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    Donald Trump to meet the king as protesters gather in London and Windsor – UK politics live

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    Good morning. Official Britain is laying out the red carpet for Donald Trump today. It is the first full day of his unprecedented state visit, and he will spend it with King Charles at Windsor Castle enjoying the finest pageantry the nation can lay on. Keir Starmer, like other Western leaders, has concluded that the key to getting positive outcomes from Trump is flattery and shameless sucking up, and (not for the first time) the royal family is being deployed to this end.But civic Britain will also have its say on Trump today, and – perhaps mindful of his obsession with big crowds and his (supposed) love for free speech – there will be protests all over the country, with the main one in London. When Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president in the Trump’s first administration, was asked he felt about being booed one night when he attended the theatre, he said that was “the sound of freedom”. Trump’s response to protesters is much darker. But there is almost no chance of his hearing “the sound of freedom” today; his state visit is taking place entirely behind closed doors.I will be focusing largely on the state visit today, but I will be covering non-Trump UK politics too.Here is our overnight story about Trump arriving in the UK.Here is Rafael Behr’s Guardian about the potential flaws in Starmer’s obsequious approach to handling the US president.And here is an Rafael’s conclusion.
    Downing Street denies there is a choice to be made between restored relations with Brussels and Washington, but Trump is a jealous master. Fealty to the super-potentate across the Atlantic is an all-in gamble. There is an opportunity cost in terms of strengthening alliances closer to home, with countries that respect treaties and international rules.
    That tension may be avoided if Trump’s reign turns out to be an aberration. He is old. Maybe a successor, empowered by a moderate Congress, will reverse the US republic’s slide into tyranny. It is possible. But is it the likeliest scenario in a country where political violence is being normalised at an alarming rate? What is the probability of an orderly transfer of power away from a ruling party that unites religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, wild-eyed tech-utopian oligarchs and opportunist kleptocrats who cast all opposition in shades of treason?
    These are not people who humbly surrender power at the ballot box, or even run the risk of fair elections. They are not people on whose values and judgment Britain should be betting its future prosperity or national security.
    Here is the timetable for the day.11.55am: Donald Trump arrives at Windsor Castle by helicopter. His programme than includes a carriage procession through grounds (at 12.10pm), a ceremonial welcome (at 12.20pm), a visit to Royal Collection exhibition (at 2.15pm), a tour of St George’s Chapel (at 3pm) and a beating retreat ceremony and flypast (at 4.20pm).2pm: Anti-Trump speakers address a rally at Portland Place in London, before staging a march to Parliament Square.Evening: Fox News broadcasts an interview with Trump.8.30pm: Trump attends the state banquet at Windsor Castle.If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.As the Guardian reports, the long-coveted deal to slash US steel and aluminium tariffs to zero was shelved on the eve of Donald Trump’s state visit to BritainThe Liberal Democrats say this shows Trump is an unreliable partner. In a statement Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said:
    It looks like the government has thrown in the towel instead of fighting to stand up for the UK steel industry.
    We were told US tariffs on UK steel would be lifted completely, now that’s turned out to be yet another promise Trump has reneged on.
    It just shows Trump is an unreliable partner and that rewarding a bully only gets you so far.
    The best way to protect our economy is to stand with our allies in Europe and the Commonwealth and end Trump’s damaging trade war for good.
    A reader asks:
    Why no mention on the political blog of the bill to scrap the 2 child cap which successfully passed the first stage in the House of Commons yesterday?
    Because it was a 10-minute rule bill, from the SNP MP Kirsty Blackman, that won’t be further debated, won’t be voted on, won’t go anywhere, and won’t have any influence on government thinking.There was a vote yesterday under the 10-minute rule procedure, which allows a backbench MP every to propose a bill to the house. Yesterday Blackman proposed the bill, and the Tory MP Peter Bedford argued against it. There was then a vote on whether “leave be given to bring in” the bill and that passed by 89 votes to 79. And that is it. With no further time set aside for Blackman’s bill, it disappears into a parliamentary black hole.Sometimes I cover 10-minute rule proceedings because they can reveal something about how much parliamentary support there is for a particular propostion. But there was quite a lot else on yesterday. And it was Lib Dems, SNP MPs, independents and a few Labour leftwingers voting for the Blackman bill – all people whose supprt for removing the two-child benefit cap is well known.Lucy Powell has hit out at the “sexist” framing of her deputy Labour leadership campaign, with people claiming she and her rival, Bridget Phillipson, are standing as “proxies” for two men, Aletha Adu reports.Most of Donald Trump’s policies horrify progressives and leftwingers in Britain, including Labour party members and supporters, but Keir Starmer has said almost nothing critical about the Trump administration because he has taken a view that maintaining good relations with the White House is in the national interest.In an article in the Guardian today, Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, has urged Starmer to be more critical. He says:
    I understand the UK government’s position of being pragmatic on the international stage and wanting to maintain a good relationship with the leader of the most powerful country in the world. Faced with a revanchist Russia, Europe’s security feels less certain now than at any time since the second world war. And the threat of even higher US tariffs is ever present.
    But it’s also important to ensure our special relationship includes being open and honest with each other. At times, this means being a critical friend and speaking truth to power – and being clear that we reject the politics of fear and division. Showing President Trump why he must back Ukraine, not Putin. Making the case for taking the climate emergency seriously. Urging the president to stop the tariff wars that are tearing global trade apart. And putting pressure on him to do much more to end Israel’s horrific onslaught on Gaza, as only he has the power to bring Israel’s brazen and repeated violations of international law to an end.
    Khan also says he is in favour of Londoners protesting against Trump to “tell President Trump and his followers that we cannot be divided by those who seek to sow fear.”Khan and Trump have a long history of slagging each other off. (Khan is also a Muslim, who may or may not be relevant to why Trump singles him out for special criticism.)On the Today programme this morning Bryan Lanza, a Trump ally who worked for the president during his first campaign for the White House, was asked if Trump would be bothered by comments like those from Khan. No, was the answer. Lanza explained:
    [Trump] receives enthusiasm everywhere he goes. There’s obviously opposition, but at the end of the day, those who are opposed, they don’t matter.
    The American people are the ones who voted this president in. They validated his vision for the country. And if Europe has a problem with the American people’s vision, that’s Europe’s problem. That’s not President Trump’s problem.
    As for the mayor of London, who cares? I mean, he’s nowhere relevant in any conversation that’s effective to any foreign policy that President Trump’s involved in. He’s just a local mayor. I think he should focus more on traffic, on handling the trash, than trying to elevate himself to the diplomatic stage.
