Mandelson accuses European leaders of ‘histrionic’ reaction to Trump’s Greenland stance
Peter Mandelson has accused European leaders including Keir Starmer of a “histrionic” reaction to Donald Trump’s plan to take over Greenland, arguing that without “hard power and hard cash” they will continue to slide into unimportance in the “age of Trump”.In his first political comments since being sacked as Britain’s ambassador to Washington last year, Lord Mandelson said Trump had achieved “more in a day than orthodox diplomacy was able to achieve in the past decade” when he captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.The intervention is likely to be seen as a criticism of the British prime minister, who has attempted to walk a diplomatic tightrope since the US captured Maduro.This week he signed a statement calling on the US president to respect Danish sovereignty over Greenland after a White House statement said the US was looking into “a range of options” in an effort to acquire Greenland, adding that using the US military to do so was “always an option”.On Wednesday evening, Starmer “set out his position on Greenland” in a phone conversation with Trump, Downing Street said without giving further details of the call.
While Starmer has steered clear of criticising Trump’s actions in Venezuela, he has repeatedly said Greenland’s future must be a matter for the territory and Denmark alone.But in an article for the Spectator, Mandelson argued that the reaction to Trump’s manoeuvres exposed a “growing geopolitical impotence” in Europe, urging Starmer and other European leaders to use “hard power and hard cash” to increase their relevance.The former US ambassador argued that Trump would not invade Greenland, because he did not need to.“What will happen is that the threats to arctic security posed by China and Russia will crystallise in European minds, performative statements about ‘sovereignty’ and Nato’s future will fade, and serious discussion will take over,” he said.“The bigger issue is how both sides of the western coin – America and Europe – are going to establish a modus vivendi in this age of Trump.
”While UK ministers have decried the “disintegration” of the international rules-based system and Starmer has stressed his lifelong advocacy for international law in the aftermath of the US capture of the Venezuelan president, Mandelson said the “rules-based system” had not existed for a long time.“President Trump is not some populist disruptor bent on destroying it; it ceased to have meaning before he was elected.He has not single-handedly broken up the postwar ‘global order’: if that ever fully existed, it started to evaporate two decades ago when China emerged as a great power contesting the US-led unipolar world,” he said.Mandelson said he believed European leaders had not “even now … adjusted to the revolution under way”, and were “guilty of a lazy interpretation of ‘America First’ to mean ‘America Alone’”, despite US interventions in Ukraine and Gaza.“Europe is transfixed by the Truth Socials coming out of the White House but without following the arguments underpinning them,” he said.
Instead of hand-wringing, he said, European leaders would be better “to ask themselves why the US is making an adjustment and how they, as America’s allies, can mitigate its consequences”, adding: “In other words, how and when the piggybacking stops and Europe starts assuming its full military and financial responsibilities beyond fine words.”He said: “This will mean accepting that Trump’s decisive approach when faced with real-world situations is preferable to the hand-wringing and analysis paralysis that has characterised some previous US administrations or, indeed, the deadlock and prevarication that so often characterise the UN and the EU respectively.”
Jim Thomas obituary
My father, Jim Thomas, who has died of cancer aged 61, started out on his career in health and social care as a community nurse in East Anglia in 1986, and worked his way up to be head of workforce capacity and transformation at the charity Skills for Care, where he was employed from 2007 to 2022. Throughout his career, Jim fought for people to have more control over their care, and he had a deep suspicion of authority and rules for the sake of rules. He was a lateral thinker who cut through the jargon and asked: what do people actually need?As a young nurse, he was asked to convince an elderly man to move into sheltered housing. But he quickly realised that this man enjoyed living in his isolated countryside home with many cats, a long-drop toilet and a water supply from a nearby stream. To keep the authorities at bay, Jim persuaded the man to connect the house to mains water and get a flushable toilet and litter trays
Guardian readers raise more than £850,000 as charity appeal enters final days
The Guardian’s Hope appeal has so far raised more than £850,000 thanks to generous readers’ continuing support for our five inspirational charity partners, whose work aims to tackle division, racism and hatred.The 2025 Guardian appeal is raising funds for five charities: Citizens UK, the Linking Network, Locality, Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust and Who is Your Neighbour?.The Hope appeal, entering its final few days, is aiming to raise £1m for grassroots voluntary organisations campaigning against extremism, violence and harassment, anti-migrant rhetoric, and the re-emergence of “1970s-style racism”.The appeal has struck a chord with thousands of readers. One emailed us to say: “I am so worried about the division being sown between people in the UK
Hospital patients collapsing while out of sight on corridors, NHS watchdog says
Patients are collapsing in hospitals unseen by staff because overcrowding means they are stranded out of sight on corridors, the NHS’s safety watchdog has revealed.Using corridors, storerooms and gyms as extra care areas poses serious risks to patients, including falls, infections and a lack of oxygen, the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) said.NHS staff told investigators that some patients who end up on a trolley or bed in overflow areas have not been assessed or started treatment “and so may be at increased risk of deterioration, which may go unnoticed or be detected late in a temporary care environment,” HSSIB’s report said.It highlighted that patients in these areas are at risk of not getting prompt attention if they deteriorate and suffer a medical emergency.“Several nurses shared a patient safety concern around calling for help and responding to a medical emergency in temporary care environments,” the report said
People who stop taking weight-loss jabs regain weight in under two years, study reveals
People who stop taking weight loss jabs regain all the weight originally lost in under two years, significantly faster than those on any other weight loss plan, according to a landmark study.Weight loss medications, known as GLP-1 agonists, were originally developed as treatment for diabetes and work by mimicking the glucagon-like peptide (GLP) 1 hormone which helps people feel full.The study, led by academics at the University of Oxford and published in the BMJ, included a review of 37 existing studies regarding weight loss medication, involving 9,341 participants. The average duration of weight loss treatment being 39 weeks while the average follow up period was 32 weeks.On average, weight was regained at a rate of 0
Our fragile society needs compassion | Letter
Elif Shafak’s image of shattered glass lingers because it names something we often avoid: fragility is not a failure, but a condition that requires care (A polycrisis has shattered our world this year. But with care, we can put it back together, 31 December).The deeper danger she identifies is not crisis itself, but numbness. We have built systems that reward speed, certainty and outrage, and then wonder why compassion struggles to survive inside them. This is evident not only in geopolitics and media, but in our institutions, workplaces and public services
Don’t blame GPs for patients going to A&E with coughs and other minor ailments | Letters
GPs are not to blame for A&E attendances (Huge rise in number of people in England’s A&Es for coughs or hiccups, 31 December).England’s general practice meets unsustainable pressures with record productivity: 250,000 additional GP practice appointments are being delivered a day compared with 2019. It is the fall in the number of inpatient beds gumming up the A&E system, not a fall in GPs’ capacity to treat patients.With that said, we have thousands of GPs looking for NHS work across England right now. Just 65 more GPs could have delivered the 1
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