Is it ever the right time to worry about what Peter Mandelson has just said? Given he is so famously allied with the darkness, and the government is beset by more urgent problems, everywhere, it feels as if Mandelson should cut us a break and just say inoffensive things, or ideally, nothing. Instead, the ambassador to the US made a speech on Sunday to the Ditchley Foundation. Of Donald Trump, he said: “The president may not follow the traditional rulebook or conventional practice, but he is a risk taker in a world where a ‘business as usual’ approach no longer works.” According to Mandelson, those of us arguing for a pivot away from the special relationship are guilty of “lazy thinking”.
Some things are so depressing that they make themselves urgent, just by resting their boot upon your spirit. “Traditional rulebook or conventional practice” – I guess, by that, Mandelson means the traditional rule of law, where you don’t deport people without due process, to countries they weren’t even born in, or detain four-year-olds in the middle of cancer treatment. Or maybe he means the “conventional practice” of thinking genocide is bad; we live in a world where that belief has apparently been overturned, replaced by an AI mock-up of what Gaza would look like cleansed of its remaining inhabitants.
Mandelson is only the most cynical and supercilious edge of a Labour approach that is impossible to make sense of. They want to deplore misogyny and authoritarianism and yet go fishing with JD Vance. They want to support Ukraine to the hilt and yet pull out the stops for Trump’s state visit – to which he could easily show up with Vladimir Putin as his plus-one. He’s a daredevil, remember; an iconoclast, a risk taker. Stop bleating about the international order and how important it is not to reward wars of aggression, stupid liberal. Try to keep up.
There is no appealing to the conscience of a government that has already told you it can’t afford a conscience when there’s cheap nuclear energy on the table. And yet, as unjust as it is, from a global perspective, Mandelson’s position on Trump represents all of our position. Unless you find some way to express dissent, the state invitation comes from the British people. The government’s prioritisation of slightly more favourable tariffs over decency and human rights reflects our priorities.
I have wondered so often what the point of a protest demo was. I’ve seen marches that were vast and made no difference at all, and demos that made a difference, but so long after, or so circuitously, that the world never recognised the connection. I went through a phase, some time between the poll tax riots and the Countryside Alliance, of thinking that demonstrations didn’t deserve to succeed – why should you get to decide what tax we pay, who we go to war against, what animals you’re allowed to chase on a horse, just because you showed up? It’s a little bit primitive, for a mature democracy.
The Stop Trump demo on 17 September cannot conceivably stop Trump. It cannot stop him in the US, it cannot stop him on the world stage, it cannot even stop the state visit, given that he’ll already have arrived. It cannot shame the prime minister, the US ambassador, the outgoing or the incoming foreign secretary, or if it does, there will be no way of knowing. But it will succeed for everyone on it, because they’ll have withheld their consent for a morally bankrupt position. It will succeed in a way that shouting at the radio cannot, being collective rather than solitary. It will succeed because a state visit from Trump that went unprotested would be the most abject and painful failure of British values. We cannot conjure ourselves a government that responds with decency to the US administration. But we can say, at least, that it doesn’t speak for us.
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