Donald Trump attacked the British prime minister for appointing a U.S. ambassador who was ultimately fired in a scandal over the envoy’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
“Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom acknowledged that he ‘exercised wrong judgement’ when he chose his Ambassador to Washington,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Monday night, referring to former ambassador Peter Mandelson.
“I agree, he was a really bad pick,” the president added, before somewhat confusingly signing off: “Plenty of time to recover, however!”
Starmer, whose ruling Labour Party has consistently bled support since its resounding electoral victory in 2024, now faces the most perilous challenge to his leadership to date after it emerged last week his officials had overridden internal concerns about Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein, and business ties with China, in appointing Mandelson as British ambassador to Washington.
The PM fired Mandelson last September after the U.S. House Oversight Committee released documents revealing Mandelson had maintained contact with Epstein well after the financier’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
A second tranche of files, published by the Justice Department in January, further alleged Mandelson had passed sensitive government information to Epstein on several occasions. Those claims are currently the subject of a police investigation in the U.K.
An investigation by the Guardian revealed last week that Mandelson had failed the security vetting process for his ambassadorial position as a result of that relationship, but that officials at the Foreign Office overrode those concerns in order to allow Starmer to confirm Mandelson’s appointment to that role, which he had already publicly announced.
Starmer, who has denied knowing the Foreign Office had initially denied Mandelson clearance, is widely understood to have picked the former European Union trade chief in December 2024 because he considered Mandelson’s contacts among global elites to be an asset in dealing with the incoming Trump administration.
The president’s broadside against the British PM comes amid a dramatic reversal in the previously warm relationship between the two men. Trump has increasingly attacked Starmer over the past several weeks over Starmer’s refusal to participate in the president’s war against Iran, and has threatened to back out of a major trade deal with the U.K.
Trump, like Mandelson, enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Epstein, beginning in the late 1980s and lasting until the men are believed to have had a falling-out over a real estate dispute in 2005.
Allegations as to the nature of that relationship have dogged Trump’s second stint in the White House, although he has always denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women and girls.
Other members of Trump’s Cabinet have also faced scrutiny over the scandal. Howard Lutnick, whom Trump appointed commerce secretary last year, is accused of maintaining contact with Epstein for years after claims against the late financier first broke.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