    Amnesty International UK is supporting the anti-Trump protest in London today. Explaining why, its communications director, Kerry Moscogiuri, said:
    As President Trump enjoys his state banquet, children are being starved in Gaza in a US backed genocide. Communities of colour in the US are terrorised by masked ICE agents, survivors of sexual violence, including children, face being criminalised for getting an abortion and polarisation emanates from the White House at every opportunity.
    We’ve watched in despair as rights and freedoms have been stripped away across the US. But here too our protest rights are eroded, millions go without adequate access to food or housing, safe routes for those seeking asylum are shut down and our government is doing nothing meaningful to prevent and punish Israel’s genocide in Gaza. With racist bullies feeling empowered to abuse people on our streets, the grim and nihilistic politics of Trump could be on its way here.
    [The march] is about sending a clear message that the UK does not welcome Trump’s policies with open arms. We reject his anti-human rights agenda. We say not in our name, not on our watch.
    The police may have stopped campaigners projecting the Trump/Epstein picture onto the walls of Windsor Castle (see 9.37am), but this morning it is being driven around the streets of Windsor on the side of an advertisting van.Britain and the US have struck a tech deal that could bring billions of pounds of investment to the UK as President Donald Trump arrived for his second state visit, PA Media reports. PA says:
    Keir Starmer said the agreement represented “a general step change” in Britain’s relationship with the US that would deliver “growth, security and opportunity up and down the country”.
    The “tech prosperity deal”, announced as Trump arrived in the UK last night will see the UK and US co-operate in areas including artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and nuclear power.
    It comes alongside £31bn of investment in Britain from America’s top technology companies, including £22bn from Microsoft.
    Microsoft’s investment, the largest ever made by the company in the UK, will fund an expansion of Britain’s AI infrastructure, which Labour sees as a key part of its efforts to secure economic growth, and the construction of the country’s largest AI supercomputer.
    Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of the firm, said it had “many conversations” with the UK government, including No 10, “every month”, adding that the investment would have been “inconceivable because of the regulatory climate” in previous years.
    “You don’t spend £22bn unless you have confidence in where the country, the government and the market are all going,” he said. “And this reflects that level of confidence.”
    Microsoft is backing tech firm Nscale to contribute towards developing a major data centre in the UK, which the company said would help build out Britain’s cloud and AI infrastructure.
    Asked how much electricity capacity would be required for the build-out and how this would be supplied, Smith said: “We already have the contracts in place for the power that will be needed for the investments that we’re announcing here.”
    Officials said the investment enabled by the tech partnership could speed up development of new medicines and see collaboration on research in areas such as space exploration and defence.
    Starmer said: “This tech prosperity deal marks a generational step change in our relationship with the US, shaping the futures of millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic, and delivering growth, security and opportunity up and down the country.”
    Here is the government news release about the deal.In the Commons yesterday MPs debated the decision to sack Peter Mandelson as the UK ambassador to Washington last week because new emails revealed that his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile sex trafficker, was closer than he had previously disclosed. One MP said Donald Trump must think the UK government “complete plonkers” for their handling of this because, by sacking Mandelson, Keir Starmer has put Epstein back at the top of the UK news agenda just ahead of Trump’s arrival. And Trump, of course, is deeply embarrassed about his own past friendship with Epstein.British protesters are doing their best to ensure Trump can’t ignore the story. Four people have been arrested after images ofTrump alongside Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle last night. Reuters has more here.Starmer is not the only leader Trump will be meeting who has “sacked” a close ally over his Epstein links. King Charles, continuing an approach adopted by his mother, the late Queen, has excluded his brother, Prince Andrew, from playing a role in public life follow the scandal about Andrew’s own links with Epstein.Good morning. Official Britain is laying out the red carpet for Donald Trump today. It is the first full day of his unprecedented state visit, and he will spend it with King Charles at Windsor Castle enjoying the finest pageantry the nation can lay on. Keir Starmer, like other Western leaders, has concluded that the key to getting positive outcomes from Trump is flattery and shameless sucking up, and (not for the first time) the royal family is being deployed to this end.But civic Britain will also have its say on Trump today, and – perhaps mindful of his obsession with big crowds and his (supposed) love for free speech – there will be protests all over the country, with the main one in London. When Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president in the Trump’s first administration, was asked he felt about being booed one night when he attended the theatre, he said that was “the sound of freedom”. Trump’s response to protesters is much darker. But there is almost no chance of his hearing “the sound of freedom” today; his state visit is taking place entirely behind closed doors.I will be focusing largely on the state visit today, but I will be covering non-Trump UK politics too.Here is our overnight story about Trump arriving in the UK.Here is Rafael Behr’s Guardian about the potential flaws in Starmer’s obsequious approach to handling the US president.And here is an Rafael’s conclusion.
    Downing Street denies there is a choice to be made between restored relations with Brussels and Washington, but Trump is a jealous master. Fealty to the super-potentate across the Atlantic is an all-in gamble. There is an opportunity cost in terms of strengthening alliances closer to home, with countries that respect treaties and international rules.
    That tension may be avoided if Trump’s reign turns out to be an aberration. He is old. Maybe a successor, empowered by a moderate Congress, will reverse the US republic’s slide into tyranny. It is possible. But is it the likeliest scenario in a country where political violence is being normalised at an alarming rate? What is the probability of an orderly transfer of power away from a ruling party that unites religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, wild-eyed tech-utopian oligarchs and opportunist kleptocrats who cast all opposition in shades of treason?
    These are not people who humbly surrender power at the ballot box, or even run the risk of fair elections. They are not people on whose values and judgment Britain should be betting its future prosperity or national security.
    Here is the timetable for the day.11.55am: Donald Trump arrives at Windsor Castle by helicopter. His programme than includes a carriage procession through grounds (at 12.10pm), a ceremonial welcome (at 12.20pm), a visit to Royal Collection exhibition (at 2.15pm), a tour of St George’s Chapel (at 3pm) and a beating retreat ceremony and flypast (at 4.20pm).2pm: Anti-Trump speakers address a rally at Portland Place in London, before staging a march to Parliament Square.Evening: Fox News broadcasts an interview with Trump.8.30pm: Trump attends the state banquet at Windsor Castle.If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog. More

