Peter Mandelson, The New Statesman and How the ‘Soft PR’ Sausage Gets Made

Two days after Peter Mandelson was announced as the UK’s Ambassador to Washington in December 2024, Tom McTague, then political editor of UnHerd, published a column headlined ‘Peter Mandelson is a canny choice for US ambassador‘. In it he wrote: 

“In Washington, Mandelson will do what he has always done: gossip, perform and gravitate to the centre of power. In many ways, he is a made diplomat.”

The name Jeffrey Epstein does not appear in that short and profoundly positive piece. 

In March 2025, McTague was named editor of The New Statesman and, seeking splashy articles for his first issue in charge, he approached that canny US ambassador in the hope that Mandelson might gossip and perform for the benefit of his readers. 

We now know what Mandelson thought of the invitation to write a diary piece for the magazine because his WhatsApp conversation about it with Stephanie Driver, who was Head of Communications in Number 10 at the time, has been made public. It’s part of the gargantuan drop of documents released as a result of the Humble Address process allegedly designed to get to the bottom of why Mandelson was appointed in the first place. 

On 30 May 2025, Mandelson messaged Driver: 

“Hi hope you well [sic]. My/Morgan’s friend Tom McTague is taking over the New Statesman as you know and he wants me to do diary [sic] for his first issue on what it’s like being an ambassador. Happy to let you see sight of draft of course but I think it will be good soft PR and contextualising our government’s engagement with Trump administration for sceptical Labour readership…” 

The Morgan referenced there is, of course, Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s former Chief of Staff, about whom McTague wrote a political obituary in The New Statesman upon his resignation. To be described as a pal of both Mandelson and McSweeney is not a comfortable position for him to be in. A closeness to both may have been professionally useful in the past, but it now ties him to the disgraced and the defenestrated.

There is, of course, also the possibility that Mandelson’s description of him as a friend is just another example of his oily tendency to exaggerate his connections. This is, after all, the man who the document releases show was desperately campaigning to be made Chancellor of Oxford. 

Driver replied to Mandelson’s message saying: 

“Hi Peter, from a beach in the Canaries! This sounds great, an opportunity. Tom is doing a profile of the PM for the first issue and I’ve arranged for some decent access to enable it. I don’t know him very well but have enjoyed his writing, and trust his intentions with the piece.” 

Mandelson then came back with another telling line: 

“He is essentially benign towards Keir but suffers a bit from Patrick Maguire syndrome.” 

Only Mandelson can definitively know what he meant by “Patrick Maguire syndrome”, but his reference to The Times’ chief political commentator, who writes frequently about the internal workings of the Labour Party and the government, suggests he found Maguire inconveniently critical. 

Driver and Mandelson’s chat on the topic ended with her sharing more details of the Starmer profile: 

“I’m due to chat with [McTague] next week when I’m back. He’s had two sessions with Keir, with at least one more to come. I need to get a sense of his take so far to enable us to shape and tweak where possible.” 

Mandelson’s diary, under the headline ‘Inside Trump’s Oval Office‘, was published in the 12th June 2025 edition of The New Statesman. Comparing the draft released in the Humble Address documents with the published version shows that virtually nothing was changed. He got the “soft PR” he was looking for with some gentle comments about Trump mixed with a lighthearted story about the “Ambassa-dog” Jock and an unexpected encounter with Emily Thornberry. 

McTague’s profile of Starmer (‘What Keir Starmer can’t say’) appeared in the same issue. Unlike her chat with Mandelson, Driver’s conversations with McTague aren’t public, so there’s no way of knowing how much she was able to shape and tweak his take. It is by no means an uncritical portrait of the Prime Minister, but it concl

udes by giving him the last word: 

“‘I know what my job is,’ Keir Starmer tells me before we part. ‘To clear up the mess.’” 
In the Mandelson disclosures, we find McTague in amongst the mess.

Unsurprisingly, when The New Statesman published ‘Six things we learned from the Mandelson files’ yesterday, the fact that its editor was featured as a pal of both the man himself and Morgan McSweeney didn’t make the cut.

Tom McTague has been approached for comment. We will update this article if one is forthcoming.