Before being stripped of his ambassadorship to the U.S. on Sept. 11 over his ties to Jeffery Epstein, Peter Mandelson, was a big beast in Britain’s Labour Party. As Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spin doctor, he was known as the Prince of Darkness for his devious ways behind the scenes. Keir Starmer, the current prime minister, appointed him ambassador in February to work his legendary wiles with the new administration. And for a few months, it looked like a great decision. President Donald Trump and all his team liked him. He was photographed smiling in the Oval Office.
Media reports painting his early exit as a disgrace, however, only obscure what may be his final masterpiece of deception: Trump’s second state visit to the U.K., which he organized.
The announcement of Trump’s first state visit in June 2019 provoked a petition with 1.8 million signatures demanding it be canceled, followed by two huge protests in the streets of London that were defined by a mixture of sarcastic humor and genuine anger. Trump’s average approval rating with the British public at that time was 21%. Now it is 16%.
So, Mandelson had an idea. Let’s tell Trump that, while lesser heads of state do their visits at Buckingham Palace and parade through the streets of London, where big crowds can cheer both them and the reigning monarch, the true greats get private visits at Windsor Castle instead.
Starmer and King Charles III had good reason to go along with this. The state visit routine was established by the late Queen Elizabeth II, and in spite of her beloved, untouchable status, there had been some sticky moments, in particular the visits of Emperor Hirohito of Japan in 1971 — which was met by organized protests of war veterans and former inmates of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps — and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1978. The prospect of any public appearance by Trump being met by large crowds shouting abuse and throwing things was all too real.
Trump fell for it, excitedly calling Windsor Castle “the ultimate.”
Mandelson correctly calculated that Trump was too stupid and narcissistic to notice any of this, so instead of a real state visit on Sept. 16, he arranged a kindergarten version to take place behind the high walls of Windsor Castle. Every participant — the military bandsmen, the honor guard, those driving the carriages and feeding the horses, plus, of course, the dinner guests — must have realized what was happening. It hasn’t been long since the last state visit by President Emmanuel Macron of France in July. This featured normal parts of the program mysteriously missing from the Trump visit, such as an address to both houses of Parliament, public events in London like dinner with the lord mayor, a visit to No. 10 Downing Street, laying a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey and visits to relevant monuments — statues of Winston Churchill and Gen. Charles de Gaulle in Macron’s case — plus the usual grinning and waving to curious crowds.
Trump fell for it, excitedly calling Windsor Castle “the ultimate,” and evidently believing he had been singled out for special treatment because he is so great, rather than because he is such a horrible political liability.
There were some spirited attempts to sabotage his visit. Protesters unfurled a giant photo of Trump and Epstein in a public space just outside Windsor Castle and projected footage of them onto the walls of the castle before he arrived. But Mandelson’s strategy paid off, and the visit was not disrupted. Channel 4 aired a TV special, “Trump v The Truth,” made up of three hours of Trump lying, though it didn’t make much of a dent.
Those half-hearted anti-Trump demonstrations fade into insignificance compared with the massive demonstration in London that took place three days earlier, on Saturday, Sept. 13, organized by 42-year-old Tommy Robinson (the nom de guerre of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon). Unlike the hypocritical if understandable display at Windsor, this protest was focused on a political agenda that attracted at least 150,000 people (some put the figure at over a million), waving flags and cheering on the slogan of “Unite the Kingdom.”
This event arguably turned Robinson into a major national figure, and he may well eclipse Nigel Farage as the main leader of a rapidly mutating populist movement. Farage spent decades in the wilderness, insisting on the single issue of getting the U.K. out of the European Union. This succeeded. But with 56% of Brits saying in June that it was a mistake versus 31% still in favor, the 61-year-old Farage’s star has visibly faded.
Robinson is also a single-issue figure, his issue being resistance to an alleged Muslim takeover of the country. Farage is a public (i.e., private) school-educated former stockbroker, whose original idea was that membership in the European Union was bad for Britain’s financial services sector. Robinson is a working-class former football supporter from Luton, a town that has become a center for radical Islamism, and his first attempt to organize a political movement (the English Defence League, founded in 2009) involved recruiting local football hooligans. He has had a couple of spells in prison, but while this makes him toxic to the mainstream media and political parties, it has only made him more credible in the eyes of his supporters. As he shouted during his big event, “We rode the storm, we weathered the storm, and today we are the storm.”
The Unite the Kingdom movement, his new schtick, subtly avoids mentioning Islam completely. He claims to want to bring together all those who believe in the idea of Great Britain, which they can demonstrate by waving flags. The event featured a Black gospel choir and the crowds included many Black and other minority participants. But when listing all the people who were welcome, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, who form the largest Islamic elements in Britain, were somehow forgotten, and also did not attend, rightly judging that not just Robinson himself, but also the majority of those in the crowds, were really drawing attention to the fact that they did not consider these communities as loyal British citizens.
An anti-Islam rally that does not mention Islam is a strange event, but so many people turned out that most of them couldn’t get anywhere near the stage to hear the speakers anyway. It went off surprisingly peacefully, with only 25 arrests, 12 of those being from a much smaller counterdemonstration under the banner of anti-racism.
Using “immigration” as code for the underlying anti-Muslim agenda just isn’t going to work.
A common slogan from banners and chants at Robinson’s event was “We want our country back,” and if that sentiment sounds familiar to Americans, The Economist has uncovered a disturbing truth to explain why. While Brits mostly can’t stomach Trump himself, The Economist analyzed British survey results for 34 points they claim represents the Trump agenda and looked at what this data showed over the years. In 2014, 40% of British respondents were functionally Trumpy by this standard. But this number went into a steep decline once Trump was elected president the first time, falling to around 28% in mid-2021. But under the Biden administration, possibly under the influence of Farage, or for some other unknown reason, it began to climb again, and is now around 36%, even while Trump’s personal ratings continue to fall.
This means that a large and growing section of the U.K. population has views that are not represented by any established political party. This has been the constituency of Nigel Farage and is now the one Tommy Robinson appears to have claimed for his own.
The London rally did feature some Americana, like images of Charlie Kirk, and weird anti-climate science and anti-vax slogans, but the single Trumpy policy that attracts both his own supporters and his British unconscious believers is “Send them back”: mass deportations and similar schemes. But there is a big problem with this in the U.K. Mexican illegally in the U.S. can be identified and deported. However inhumane, it is a possible project. The Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain are U.K. citizens. Some of their immigration tactics — such as taking a 16-year-old British-born and British-educated daughter out of high school and sending her to Pakistan for an arranged marriage to a much older cousin they have never met so that he can then apply for a family reunification visa — seem immoral to many people, but they are perfectly legal.
Using “immigration” as code for the underlying anti-Muslim agenda just isn’t going to work. No legislation against immigration is going to remove these large and growing communities, and it is hard to imagine the United Kingdom or any Western democracy following the lead of Islamic states and discriminating purely on the grounds of religion. Radicalizing the right automatically radicalizes Islam too, setting up a deadly spiral.
Neither Tommy Robinson nor Nigel Farage nor anyone else offers a solution to this political conundrum. The Labour Party needs Muslim votes and so is happy to decry “Islamophobia” as the most terrible of thought crimes imaginable. And Donald Trump, unaware of his influence on the dangerous growth of impossible wishes in Britain, has happily returned to America, still glowing with the thought of what a great honor has been bestowed upon him. Before the president left the U.K., Beth Rigby of Sky News asked Trump what he thought about Mandelson’s firing. Trump replied, “I don’t know him, actually.”