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      Trump’s tariffs have hurt tea exports to the US, says Fortnum & Mason boss

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      The boss of upmarket retailer Fortnum & Mason has said Donald Trump’s trade war has hit sales of its luxury tea exports to the US and forced up prices.Tom Athron, the London-based retailer’s chief executive, said Trump’s stricter country of origin rules and the end of the “de minimis” cost exemption for parcels worth less than $800 (£587) had hit customers across the Atlantic.“The American authorities have told us – this is the tea industry in its entirety – that if you’ve got tea from China and India in your tea, then its country of origin [is] China or India, and therefore those enormous tariffs apply,” he told the Financial Times.Trump, who landed in the UK on Tuesday for an unprecedented second state visit for a US president, last month imposed a 50% tariff on imports from India as a punishment for buying Russian oil.And earlier this year, the US administration raised tariffs as high as 145% on Chinese goods as the trade war intensified, before dropping them to 30% in May to facilitate talks between the two trading giants. The world’s two largest economies held talks in Madrid this week to try to reach a potential deal.For a 250g canister of loose leaf Royal Blend tea, which retails to US consumers at $27.85, Fortnum’s has now been forced to charge delivery fees starting at $25.41 owing to the changes to US taxes and duties.The 318-year-old retailer, which holds two royal warrants, was not previously liable for any tariffs on the majority of its deliveries to US customers.US custom agents assess whether a “substantive transformation” has been made to a product to decide whether its country of origin is different from where the product has been sourced.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis process can be unclear to retailers, while the scrapping of “de miminis” rules has led to customers being wary of buying Fortnum & Mason’s products, which are popular with expats and international buyers.“A lot of our things are sent as gifts [so] if you’re living in New York and I’m sending a present to you, I want to be sure that you’re not going to be landed with a $200 bill on receipt of your parcel,” said Athron. “It’s all in hand, logistically we’re immaculate, it just means prices will go up for US consumers.”Overseas sales of Fortnum & Mason’s goods, including its famous hampers, were £12.5m in the year to July 2024, accounting for about 5.5% of total revenues.Wider inflationary pressure has led the retailer to raise the UK price of a 250g canister of loose leaf Breakfast Blend tea by almost 40% over the last five years. More

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      Keir Starmer is betting everything on an America that doesn’t exist any more | Rafael Behr

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      Interpreters are not required for visiting US heads of state, but that doesn’t mean Donald Trump and Keir Starmer will speak the same language this week. The UK prime minister will practise the art of tactful diplomacy emphasising mutual advantage and historical alliance. Most of the words in that sentence mean nothing to a president who is fluent only in self-interest.Given the likelihood of miscommunication between two men from such different political cultures – the showbiz demagogue and the lawyer technocrat – relations have been remarkably friendly and, in Downing Street’s estimation, fruitful.The contrast in styles has been turned to an advantage. The prime minister’s quiet solicitousness makes no competitive claim on the president’s limelight.Trump has praised Starmer as a “good man” with a “beautiful accent”. He has agreed trade terms that are marginally less vindictive than the tariff regime applied to the rest of Europe. British lobbying has been instrumental in softening White House disdain for Nato and nudging the president towards scepticism about Vladimir Putin’s motives in Ukraine.Managing the transatlantic relationship is one of the few things Starmer’s shrinking band of loyalists confidently cite as an achievement. Privately, some of the prime minister’s Tory opponents concede the point. But in the restive ranks of the Labour party, and a broad swath of public opinion, Trump is seen as a monster whose flimsy favours are not worth the price in national self-abasement.Anyone hoping the state visit may include some hint of official rebuke for the honoured guest’s authoritarian character will be disappointed. Flattery and regal pomp to secure Britain’s status as Trump’s most esteemed tributary are the whole point.Pre-cooked deals on nuclear and tech cooperation will be unveiled. Awkward differences on foreign policy – Britain’s imminent recognition of a Palestinian state; the US’s continued indulgence of Russian aggression – will not be aired in public.Not by the prime minister, at least. No amount of Foreign Office contingency planning can insure against Trump’s capacity for unscripted sabotage. Even if the personal affection for Starmer is sincere, it is an outlier emotion in a man whose power base throbs with hostility to Labour Britain.The prime minister can only pray that those prejudices don’t surface in some spontaneous televised riff on popular Maga themes – repression of free speech via social-media content regulation; submersion of indigenous white folk in a rising migrant tide. Even if that doesn’t happen, the hazard reveals a flaw in the policy of uncritical intimacy with an inherently unreliable regime.The case for Starmer’s method is that Britain’s economic and security interests are inseparable from US power and will remain so for the foreseeable future. To attempt strategic decoupling out of distaste for an incumbent president would be myopic self-indulgence. Such influence as a junior ally might have over a prickly protector needs to be exercised sparingly in private. The more openly dissenting approach, sometimes showcased by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, doesn’t get results. Besides, France is part of the EU. Brexit puts Britain in a different category in Trump’s mind and, it is said, thereby affords unique opportunities.A version of this argument was set out in a speech by Peter Mandelson, shortly before his dismissal as ambassador to Washington last week. The thrust was that the 21st century will be shaped by superpower rivalry between the US and China. The winner will be the one that dominates in the fields of AI, quantum computing and other such innovations with awesome dual-use military applications. Britain is disproportionately competitive in this field, given its size.In short, the UK is bound by common interests and post-Brexit realpolitik to join Team USA when the only alternative is a world order dictated by the Chinese Communist party. “Like it or not, our US partnership has become indispensable to the functioning of our nation,” said Mandelson.That perspective will continue to shape the government’s foreign policy regardless of who is the ambassador to Washington. It contains some truth about the new technological arms race but, more importantly, it goes with the deep grain of Britain’s postwar Atlanticist bias. It also brushes aside any obligation to work harder at reintegration with the rest of Europe, which is a fiddly multilateral process. It has complex moving parts and a tendency to start awkward conversations about labour migration. Starmer is making incremental progress in his reset of EU relations. Negotiations on agricultural trade, defence and energy cooperation are ongoing. But the mechanics of cosying up to the White House are simpler and the reward in political gratification comes quicker.Trump does deals briskly, but he undoes them just as fast. His word is not a bond. His commitments are conditional. Preferential treatment for British business might be promised, but not delivered, or partly implemented, and one day reversed. The president signed agreements in his first term that count for nothing now. His modus operandi is extortion, the classic protection racket. He inflicts pain – tariffs for foreign governments; lawsuits or bureaucratic harassment for domestic companies – and offers to relieve the suffering in exchange for some commercial advantage. Paying up encourages the bully to come back for more.This is the economic corollary to Trump’s political assault on judicial independence, pluralism and the rule of law. British citizens might not be directly threatened by deployment of the national guard to US cities under the guise of law enforcement or a paramilitary immigration force that kidnaps people from the streets, but that doesn’t mean the corrosion of democracy in the US has no bearing on UK interests.For one thing, the Maga project provides a template that Nigel Farage is admiring, ready to implement something along the same lines if Reform UK ever form a government. Denying them that opportunity will be easier if arguments against authoritarian nationalism have been rehearsed in advance of the general election campaign.That case should be made in principle, but it applies also to pragmatic calculations of geopolitical influence. Downing Street denies there is a choice to be made between restored relations with Brussels and Washington, but Trump is a jealous master. Fealty to the super-potentate across the Atlantic is an all-in gamble. There is an opportunity cost in terms of strengthening alliances closer to home, with countries that respect treaties and international rules.That tension may be avoided if Trump’s reign turns out to be an aberration. He is old. Maybe a successor, empowered by a moderate Congress, will reverse the US republic’s slide into tyranny. It is possible. But is it the likeliest scenario in a country where political violence is being normalised at an alarming rate? What is the probability of an orderly transfer of power away from a ruling party that unites religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, wild-eyed tech-utopian oligarchs and opportunist kleptocrats who cast all opposition in shades of treason?These are not people who humbly surrender power at the ballot box, or even run the risk of fair elections. They are not people on whose values and judgment Britain should be betting its future prosperity or national security.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      How huge London far-right march lifted the lid on a toxic transatlantic soup

