Self-serving, egotistical and narcissistic. These epithets accurately describe the personality and motivations of former Business Secretary, former Northern Ireland Secretary and former Industry Secretary, Peter Mandelson. That’s why it was a relief not to see him on television in the first few weeks of the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition.
Sadly, even now, speaking from beyond the political grave and leaning on the crutch that is his overblown and slightly hysterical autobiography, The Third Man, Lord Mandelson informs us that he wants to return to frontline politics one day. All good people should respond in unison: “Over our dead bodies.”
Mandelson rejoices in the breathless prose of the commentators who fed from his hand and lauded him as the “architect of New Labour”. So significant was his role during the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years, at least in Mandelson’s own estimation, he must be counted as an equal alongside them – hence the title of his book. In fact, he is not even near the same political league as Blair or Brown. Still if he wants to be remembered as the originator of that weird sect, New Labour, a star-struck fan club run with the same élan as the old East German Communist Party, let him. Even now, The Guardian talks of him “saving his beloved Labour Party”.
However, it is worth intruding on this love-in and pointing out that Labour lost five million voters during Mandelson’s New Labour era. Thousands of people have left the party and it is broke. To cap it all, it has just suffered its worst general election result since 1983 – although The Guardian’s support for Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems can’t have helped. In case Mandelson and his friends haven’t noticed, “New Labour” became a term of abuse some time ago.
Mandelson would also like to go down in history as the man responsible for Labour’s 1997 election landslide – a myth recalibrated ad nauseam by his sycophants in the media. Joe Haines, the former street-fighting adjunct to Harold Wilson and no shrinking violet, offered up a rather more cogent analysis in his review for Tribune of Alastair Campbell’s uncut diaries. Haines describes these as “an anthology of hate, obsession, spin and rampant ambition”, adding that Labour won in 1997, not because of the brilliance of Mandelson, Blair and Campbell, but “because the nation was irretrievably fed up with John Major and he couldn’t have won a raffle in which he bought all the tickets”.
I first met Peter Mandelson in 1993 at a House of Commons drinks party organised by Gordon Brown. Back then, Mandelson was invariably followed around by a gauche young researcher called Derek Draper. Both Mandelson and Draper seemed very keen to denigrate John Smith, then the Labour Party leader. This they did in a malevolent and snide fashion. It was the sort of behaviour that came to epitomise much of the nastiness of the New Labour years. I reached some early conclusions about Mandelson at that time. In the intervening years, he has not given me cause to revise them.
It should not be forgotten that, as plain Peter Mandelson, he lasted barely five months as Secretary of State for Industry. He was forced to resign for failing to declare a £373,000 home loan from fellow Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson.
Late, having militated against the much-loved Mo Mowlam, he persuaded Blair to let him have her job of Northern Ireland Secretary. This time he lasted barely a year, before he was accused of helping arrange a British passport for an Indian billionaire, Srichand Hinduja, something for which he was later cleared. Hinduja, it will be recalled, had promised a cool £1 million for Mandelson’s Millennium Dome – a ludicrous white elephant that finally did for any notion of “Cool Britannia”.
Bizarrely, although Mandelson bleats in The Third Man that he “fought for 10 years to make the relationship of Blair and Brown work in government”, it was Brown who rehabilitated the man who had caused him so much grief over the years and brought him into his Government as Business Secretary. Perhaps this was done on the on the basis that having Mandelson inside the tent instead of plotting outside would negate some of the effects of his infamous poison.
Having attempted to stitch up a deal behind Brown’s back during the 2010 general election that would have seen Lord Mandelson “loyally serve” Nick Clegg – presumably as a coalition Foreign Secretary – Peter Mandelson would now like us to buy his book. He and Blair were locked in battle as to whose memoirs should be published first.
Those who intend to buy Mandelson’s tome should be warned that they will be subject to chapter after chapter of empty banality, obfuscation and exaggeration about his relations with Blair and Brown, and theirs with him ad nauseam. Mandelson talks of his “intense” relationship with the other two men – something that used to prompt the late Leo Abse speculate that the real story of New Labour was one of unrequited love. But is anyone interested any more? Does anyone still care? Although it is worth asking why internal Labour Party democracy had to be effectively closed down – ostensibly to avoid division – when those at the top were responsible for more divisive activities that a dozen Derek Hattons.
Now Mandelson tells us magisterially that he will not be endorsing any of the current Labour leadership contestants. He is a past master at secretly backing one, while pretending to support all the others. He didn’t back Blair publicly when he stood for the Labour leadership, instead preferring to operate behind the scenes using the pseudonym “Bobby”. When, back then, we attempted to reveal his role in Tribune, Mo Mowlam called me having been assured by Blair that Mandelson was not involved in his campaign, to threaten legal action if we went ahead and published the story. Why the threatened heavy hand? Because Mandelson was so unpopular among Labour MPs, Blair’s leadership hopes could have been scuppered if the MPs got to know of his involvement.
Don’t get me wrong, I know Mandelson is as capable as he is intelligent. Had he not allowed himself to be suckered into the less than rarefied world of the nouveau riche, dodgy Russian oligarchs and the superficiality afforded by associating with them, he could have concentrated on being a good Government minister. Had he been far shorter on spinning and plotting and much longer on philosophy and empathy, he might have become a successful and even long-serving Foreign Secretary.
But now, finally, it seems to be all over for Peter Mandelson – in Labour politics, at least. Of course, he has defied his critics and come back before. He’s “a fighter, not a quitter”, after all. However, as Clement Attlee once famously said to the disputatious Harold Laski: “A period of silence on your part would be most welcome”. That must surely be what all the contenders for the Labour leadership want from Mandelson now.
