The government may have to fall on Nigel Farage for help after the choice of Peter Mandelson as the new US ambassador did not go down well.
One of president elect Donald Trump’s team publicly described him as an ‘absolute moron’, while an insider described told the Independent it was a ‘horrible, arrogant’ choice.
Mandelson previously had worse to say about Trump, calling him a danger to the world and a white supremacist, but he now wants to to work on the US and UK special relationship.
It has sparked concerns about how the governments will be able to work together, with Reform’s Nigel Farage offering his services to build a ‘bridge’.
Reform’s founder has good relations with Elon Musk, who met with him last week and is rumoured to be considering a £78 million donation to his party.
Farage told the Telegraph: ‘Our relationship with the USA is by far our most important. If it helped the national interest I would be happy to act as a bridge.’
It comes after Mandelson himself said he would set aside differences to work with whoever Musk’s British friends are.
He told his Times podcast that it was necessary to ‘swallow your pride, find out who his friends are and try to get into those networks.
‘You cannot just continue this feud indefinitely.’
Former British ambassador to the US Lord Kim Darroch said today that this was unlikely to be the only controversy, as Trump’s return to the White House will be ‘like a 24/7 bar-room brawl’.
His advice to the next ambassador would be to watch out for Donald Trump’s ‘5am tweet storm’.
‘I can’t tell you how often I got woken up at 5am in the morning when I was in Washington,’ he said. ’10am UK time, because Trump wakes up very early and he tweets.
‘And those tweets are completely unfiltered Donald Trump, and he will comment on what’s going on around the world, including on things going on in the UK. It was very critical at times, for example, of the way Theresa May was handling Brexit.’
The tweets would be ‘instantly’ big stories so Mandelson would need to be prepared and ready to be firm about the British position.
But he said he wouldn’t take the ‘absolute moron’ comment too seriously, as the man who tweted it was an election strategist whose ‘job is finished’.
‘I don’t think he’s in the Trump White House team,’ he said. ‘I doubt that he cleared his lines with with the president-elect before he tweeted what he did.
‘You get this sort of stuff going on all the time, you need to have a thick skin.’
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