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      A young man in a suit made of union jacks held up a framed photograph of their hero above his head. The crowd loudly chanted the name. The focus of this acclamation was not Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, the organiser of the so-called “free speech” march in central London last Saturday.They were instead shouting themselves hoarse for Charlie Kirk, the murdered political activist from Cook County in the US state of Illinois.It is unlikely that many of the 110,000 to 150,000 protesters estimated to have been on the streets last weekend, at what turned out to be the largest rally of its type in British history, knew much about Kirk before his death at the hands of a gunman at Utah Valley University.The UK version of Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which claims to be the “largest Conservative student movement” in the US, has never really taken off in Britain.But they were moved to cheer him on Saturday. Clips of an almost entirely white and predominantly male crowd of Britons chanting the first name of the murdered 31-year-old were lapped up on social media accounts said to be US-based, as was the minute’s silence afterwards.View image in fullscreen“Thousands of British patriots just fell silent in honor of Charlie Kirk in London,” tweeted Eric Daugherty, an assistant news director at the conservative Florida’s Voice website (“Honest political reporting to Florida, minus the mainstream talking points.”)It is said that when America coughs, Britain catches a cold.The reality with this strain of politics is that there is something of a feedback loop between the US and the UK that is proving mutually beneficial to both sides, said Prof Paul Jackson, author of Pride in Prejudice: Understanding Britain’s Extreme Right.Kirk may not have been a household name in the UK but his murder offered validation for a view that a certain outlook on life is under threat. In turn, the scenes on Saturday provided evidence of the righteousness of the cause back in the US.There is history to this mutually enforcing exchange of ideas on the extreme right, said Jackson.A certain type of US political thought has never travelled well across the Atlantic, notably the Ku Klux Klan, which grew after the civil war in the late 1860s, said Jackson.But other ideas have thrived in the past as they do today, including those contained in Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, which influenced some European white supremacists, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew.It has not all been one way. The Blood & Honour movement, founded by British neo-Nazi and white power music pioneer Ian Stuart Donaldson in 1987, led to the birth of Blood & Honour American Division and Blood & Honour Council US.That was the analogue age, though.In the digital era, particularly in the so-called “counter-jihad” space that now dominates what is loosely termed the far right, the mutual reinforcement of messages is done in real time. Stories of social conflict or moral panic in one country are used to boost a political claim in another.Kirk himself was one of those who picked up on the case of Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old English woman –married to a Conservative councillor – who was sentenced to 31 months in prison for calling for hotels that were housing asylum seekers to be burned down during last summer’s riots. (She was released in August after serving less than half her sentence.)View image in fullscreen“Every day people say: ‘Well someone should go kill Charlie Kirk.’ I don’t like it, but that is protected speech,” he told GB News. “In America, we care what you do and not what you say.”It was of a piece with the general claim that free speech is under threat in the UK, confirmed in the mind of the likes of JD Vance by the UK’s Online Safety Act, aimed at preventing young people from encountering harmful content, which the US vice-president claims has put Britain on a “very dark path”.The amplification of certain causes, the repetition of choice phrases, cannot be said to be highly organised, but it is nonetheless powerful.The Infowars website, founded by the prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, promoted Robinson’s content about the rally on Saturday, but also that of a series of obscure accounts on X, said to be based in both the UK and the US.“Breaking: London falls silent for fallen hero Charlie Kirk,” said one such account with 335,700 followers that described itself as a defender of western values and culture. “The British media hated him. The British people certainly didn’t.”View image in fullscreenAnother account promoted by Jones’s site was that of Naomi Seibt, a US-based German political influencer linked to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, who is known for her climate change denial and promotion of “great replacement theory” tropes.She tweeted images from the rally to her 436,700 followers that included the words: “White children will grow up as patriots from now on. White guilt is over.”Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the anti-Muslim movement Act for America, which claims to have 1,000 local chapters across the US, posted on X: “Don’t let the media downplay how massive this is. Millions of patriots in the UK are standing up for free speech.”Then there is Elon Musk, who appeared via videolink at Saturday’s rally. It would be difficult to overplay the importance to Robinson of the support of one of the world’s richest men, according to analysts including the Hope Not Hate anti-extremist organisation.View image in fullscreenIn lifting the ban on Robinson’s content on X and through his own misleading posts framing him as a free speech warrior persecuted by the state, Musk gave the activist a vital leg-up, it is argued.Robinson, a former member of the racist British National party, who has a string of convictions to his name including for assault, using a fake passport, mortgage fraud and contempt of court, is said to have been able to build upon his profile in the US, stir up protests outside hotels accommodating asylum seekers while pushing anti-immigrant messages that circle around a supposed threat of Islamisation to the UK.“When you hear people talk about the special relationship between America and Great Britain, this is the special relationship that you’re seeing here,” Robinson said at the rally.“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” Musk told the crowd, in turn.Musk is not yet believed to have directly funded anyone in the UK, although he reportedly flirted with offering money to Reform, the rising political party on the right that is led by Nigel Farage. But such transatlantic relationships do exist, albeit they tend to remain below the radar. It is a murky soup – but some of the chunkier players can be made out.One is the US tech billionaire Robert Shillman, known as Dr Bob, who in 2018 financed a fellowship that helped pay for Robinson to be employed by the rightwing Canadian media website, Rebel Media, now called Rebel News, on a salary of about £5,000 a month.View image in fullscreenOther Shillman fellows have included Katie Hopkins, the English former reality TV star who compared migrants to cockroaches, and Laura Loomer, the American conspiracy theorist referred to by some as the president’s “de facto national security adviser”.The rightwing Middle East Forum thinktank, led by the neoconservative academic Daniel Pipes, has paid for foreign speakers to attend Robinson rallies in the past, in addition to funding the activist’s legal defence.There are laws against foreign donations in both the US and the UK but the far-right echo chamber is also clearly a useful tool for those seeking electoral success on both sides of the Atlantic.Trump has had no qualms about bouncing off certain British causes, sometimes unadvisedly. He said he was prepared to apologise in 2018 when he retweeted posts from Britain First, an offshoot of the BNP. But he is notably cautious about certain characters.Trump, who will be in the UK for a state visit this week, did not comment on social media about Saturday’s rally. He appears to prefer his outriders to do the work at times, including his son.When the rightwing activist Kurt Schlichter claimed – falsely – on X that Robinson had been arrested for reporting on a court case in May 2018, Donald Trump Jr retweeted it, writing: “Reason #1776 for the original #brexit. Don’t let America follow in those footsteps.”In the UK, Farage, who successfully fought for decades for the UK to leave the European Union and is today riding high in the polls with his anti-immigration populism, has sought to keep a sterile gap between himself and Robinson, who he fears is beyond the pale for much of the British public.He steps carefully in the digital space, seeking support but without getting too close to the most strident actors, including those in the US. He is notably quite loth to associate himself too much with Trump these days when he is at home in the UK, given the US president’s poor approval ratings among the British public.View image in fullscreenBut his long-standing ties to the Make America Great Again movement remain financially advantageous. This week, Farage apologised for breaching parliamentary rules by failing to register a trip to Florida to headline a fundraising event for Trump. He had been the main speaker at the $500-a-head Republican party dinner in Tallahassee in March.Farage hopes to benefit from the promotion of anti-immigrant themes in the digital world, including from US commentators, without putting off those with more mainstream outlooks, say insiders. It will be a difficult trick to get away with – as Musk’s criticism of Farage at the start of the year over his lack of support for Robinson illustrated.“British people are kind of looking for an international source of inspiration,” said Jackson. “[Then] some of the reason why somebody like Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson might be of particular interest in the US is because they’ve had a lot of success in their own terms.“Tommy Robinson’s social media profile of the last few years has been highly impactful, even more so since [Musk] reversing his ban from Twitter. Nigel Farage’s impact on Britain shortly before Trump’s first presidency can be seen as perhaps providing some blueprints about how to have impact.”Gawain Towler, who was Farage’s long-standing press adviser until he left Reform earlier this year, said he believed the American interest in shaping British politics was also instinctive.“Trump sees the UK as the spiritual home of the US,” he said. “He sees our traditional political and legal traditions as the spiritual background to America’s right.“Musk certainly feels that way. He sees the UK as the spiritual homeland of the concepts of the American Declaration of Independence and its bill of rights and all the rest of it. This is where freedom was born, right? It’s like losing a great-uncle if it falls.” More

