Peter Mandelson has described Donald Trump as a “people person” who could cut levies on British goods again after extraordinary scenes which saw the two men hold hands in the Oval Office this week.
The UK’s ambassador in Washington said he was looking forward to negotiating with the US to “bring down further tariffs”.
He also revealed that when he first walked into White House, President Trump said to him: “God, you’re a good looking fellow, aren’t you?”.
And he described Trump as a “people person” who takes people at “face value”, saying that the president had judged him on his merits.
The Independent revealed earlier this year that President Trump has been considering rejecting Lord Mandelson as ambassador.
In an interview with BBC’s Newsnight, the Labour grandee said that Thursday’s historic UK-US trade deal represented a “platform for going further and opening up more trade opportunities”.
Keir Starmer has declined to rule out the possibility of reforms to taxes that mainly hit US tech firms in a future trade deal.
The deal agreed on Thursday cut taxes on car imports of 100,000 a year from 27.5 per cent to 10 per cent and scrapped tariffs on steel and aluminium.
However, a baseline 10 per cent rate for other goods remains in force.
Lord Mandelson said: “I’m very pleased with what we’ve achieved. It’s taken many months of very tough negotiation, and it’s also a platform going further and opening up more trade opportunities.”
He added: “We’re going to negotiate further and bring down further tariffs and remove further barriers to trade between us, that’s what we’re committed to, and I’m looking forward to doing that.”
The White House said that the president is “committed to the 10 per cent baseline tariff” imposed in April “not just for the United Kingdom, but for his trade negotiations with all other countries as well”.
But business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said on Thursday that conversations about “those wider tariff lines and the 10 per cent” rate were continuing.
Lord Mandelson said that digital services tax was brought up during the negotiations for this week’s agreement, but “what they suggested wasn’t acceptable to us, so it’s not in the deal”.
On Friday, Sir Keir told the Independent that he has “struck up a good relationship” with the president.
“I am the sort of person that tries to have constructive and positive relations with people,” he said.
Kemi Badenoch has said she is “concerned” about the prospects of the UK going on to strike a full free trade agreement in the wake of Thursday’s agreement.
She said Thursday’s deal was “not a huge success at all… It’s not even a trade deal, it’s a tariff deal, and we are in a worse position now than we were six weeks ago.
“It’s better than where we were last week, so it’s better than nothing, but it’s not much.
“One of the things that concerns me is that we will probably now not get a comprehensive free trade agreement.”
