Who’s next on the Ambassador’s Sofa?

This time next week, President Trump will be across the Pond in the United Kingdom for a state visit. He goes back to the Old Country at a testing time for US-UK relations.

The UK ambassador to the US Lord Mandelson was removed from his post this week after further revelations emerged about his friendship with the convicted child sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson remained close with Epstein after his first conviction in 2008 and referred to him as his “best pal” in emails.

Mandelson also has an entry in the 50th birthday book put together by Ghislaine Maxwell which the House Oversight Committee released last week – the same book which is the subject of a defamation suit filed by President Trump against the Wall Street Journal. In July, the WSJ published a story describing an entry ostensibly by Trump which bears his signature. The White House has described the page and signature as “fake.”

A photograph of Mandelson and Trump behind the Resolute Desk, taken when the framework of a trade deal between the US and UK was agreed in May, was displayed prominently on a side table in the Ambassador’s Residence during Mandelson’s tenure. Cockburn wonders if it’s still there.

In June, Mandelson was also honored with a plaque at Butterworth’s, the popular MAGA haunt, which dubbed one of its couches “The Ambassador’s Sofa.” That, for now, is staying put. “The plaque was always for the Ambassador, not for the man,” Raheem Kassam, the restaurant’s British co-owner, told Cockburn. “We are eager to meet its next steward, unless that steward is George Osborne. In which case it’s coming down immediately.”

Possible successors include Dame Karen Pierce – who preceded Mandelson and is thought to be favored at the White House – as well as former foreign secretary David Miliband and MI6 chief Sir Richard Moore. Deputy chef de mission James Roscoe, who temporarily becomes chargé d’affaires in DC, “would not be considered for the permanent replacement for Mandelson, having served only three years at his grade… on the four-step scale,” according to insiders cited in the Times of London.

On our radar

SUSPECT APPREHENDED Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old from Utah, has been booked into the Utah County Jail on suspicion of the murder of Charlie Kirk. “We got him,” said Governor Spencer Cox at a press conference this morning.

SPEECH IMPEDIMENT Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a Republican, expressed his desire for tech companies to “mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled” Kirk’s assassination.

PUT ON MY BLUE SUEDE SHOES AND I BOARDED THE PLANE President Trump announced plans to deploy National Guard and federal forces to Memphis, Tennessee, to address urban crime.

No Kings day

An adaptation of a 1979 Stephen King novel, The Long Walk, opens in theaters today, but Republican senators are suggesting that the extremely online left-wing novelist take his own long walk… off a short pier. In a classless post about the murder of Charlie Kirk, King claimed Kirk “advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, the state where Kirk was assassinated, didn’t take a shining to this statement. Lee immediately hopped on X, saying that Kirk’s estate should sue King for “this heinously false accusation.” Ted Cruz also stood by Kirk. In a tweet for the ages, Cruz said, to King,

You are a horrible, evil, twisted liar. No, he did not. Your party – which you shamelessly shilled for – sent $100 billion to the Ayatollah… who does routinely murder homosexuals. Why are you so dishonest & filled with hate?

This morning, after a long, twisted night of the soul during which he received visitations from spirits, vampires and a demented clown monster who lives in the sewers, King tweeted out, “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.” The author subsequently issued several more apology tweets, even referring to himself as a “horrible, evil, twisted liar.” He’s deleted the offending post.

Maybe, at long last, Stephen King has learned to operate with some grace online when it comes to his supposed ideological enemies. Or maybe he’s just learned, as Cockburn did long ago, that social media is a Dead Zone that can bring you nothing but Misery.

King is far from the only person showing a distinct lack of grace in the light of Kirk’s assassination. One of Cockburn’s spies was at New York’s Yankee Stadium last night where President Trump came to pay tribute to 9/11 victims on the 24th anniversary of the attacks:

The mood in the stadium was fine and dandy until the first time they showed Trump on the Jumbotron. His face seems to have a flipped a switch in the brains of everyone around us – they immediately starting screaming, like, “Die fucking Fascist” and giving him the finger. They were all filming themselves doing it. Then Trump’s face would disappear, and they’d immediately become docile again. Then he’d reappear, and it would start back up again. It was like being in the middle of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate.

My friends and I clapped for him as we would for any president. Then the guy behind us, a Detroit fan, started screaming, “Clap if you support pedophiles! These guys right here support pedophiles!”

At one point, when Trump wasn’t even on the screen, I shouted “God bless America.” That earned the first “Fuck you, fascist,” thrown in our direction, which seemed ironic because the song we were singing was “God Bless America.” After the song ended, the same guy says to us, “Do you guys actually support Trump or are you just trolling?” I said, “Why would anyone not support the President, he’s our President!”

We went back and forth for a little while longer while people around us called us Nazis and such, until I said, “Dude you’re making us miss the game, I paid to watch the Yankees, not debate with you.” Things chilled out after that, except the guy sitting next to us definitely muttered something in our direction about us getting “Charlie Kirk’d.”

Truly, the best of the country on display…

Civitas and Substack soirées

Cockburn shined his shoes and straightened his tie on Thursday evening for a reception upstairs at the Metropolitan Club hosted by the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Executive director Ryan Streeter laid out his vision for the institute as attendees sampled bacon-wrapped scallops and supped bourbon and Bordeaux. Spotted: the Washington Post’s George F. Will; Christopher Caldwell; RealClear’s Carl Cannon, David DesRosiers and John Tamny; National Review’s Jack Butler; Veronique Rodman, and Civitas’s Richard M. Reinsch II, Peter Robinson and Michael Toth.

Substack – the newsletter and media platform that serves as the new home for Cockburn’s Diary – hosted a number of its top DC contributors for a “Recess is Over” mixer upstairs at Butterworth’s. Guests drank martinis and Guinness and snacked on hors d’oeuvres including beef tartare, chicken flautas and warm tumblers of olives. Spotted: Jim Acosta; Charlotte Clymer; Telos’s Ryan Lizza and Movement for Choice’s Caroline Motley; Sean Spicer; Terry Moran; the Washington Post’s Jesús Rodríguez, Kara Voght and Natalie Allison; James Kirchick and Josef Palermo; Vanessa Santos; Jessica Reed Kraus; Brianna Herlihy; Reason’s Billy Binion; Feed Me’s Cami Fateh; Secret Ballot’s Kelly Chapman; the Washington Reporter’s Matthew Foldi, Ahmad Ali, and Substack’s Austin Tedesco, Catherine Valentine and Nishant Bhansali.

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