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      Just when Keir Starmer thought he’d got Jeffrey Epstein off his plate – look who’s coming to dinner | Marina Hyde

      by

      Quick update on Keir Starmer’s government of “national renewal”: having just lost his deputy and housing secretary over her failure to pay the required stamp duty, the prime minister has also lost his US ambassador over his known close association with a known paedophile sex trafficker. Hang on – he’s now also lost his director of political strategy for relating some dirty jokes about Diane Abbott.Meanwhile, an increasing number of people think the solution to all this is Andy Burnham taking over, suggesting the current Greater Manchester mayor could run in a parliamentary seat that has only notionally become free because the previous Labour MP was suspended from the party after being found to have sent messages hoping a couple of constituents would soon be dead/“mown down”, and is now apparently “off sick”. On top of which, we’re having the Americans round. US president Donald Trump touches down in the UK tonight on the eve of the most hideously ill-starred dinner party since the vomiting scene in Triangle of Sadness. I don’t think the nation could possibly feel any more renewed.It’s been a few days since Peter Mandelson’s emails to Jeffrey Epstein were held up in front of the public using the hazmat tongs, and the more I’ve thought about them, the more I come back to one of the more obscure lines. Writing in apparent anguish on the eve of Epstein’s incarceration in 2008, Mandelson opines to him: “It just could not happen in Britain.” Maybe he was right, unwittingly or otherwise. Britain is very, very good at a sort of institutionalised looking away. Maybe Mandelson was – unwittingly or otherwise – characterising something grim about this country that pious old Keir Starmer would no doubt be hugely affronted to be caught up in. Except, the prime minister is caught up in it – in fact, he’s at the very centre of it. He is the one who looked away.It’s hard not to feel there is something necrotic and beaten about a government whose leader would appoint someone he knew had been very close to Epstein, who the entire world by that point knew was – and forgive me for repeating the words – a paedophile sex trafficker. Association with him was already known to be such a horror show that the late Queen Elizabeth II had to sack her own son for it. And there is something worse about Starmer’s horrifying lack of curiosity even as the facts closed in, right till the bitter end, with No 10 dithering for staggeringly long last week over a set of quite the most disqualifying emails, while Starmer fannied about defending Mandelson at the dispatch box.This was, of course, the other dispatch box to the one at which Sir Keir plied his holier-than-thou trade in opposition. There’s an old online rule that declares that if you tell someone off for their spelling or grammar, you will always end up making your own howler while you’re doing it. Starmer spent his years in opposition telling off the Tories at every turn, instead of – for instance – coming up with a creative and coherent plan for growth. Inevitably, we now seem to be strapped in to watching him and his administration warrant a daily telling-off, as offences and immoralities mount up. Why does this keep happening to him, etc?As for Epstein, we know that at the time Mandelson was writing to him telling him to fight for early release, police in Palm Beach, Florida had identified 36 girls who the “financier” had sexually abused. Yet for all the many years of grim and grotesque revelations, it still feels as though we know remarkably little about him. Who was he, this mysterious paedo Gatsby, and where did all his money come from?Shortly after his death, New York magazine ran a fascinating story in which real hedge-funders expressed pointed bemusement over how Epstein made his money, since none of them had really had any dealings with him. As one big hedge-fund president, Doug Kass, put it: “I went to my institutional brokers, to their trading desks and asked if they ever traded with him. I did it a few times until the date when he was arrested. Not one institutional trading desk, primary or secondary, had ever traded with Epstein’s firm.” As Kass had said to a journalist: “There’s another guy who reminds me of Madoff that no one trades with.” Or as another hedgie remarked: “It’s hard to make a billion dollars quietly.” And yet Epstein had made no noise at all in the financial world. They could barely find one investor. Their general theory was that the “hedge fund” was simply a cover for a blackmail scheme.Perhaps most amazing, really, is the fact that Epstein will be a ghost at the feast tomorrow night for more than one attender, as Trump continues to butch out his long and close association with precisely the type of evildoer his Maga followers are convinced runs the world. Epstein is a guy who really does fit the very template of their darkest conspiracy theories – rich and powerful, involved in the trafficking of minors, connected in a network of some of the most powerful people in the world. This is all the sort of stuff they’ve been going on about for years – yet who should keep rearing his head in the story, but their own beloved president.Isn’t it intriguing how many of them (currently) just can’t bring themselves to believe it? Something to discuss over the starter tomorrow night at Windsor Castle, perhaps, as long as everyone can keep their food down.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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      When Trump comes to UK, normal rules of state visits will not apply

