25 March, 2026. Jonathan Powell is UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘National Security Adviser’, in practice more accurately described as his foreign policy adviser. He is well qualified to help get Trump out of the mess into which he has got himself over Iran, and it is quite possible that his services will be called upon, even if only indirectly.
Powell joined the British diplomatic service in 1979 and was a political officer in the Washington embassy by the early 1990s. In 1995 he was recruited from this mission to be chief of staff to Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition in the UK parliament, and retained this post for the entirety of Blair’s long term as British prime minister, from 1997 until 2007. He played a key role in securing the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland in 1999 and was behind Blair in giving strong support to the USA, notably in the Iraq war in 2003.
Out of government office, in 2011 Jonathan Powell founded the non-profit track two mediating body, Inter-Mediate, which chalked up some impressive successes, thereby confirming his reputation as one of the West’s most successful mediators. In 2014 he published a lengthy book called Talking to Terrorists: How to end armed conflicts.
Brought back to 10 Downing Street as National Security Adviser by Starmer in November 2024, he has been extremely influential, notably in helping to bandage difficulties in US-Europe relations, supporting creation of the ‘coalition of the willing’ on Ukraine, concluding the Chagos Island agreement with Mauritius, and repairing relations between Ukraine and the USA after the crude Oval Office hit job on Volodymyr Zelensky on 28 February 2025. Usefully for Powell’s well-judged preference for keeping out of the public eye as much as possible, he is not a civil servant but a special adviser on the US model, which makes it impossible for him to be exposed to public grilling by any committee of Parliament.
To the surprise of no-one who has read his earlier book, The New Machiavelli: How to wield power in the modern world (2010), a shrewd tract on delivering policy rather than fashioning it, Powell is credited with supporting Starmer’s policy of trying to stay on good terms with Donald Trump, despite its perils. He also remains close to Tony Blair, and since the former British prime minister is the only weighty European political figure on Trump’s so-called Board of Peace (unless you count Viktor Orbán), this is another tick against Powell’s name in the Trump White House.
Powell has already been called on to assist US diplomacy in the Middle East. Indeed, he has been credited by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s amiable but notoriously unqualified envoy to the Middle East, with ‘incredible input and tireless efforts’ in helping to achieve the ceasefire in Gaza. More significantly still, supported by his own five-strong team photographed in late February 2026 in the Inter-Continental Hotel in Geneva, where only a few days earlier he had also been part of a European group shadowing the third round of US-mediated Russia-Ukraine talks, he was evidently coaching Witkoff once more. This time it was on the side-lines of his proximity talks (accompanied by Jared Kushner) with the Iranians that were being mediated by the Omani foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, chiefly at the residence in Geneva of the ambassador heading Oman’s permanent mission to the UN Office. Although believed by Powell to be promising, these talks collapsed only when, to the fury of the Omanis, the Netanyahu government bounced the Americans into joining them with massive air strikes against Iran on the last day of the month. I hope very earnestly that the White House will have sufficient sense to listen to his advice on Iran more attentively in the coming days, when it is rumoured that US Vice-President J. D. Vance will this time head a US delegation in proximity talks with the Iranians mediated by the Pakistanis in Islamabad.