between Britain and Mauritius about the Indian Ocean archipelago, despite the subject not appearing in official readouts from the UK foreign office or US state department, said people familiar with the conversation.
While Rubio has been critical of the deal in the past, the UK and the US governments have both stressed the importance of protecting the military base on Diego Garcia in the long term.
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