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      Donald Trump has repeatedly described Keir Starmer as a “good man”, distancing himself from the attacks on the UK prime minister mounted by other figures on the US far right such as Elon Musk.One of the many known unknowns, however, of a Trump state visit is what kind of Trump will show up when a microphone is placed in front of him.The US president is often a bundle of contradictions. During his first state visit in 2018 most UK diplomats said he was a picture of affability, yet he took it upon himself to conduct an interview with the Sun in which he insulted Theresa May, and said Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister. He seemed unaware he might have caused offence.Starmer as host will have to grin and bear whatever brickbats Trump sends his way about the state of free speech in the UK, recognition of the state of Palestine, immigration, or the possibility that Reform will lead the next government in the UK. The one thing the Foreign Office knows is that the normal rules of state visits do not apply.An added loose mooring will be the absence of the former UK ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, who was dismissed for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Ambassadors are known to personally visit every site of every stop on a state visit. Their job is often quite literally to look round corners for what might be coming. Lord Mandelson, a stickler for detail, would have been poring over every angle of the state visit in conjunction with Buckingham Palace and the White House. Fortunately, most of it will have been battened down weeks ago. But his knowledge of the mood inside the Trump administration in the days before the visit will be missed.Behind the formal glamour, and pre-cooked agreements on tech and nuclear power cooperation, Starmer will have to choose how to spend his limited political capital. The two most pressing foreign policy issues are ones on which the UK and the US cannot agree: Israel’s future relationship with the Arab world, and the threat posed to Europe and Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. But it is the latter on which Starmer hopes to make progress.Speaking at the weekend in Kyiv, Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, gave a glimpse of current Downing Street thinking. “Putin’s sport is judo. He likes to counterbalance the action with reaction. He likes having options. If we can close his options off and leave him with only one, he will take it,” Powell said.“The main message we should be sending is real pressure to convince [Putin] the war will go on for a long time if he doesn’t make peace. His summer campaign more or less has failed already, the Russian economic position is not good, the whole economy is a war economy. If we can apply the pressure the US president is talking about in terms of targeted sanctions, and tariffs that he put on India, we might bring him to the table.”But Powell skirted around whether Trump’s latest proposal for sanctions was serious or a smokescreen to avoid doing anything. After months and months of patience-sapping delay, Trump has set out in the past fortnight new preconditions that would need to be in place before the US would ever massively sanction Russia. He said he would only do so if every Nato country, including Turkey, stopped importing Russia energy and also punished China with 50%-100% tariffs for its imports of Russian energy. Trump has already put 25% tariffs on India, the other great importer of Russian energy.The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who has spent a lot of time trying to blend the European and US approaches to Russia, explained on Sunday: “We have tried the red-carpet approach. It is not working … It is now time for the Europeans to follow President Trump’s lead to go after India and China – if China and India change their practices towards Putin, this war will end.”Starmer intends to test Trump on whether 50% tariffs on China, which would rupture China-Europe trade, is a deal-breaker. Concerted transatlantic sanctions might yet be possible if Trump demanded a ban on Russian crude imports by Hungary and Slovakia, or of imports of fuel made from Russian crude refined in third countries such as India. A ban on seaborne Russian crude oil has already cut the EU’s Russian oil imports by 90%, but Hungary and Slovakia still import it via a pipeline.Starmer’s task will be to steer Trump to more targeted sanctions on Chinese and Indian refineries, as well as yet more measures against the Russian shadow fleet. Trump’s Ukraine special envoy, Keith Kellogg, said: “If you look at the strength of sanctions from a scale of one to 10, we’re at a six. But we are at an enforcement level of three.”Starmer will also try to convince Trump the incursion of about 20 drones into Polish airspace by Russia was not the accident that Trump has suggested. Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, ridiculed the accident theory in Kyiv, saying: “We don’t believe in 20 mistakes at the same time.”Behind this argument is the fundamental discussion that Starmer tries to avoid in public – whether Trump knows Putin is stalling on a ceasefire but does not greatly care, since he believes Ukraine will lose the war and inevitably will have to cede large tracts of its territory.That requires going back to the very first principles about the victim and aggressor in Ukraine. More

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      As Starmer’s popularity tanks, what can Labour learn from Zohran Mamdani’s success in New York?

