The Indy's Mystic Maddox turns his sights on Mandelson

In an exclusive at the weekend the Independent reported that “Donald Trump is considering rejecting Sir Keir Starmer’s nominee for UK ambassador to the US in what would be an extremely rare move”. The story, quickly picked up by other newspapers and websites, said that concerns over Peter Mandelson’s links to China and a desire to punish Labour for allowing party activists to work for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign could see Trump demand that current ambassador Dame Karen Pierce be kept in place instead.

Yet within hours Trump ally Greg Swenson, head of the UK branch of Republicans Overseas, was assuring Laura Kuenssberg that Mandelson would be approved and even Nigel Farage was seeming to concede that a veto was a non-starter.

Time will tell, but perhaps a clue as to what will happen is that the story was written by Independent political editor David Maddox, the ardent Brexiteer it bewilderingly poached from the Daily Express last year.

It was he who told Express readers in August 2019 that “a historic trade agreement between Britain and the United States is set to be signed next month” and in January 2020 that there would be a “US trade deal this summer”.

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that a US-UK trade deal is as far off as ever – as was Maddox’s claim, in the latter story, that the “blockbuster trade deal” would be marked by Boris Johnson being “given the honour of addressing both Houses of Congress, only the sixth British prime minister to do so”.