Queen Camilla and the Prince of Darkness
How Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to the United States, helped bring Camilla in from the cold
Peter Mandelson, the new British ambassador to the United States, is famous for his global networking, silky charm, and ruthless political skills. When asked by Hannah Rothschild, a British documentary filmmaker who tracked him for eight months, “Would you rather be a mummy’s boy or Prince of Darkness?” he fired back, “Oh, Prince of Darkness, no question.” Moments earlier he had dismissed Conservative Party Leader David Cameron as “a smoothie, a mummy’s boy.” Mandelson has proudly carried the “Prince of Darkness” moniker since he ran communications for the Labour Party in the 1980s.
Having served in Parliament for a dozen years and held an assortment of Cabinet posts, Mandelson was raised to the peerage by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008 and is now known as Lord Mandelson. His appointment at age seventy-one as envoy to the United States is the capstone of his often turbulent career. He follows eleven seasoned diplomats, and he is the first overtly political appointee since 1977, when Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan named his forty-year-old son-in-law, TV presenter Peter Jay, to the prestigious post. Mandelson is also Britain’s first gay envoy in Washington. In October 2023 he married Reinaldo Avila da Silva, his partner for twenty-seven years, at Marylebone Town Hall in London.
The first “spin doctor”
Mandelson is credited as the first “spin doctor” in British politics, and one of the architects of rebranded “New Labour” that swept to power in a 1997 landslide that vaulted Tony Blair into 10 Downing Street. When Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced the ambassadorial appointment of his close political ally, he cited Mandelson’s expertise in trade relations at a time when Donald Trump has threatened to impose high tariffs on foreign goods.
Still, Mandelson comes to the job trailed by controversies. He was twice forced to resign his government posts—for failing to declare sweetheart real estate loans and for being charged with using his cabinet position to secure a British passport for a wealthy Indian businessman. More concerning were his links to the late convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. An investigation by JP Morgan released in 2023 described their “particularly close relationship”—so close that Epstein called Mandelson “Petie.” Although the Morgan report found no wrongdoing by Mandelson, it described multiple emails between the two men to set up meetings between businessmen and government officials. They were also reported to have spent time together at Epstein’s residences in Paris and New York City as well as his private island in the Caribbean.
Will any of this baggage matter to the 47th President as he returns to the White House? Probably not, although the new ambassador created his own headwinds with derogatory comments about Trump in a 2019 radio interview. In his typically blunt fashion, Mandelson called him “reckless and a danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and racist” as well as never being viewed by Britons “as a true embodiment of or spokesman for our values.” When the remarks surfaced after his appointment, Mandelson claimed he was not speaking personally, but rather describing the thoughts and feelings of the British people.
“In the wake of a Great White Shark”
Trump and Mandelson are transactional by nature, and even if Trump harbors a grudge, he can relate to Mandelson’s character and personality traits—among them reveling in power, stirring outrage with his insults, loving the limelight, and alternately captivating and bullying. Both men have weathered scandals and made remarkable comebacks. Hannah Rothschild might well have been talking about Trump when she likened her experience with Mandelson to “being in the wake of a Great White Shark. He never stops.”
It’s worth noting that in the days before the Trump Inaugural, Lord Mandelson made the guest list of an exclusive party hosted by Elon Musk and Labour Party nemesis Nigel Farage, head of Britain’s Reform Party. He also penned an article for Fox News praising Trump’s “straight talking and deal-making instincts” and predicted that his presidency would be “one of the most consequential” in modern times.
“The best way to his heart”
Mandelson’s experience in trade and business matters aside, his lesser-known superpower is his connection to King Charles III and Queen Camilla. Trump is an unabashed admirer of the British monarchy. As one diplomat observed, “the best way to his heart” is through the royal family. In a recent documentary about Trump’s return to the presidency, he was shown reverently paging through a photograph album of his state visit to Britain in 2019. Queen Elizabeth II was “unbelievable, she was great, we had a very good relationship,” he said. Charles is “a very good person. Camilla is fantastic,” he added.
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