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      Progressives in the UK and US are grappling with the same question. Why have rightwing populists become so much more successful at tapping into public concern? And why are so few politicians on the left connecting with ordinary people?Barely a year after taking power in Britain, Labour’s popularity has collapsed with unprecedented rapidity against surging support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.In the US, a year after Joe Biden’s defeat, the Democrats are still derided by swathes of voters and remain at a loss for how to take on Donald Trump’s unique brand of politics.But while Labour and the Democrats languish in nationwide polls, there are exceptions. In New York over the summer, Zohran Mamdani rose from little-known assembly member to social media sensation and heavily favoured Democratic nominee in November’s mayoral contest.His success in the Democratic primary comes on the back of a highly impactful people-powered campaign that looks likely to propel him to victory. A poll for the New York Times this week concluded that Mamdani held a commanding lead over his three rivals for the mayoralty, including the scandal-hit incumbent, Eric Adams, and the multimillionaire former governor Andrew Cuomo.What if anything, can Labour learn from his success?It’s the economy, stupidPolitical observers in the UK believe Labour has a communications problem. But for good comms, you need substance. For Mamdani, that has come in the form of a laser-sharp focus on the economy and affordability.According to the NYT/Siena poll this week, 49% of likely voters thought Mamdani would perform best on affordability issues, compared with 23% who said the same of Cuomo and 10% for Adams.“Elections are almost always about very, very fundamental things,” said Matthew McGregor, the chief executive of 38 Degrees who is a former digital adviser to Ed Miliband and worked as a digital campaign strategist in Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.“Mamdani has got an agenda that clicks with people’s real lived experience of a city that has become just farcically expensive, doesn’t work for working-class people, and where there is very stark inequality between people in the boroughs and the rich parts of Manhattan,” he said.Claire Ainsley, a former Labour policy chief who now runs the centre-left renewal project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a US thinktank, said: “He’s highlighted the cost of living and affordability, and that’s right – that is the major issue that’s bothering Americans. Even if inflation is under control, cost of living is a big problem.”By comparison, Labour’s first year in power has been characterised by constantly changing policy priorities. Before and after being elected, Starmer has variously talked about his six first steps, six “milestones”, five “missions” and three “foundations”.Most recently, the prime minister has sought to reset his government by announcing a “phase two” focused on delivery, including the economy – but for many Labour MPs these constantly shifting priorities betray a frustrating lack of vision that makes it difficult to connect with the public.Champion compelling, costed policiesWith his focus on affordability, Mamdani has identified the key problem for many New Yorkers. Crucially, he is also presenting clear and compelling solutions.His policies include free bus transport, a rent freeze on the city’s 2.3m regulated apartments, a crackdown on bad landlords and commercial rent control, free childcare for parents starting at six months, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030.“His answers aren’t ‘Have you read through my 12-page white paper on breaking down planning so we can get New York building again?’. It’s not ‘We’re going to make work pay by encouraging businesses to invest’. It’s ‘We’re going to make buses free, we’re going to fill in the grocery deserts’,” McGregor said. “Practical, meaningful things that people can grasp and understand.”Mamdani is seeing off criticism about the feasibility of his promises by setting out clearly how they will be paid for – imposing a 2% tax on the top 1% of residents earning more than $1m annually, and raising New York City’s top corporate tax rate from 7.25% to match neighbouring New Jersey’s at 11.5%.For its part, Labour is implementing a whole slate of progressive policies that are very popular with voters – strengthening renters’ and workers’ rights, including a ban on fire-and-rehire practices, increasing the minimum wage, cutting down hospital waiting lists and making it easier to see a GP.The trouble is, these are not being properly championed. Ministers seem reluctant to bang the drum for some of their most popular moves, sometimes for fear of angering business. Last year, Downing Street disowned a press statement that called P&O Ferries a “rogue operator” for past fire-and-rehire practices after the firm threatened to pull out of an investment summit.Craft an overarching story – and pick a sideDavid Axelrod, a former strategist to Obama who then advised Ed Miliband in 2015, memorably said Labour’s campaign that year failed because it could be summed up with: “Vote Labour, win a microwave.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis point was that Labour in 2015 offered voters a set of loosely connected transactional promises but lacked any overarching narrative. Many believe this is a problem plaguing the current Labour government and a key to explaining the success of Trump in the US and Farage in the UK.Both Trump and Farage have clear narrative stories to tell about the problems of the country and their proposed solutions. So does Mamdani. McGregor said: “He wants to be a politician that says this whole system isn’t working, and we’re going to change things in a bigger way. Politics is a vibes-based business in the modern media environment, and everything you do is a demonstration of whose side are you on.”He added: “I think you can learn from Mamdani without saying we have to be more leftwing. Those policies need to connect to that bigger story that you’re telling. Farage is telling a story, and Trump is telling a story, and Mamdani is telling a story about the country, its challenges and problems and who’s to blame for them.”That final point – picking a side and identifying your adversaries – is key. Ed Owen, a former UK government special adviser during the New Labour years who is now a visiting fellow at the centre-left US thinktank Third Way, said: “We on the centre left are great at being rather po-faced, rational, logical, and establishing ourselves inadvertently as the defenders of the status quo that most people hate.“We are in a period of history where people’s faith in politics and politicians is at an all-time low. Insurgent political figures like Mamdani, and also on the right, are good at positioning themselves as agents of change.”Get social media-savvyEven when you tick all those boxes – a focus on people’s biggest concerns, popular policies and a compelling overarching narrative – you need a way to cut through to the public, including to voters who don’t follow politics closely.Mamdani is a hugely talented communicator who has built a huge presence on social media. His masterful campaign videos and direct, easy style are shared with 1.4 million followers on TikTok and 4 million on Instagram. Unlike most politicians, at 33 he is a social media native.“These TikTok videos, I think, are a really compelling and interesting manifestation of something,” McGregor said. “Understanding the modern media environment and the fact that huge swathes of people consume information in completely different ways to how they did five, 10, let alone 20 years ago.”The decline of traditional media means many voters consume news only through snippets on their social media feeds. The only UK politician with a major TikTok presence is Farage – he rivals Mamdani’s reach with 1.3 million followers.Despite the efforts of successive No 10 comms chiefs, the UK government has been slow at adapting to new forms of communication – though Starmer and other ministers are increasingly popping up on alternative platforms such as digital-only outlets and parenting podcasts.Owen said: “We’ve got to be able to communicate where people are – and that’s increasingly on social media channels – in the form they want. And we’ve been really bad at it.”Be an authentic local voiceMamdani is a very New York success story – and one that observers say can’t be simply copy-pasted to the UK or other parts of the US. “It isn’t as if this is some sort of template you can just transpose to any political environment,” Owen said.Ainsley said: “If there is a lesson to be drawn, it’s about the importance of authentic candidates that speak to the voters that you need. Clearly, his victory has energised parts of the left, but they are not representative of the mainstream of America, that is where the midterms and the next presidential election will be fought.“He’s played to the base that he needed, which is a narrow selectorate in New York City. He’s got conviction, and one of the things that the swing voters who’ve moved away from the Democrats over time have said to us is that they want politicians with conviction – but they also want candidates that have got the competence and credible policies that they think are going to meet their everyday needs.” More

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      When Mandelson met Maga: how Labour lord charmed Trump’s inner circle

