What a difference 48 hours can make. On Saturday afternoon, Lord Mandelson, the UK ambassador to the United States, was treading the green and pleasant lawns of Ditchley Park near Oxford, where he was giving the annual lecture to an audience made up for the most part of the great and the good of UK foreign policy.

The landscape was quintessential England, it was a perfect late summer day, with golden light. Mandelson’s subject, nicely timed for ten days before the US President’s second state visit, was ‘Britain and America in the Age of Trump – and Beyond’. He managed, in characteristic Mandelson fashion, to argue that in most respects the interests of the UK and the US were aligned, while also noting the constraints of the ‘special relationship’ – a term he seemed not to place in inverte

See Full Page