After three months of speculation, Keir Starmer has appointed a replacement for Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. The winner is career diplomat Christian Turner, who has, for the last couple of years, been the political director at the Foreign Office.
Turner is considered a high-flyer and has been tipped for big roles like this for years, but it certainly won’t have done him any harm to have been one of the key link men with the incoming Labour administration a year ago. He and Oliver Robbins, the permanent secretary, have been presiding over a difficult reduction in headcount and awkward internal politics over both Gaza and Trump. He is just the sort of official who impresses the Prime Minister.
Despite reporting earlier this week that Nigel Casey, the ambassador to Russia, had overtaken Turner as the Foreign Office choice for the job, it always seemed to my contacts that Turner was the likely winner if a ‘safe pair of hands’ was Starmer’s chief objective. Ex Foreign Office people from the last government acknowledged Casey’s experience but regarded him as a bit of a plodder, to be blunt. Turner is seen as cleverer and slicker.
The interesting thing is that the two names I heard from American sources when I was last in Washington have both been passed over.
The interesting thing is that the two names I heard from American sources when I was last in Washington – Varun Chandra, Starmer’s chief business adviser, and James Roscoe, Mandelson’s deputy who has been holding the fort in DC as acting ambassador since September – have both been passed over. Roscoe did not actually apply but, senior people in Downing Street agree, he has been doing an excellent job.
Chandra got his No. 10 job, in part, because Mark Burnett, the former producer of The Apprentice who is Donald Trump’s special envoy to the UK, told Downing Street players that ‘he knows how to talk to Americans’. He has been sent away with a pat on the head and an enhanced title.
It was an open secret in Whitehall that Turner was due to be Britain’s next ambassador to the United Nations, effectively the second-ranking British diplomatic job in the US. That post now has a vacancy. My diplomatic contacts, perhaps inevitably, say ‘they will now want a woman’.
But those who have worked with him in the past think it would be a mistake to lose Roscoe’s experience of America at a critical time for transatlantic relations. MAGA world acknowledges he navigated the Mandelson affair effectively, is well liked by Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and other White House officials, and those who were present at Chequers during the state visit say Trump likes him – no mean feat for a pinstriped smoothie.
I have known him a little since he worked in Gordon Brown’s Downing Street and then as the Queen’s press secretary. Unlike many civil servants, Roscoe understands politics and likes the cut and thrust. He has also served before in New York. One of those who worked with him in No. 10 fifteen years ago says: ‘There are very few people I would go into the jungle with, but James is one of them.’
At a time when Starmer and his team often resemble a small unit pinned down in a clearing with the enemy coming at them from all sides, it would be daft to lose one of the more effective bayonets in the diplomatic service.
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