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      Peter Mandelson was in his element. Lounging on a sofa one June evening at Butterworth’s, a bistro serving as the gastronomical centre of the Maga movement in Washington DC, the recently appointed British ambassador was being honoured with a plaque that indicated he was easing his way into the conservative circles around Donald Trump.The appointment of Mandelson, an architect of Tony Blair’s New Labour project in the 1990s, had not been without controversy. He was the first political ambassador to the United States in almost half a century and had twice resigned from Labour governments in the past over scandals (not to mention his past association with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein).So he would have to move quickly to replace the well-sourced expertise of his predecessor and build ties with a new administration that had upended all the rules of the traditional Washington establishment.Mandelson managed that by leaning into the heady conservative politics surrounding the US president, working old contacts in Trump’s circles of businessmen and courting the new media right. Surrounded by conservative journalists that evening, he said that, while the two leaders’ politics may differ, both Trump and UK prime minister Keir Starmer were riding the same political winds of upheaval.Both had received mandates, he said that evening according to British media reports in the Times, from “angry people who felt they were being unheard by mainstream politics” and were “angry about the cost of living, angry about uncontrolled immigration and angry about uncontrolled woke culture spreading across institutions”.It was a textbook performance for the once-dubbed “Prince of Darkness” who was testing the lines between ambassadorial deference and open flattery. In public, a favourite adjective for Trump was neutral but weighty: “consequential”. In private, he tended away from criticism of the new administration, even as the White House leaned toward Vladimir Putin and flirted with authoritarian measures at home.His firing now amid new details of the Epstein scandal – one that the Trump administration has sought to outrun – plays out just days before Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom, when Starmer must seek to influence Trump over the war in Ukraine, continue negotiations over a US-UK trade deal, deflect concern over a potential UK recognition of Palestine, and more.“[Mandelson] has his own independent stature and status, and that was a good thing, but it carried risks, and now it’s gone wrong,” said Alexandra Hall Hall, a former British diplomat who resigned while serving as lead envoy for Brexit in the US in 2019. “And now it’s gone wrong on the worst possible topic at the worst possible time.”In Washington, the British ambassador’s Edwin Lutyens-designed residence, where Mandelson lived with his partner and “diplo-dog” Jock, hosted parties that saw an influx of the new conservative media elite in Washington. At a White House Correspondents’ Dinner co-hosted by the Daily Mail in June, new media influencers like Natalie Winters, seen as a protege of the rightwing firebrand Steve Bannon, rubbed shoulders with established journalists from across the media spectrum. It reflected the White House’s own inclusion of conservative bloggers among accredited correspondents as a counterweight to a perceived liberal bias among the media.At a celebration for King Charles’s birthday that month, Mandelson wryly inserted jokes about Trump as guests mingled among cigar and whiskey stations, drawing laughs as he recognised a leader “associated with grand ceremonies and golden aesthetics. So happy birthday, President Trump”.It is precisely what Mandelson was sent to Washington DC to do: charm the Maga faithful around Trump while bringing the political heft that would allow a UK envoy to negotiate in the name of the prime minister.He replaced Dame Karen Pierce, a veteran diplomat who was already a regular at Mar-a-Lago and one of the best-sourced foreign ambassadors in Trumpworld. Some, like Bannon, had rejected Mandelson as a “terrible choice” because of his past remarks about Trump and links to establishment politics in the UK.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYet Mandelson proved the doubters wrong, as at least one conservative outlet put it. His main success was the outlines of a US-UK trade deal, which was feted at an Oval Office meeting with Trump where Mandelson was complimented by Trump for his “beautiful accent” and given the floor in a rare show of deference to a foreign ambassador.The White House team around him laughed as he described Trump’s “typical 11th-hour intervention by you with your phone call demanding even more out of this deal than any of us expected”. He then channelled Winston Churchill as he added: “For us it is not the end, it’s the end of the beginning.”His absence will be noted as Trump arrives in the United Kingdom for the controversial state visit that Mandelson’s quick-found relationship with the US president could have helped to smooth.After the Oval Office meeting with Trump, Mandelson left with a souvenir – a handwritten note in Trump’s distinctive marker scrawl and unmistakeable signature.“Peter,” it read. “Great Job!” More

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      Being born in north-east England gives you grit, says Fiona Hill

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      There is a “resilience and grit” that comes from being born in the north-east of England, says Fiona Hill, who went from a working-class childhood in County Durham to a top intelligence job at the heart of the White House.But, she believes, it is also a big reason why she and other notable high achievers have had the success they have. The secret of success could be being from the north-east.Hill has talked to a number of figures from – or with strong links to – the north-east for her new Forged in the North podcast series, which will be launched at Durham book festival in October.They include two global figures originally from the same part of Wallsend: the Cramlington primary school teacher turned superstar Sting, and the Yale historian Paul Kennedy.“It’s basically just listening to two people who seem on the surface so completely different but have this common origin story,” says Hill.Other podcast guests are Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot; Brendan Foster, the founder of the Great North Run; the north-east mayor, Kim McGuinness; the Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Sara Davies; the dramatist Peter Straughan; and the Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson, who lives in Stockton-on-Tees.Hill was born and brought up in Bishop Auckland, the daughter of a coalminer and a midwife. She and her accent went on to be a foreign affairs adviser to US presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump and she is considered one of the world’s leading experts on Russia and Putin.Last year she was named as one of three advisers to oversee the UK government’s strategic defence review.The new series is born, Hill says, of a belief that “too much happens down in London, as if the rest of the country doesn’t exist”.The hope is to “put the spotlight on a region that is normally only in the headlines for something going wrong: child poverty, the lowest life expectancy, worst nutrition”, she says.“The north-east is home of the Industrial Revolution – literally the engines of prosperity. Two hundred years ago, it was the forefront of innovation, and we’re saying, there’s still a lot of potential for innovation.”Hill turns 60 this year and is planning a trip back to the north-east from her home in the US. She says: “I’ve always wanted to walk along a portion of Hadrian’s Wall, I want to go back up the Northumberland coast. I want to come back for all the stories and storytelling I remember as a kid from the region.”It was in this context that the idea of the podcast series came about, with the aim of telling stories about the north “not just how it was, but how it is and how it might be”.Many cultural figures have talked passionately about the importance of where they are from. The Hull-born playwright Richard Bean once said: “Thank God I wasn’t born in Guildford. Thank God I was born somewhere there is tragedy and comedy every other second.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHill says coming from the north-east gives “a certain resilience and grit”. “Being from the north-east grounds you, it’s an anchor, a solid base with a strong sense of what’s right and wrong and a clear perspective and values.”She points to a recent poll revealing how people from the north-east have a stronger attachment to their region than other parts of England. “There’s a sense of solidarity that’s been forged in adversity. Everyone’s thrown all kinds of rubbish at the north historically … but it has a resilience.”The importance of investing in people while they are young is a theme of the podcast discussions, says Hill, who got a grant from the Durham Miners’ Association to take a Russian language course to pursue her ambition to go to university.Straughan and Hall got started with enterprise grants and through locally funded theatres. Interestingly, McGuinness and Davies, both younger interviewees, say they had to make their own luck, with Davies using her savings to start her successful business.McGuinness says the series resonated with her ambition for the north-east to be a cultural powerhouse. “This important podcast shines a light on how with the right support, talent can truly thrive.“Funding in our region’s art sector has been outpaced by the south for some time. I’m determined to fix that cultural chasm and the cycle of regional inequality, positioning the north-east as a strong contender in the UK economy.” More