Peter Mandelson does nothing by accident so his encomium to Trump in The Spectator this week followed by a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg is preparing the ground for a last act.

He’s 72, rich, and has held high office in London, Brussels and Washington but – as he told Kuenssberg – “I will find something useful to do”.

An assiduous collector of political and financial patrons, Mandelson has learned from his campaign for the US ambassadorship and seven glorious months on Massachusetts Avenue that something was missing from his CV.

His old Clinton-era Democratic network served a purpose along with Blair, Brown, Starmer and soft Tories like Osborne and Finkelstein. But the money is in Trumpwelt and its ecosystem – tech bros, crypto, the Kushner-Witkoff axis and the Gulf – and power projection is personalistic and agnostic regarding liberal democracy and various authoritarianisms. And the future of British politics after 2028-29 is anti-EU and MAGA-friendly.

Mandelson is executing what absolutely everyone except me now calls a “pivot” and it’s as subtle as a heart attack.

“He's not a fool,” he said of the Fool in Chief in today’s interview. “He feels that we live in a world that's full of conflicts, of hard power, of growing rivalry, and particularly between the United States and China, and that sometimes nettles have to be grasped, and that that requires deterrence”.

As too often, Kuenssberg left his generalisms to float unmolested. Presumably, he meant that the removal of the Venezuelan president (and support for his vice president and her regime) had deterred hemispheric Chinese and Iranian influence. Maybe. Not even fellow anti-anti-Trumper Niall Ferguson believes this president would fight a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Mandelson claims to have bought the lie that Trump is a powerful president the Chinese and Russians fear. “If you want peace, you get peace through strength … Sometimes I'm afraid as a last resort, very difficult, very complex situations require decisiveness. They require sometimes force … [Trump] is an extraordinary risk-taker”.

Is he? He let the Israelis defeat the Iranians, authorised a single bombing and then declared the war over. He okayed a special forces snatch-and-grab from Caracas and left the regime intact. Above all, he’s done nothing in Ukraine except insult its president and browbeat him into accepting the Dmitriev-Witkoff plan while allowing continued intelligence and targeting assistance.

As he wrote in The Spectator, Europeans should stop having the vapours about Trump’s threat of violence in Greenland. “What he's saying is that the piggybacking has got to stop”. No he isn’t. He is saying explicitly that US “ownership” is essential (""Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don't defend leases"). You can decide not to take him seriously but that hasn’t worked so well for the chin-strokers since 2024.

I have no doubt that Mandelson is already talking to Farage – someone he described as long ago as November 2024 as a “bridgehead” to MAGA. He’s redefining himself as a MAGA-whispering elder statesman. When Farage appoints him as some bipartisan grey eminence, ask Claude how I’m doing.