It is a lazy cliché, beloved of broadsheet columnists, to describe Peter Mandelson as Machiavellian. Lazy, wrong and an insult to Machiavelli. M and M have no more in common than Banksy and Leonardo, except the initial letter of their surnames.
The Prince has been read now for 500 years. I cannot imagine libraries being stocked with The Third Man in 2500AD. If anyone doubts that, I recommend them to read this piteous, self-indulgent whine and think again. I have no problem with my doubts; they sprang up the first time I had anything to do with him. Maybe that’s why we never got on.
Most of those who will read this book – and, despite what follows, I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from doing so – have their own Mandelson stories. Mine is quite simple: he intrigued behind my back when I was political editor at the Daily Mirror but praised me to my face – and I called him a hypocritical bastard in consequence. The passing of the years has done nothing to alter that opinion.
Mandelson gets round that episode easily enough in this autobiographical plea of Not Guilty to anything as charged. He tells his readers that Alastair Campbell was the political editor at that time (the mid-1980s). But, until the end of 1984, Terry Lancaster filled that role. I succeeded him. Alastair was a reporter then and left the Mirror in 1985 for Sunday Today, despite my efforts to retain him.
He failed at Eddie Shah’s paper and returned to the Mirror Group in 1986 (with the Sunday Mirror) and did not become political editor of the daily until 1989, though I remained completely in charge of the paper’s politics until I retired in the summer of 1990.
What’s the point of this story? In the second half of the 1980s, Mandelson complained about me to the Mirror’s owner, Robert Maxwell, because of our coverage of a speech by Neil Kinnock. It was given the coverage it deserved, which wasn’t much.
As I was reading his letter to Maxwell, Mandelson phoned to congratulate me on a leading article I’d written for that day’s paper. That was when I reflected both on his sincerity and legitimacy. Despite the Mirror’s importance to Labour, and the fact that no decision on political policy was ever implemented without my approval, he got in a huff and didn’t speak to me again for three years, which included the 1987 general election. That was not only petulant but incompetent and had no effect. It was left to more senior members of the party to enlist my help in extracting many thousands of pounds from Maxwell.
From the beginning, that was Mandelson’s style. There’s another illuminating example of it in his introduction to this book: at a press conference in 1985, Tony Blair, still in
short pants politically, described Margaret Thatcher as “unhinged.” Michael Brunson, ITN’s political editor, seized on the remark. Mandelson sought to convince him afterwards (untruthfully) that Blair didn’t mean Thatcher was mad but that her policies were. He then added that Blair was “going places” and was therefore “someone Michael would want to befriend.” That, he says, helped to establish his reputation as “Britain’s original spin doctor,” someone who could “fix” the news. Lying with menaces, I’d call it.
The Third Man is a continuous justification of a serial offender with no convictions, unable to understand why he, one of the “three founding fathers of New Labour,” was badly treated by the other two (Blair and Gordon Brown). Everything was the “three of us” who began the “reforming crusade,” with Alastair Campbell blanked out of this adventure.
He knew Gordon best, he says, and worked closest with him, and Tony couldn’t do without him. He approvingly quotes a Guardian article which described Blair and Brown as “star pupils of the Peter Mandelson finishing school” in media presentation. Personally, if Brown were one of my star pupils, I’d have kept quiet about it, but this book abounds with embarrassing false modesty and insensitive boasting. He has the conceit of Caligula, not the wisdom of Machiavelli.
He doesn’t understood that he was never the equal of the other two. Position, power and plotting were his obsessions. The alliterative alternative of people, policies and principle only get a passing nod. The plot was the thing. Being on the inside was the place to be. He was always protesting his innocence despite always being at the scene of the crime. The more he was hurt, the more he wanted to be loved.
A good example was over the appointment of Joy Johnson to take over his old job as director of communications at the Labour Party. Although she was “traditional” Labour (horror of horrors!), he favoured her because she was Gordon’s candidate: “If I was nice to Gordon, I thought he might be nice to me back.”
Brown notoriously didn’t repay favours, at least not from Peter. Mandelson accuses him of being behind “the poisonous polemic” by Paul Routledge which exposed his bizarre mortgage arrangements with Geoffrey Robinson and the Britannia Building Society and led to his first resignation as a Cabinet minister. He says, portentously: “The engine of my destruction was Gordon Brown.” Wrong. The engine of his destruction was himself. Embracing the high life, with the house to go with it, had always carried its dangers for a Labour politician (see Ramsay MacDonald and others).
So much of this book has been splashed, written about and broadcast over the last few weeks that there is little that’s not known by constant repetition, a favourite Mandelson tactic. But what was the man for?
What was ever his end-game but the game itself? He was a natural plotter, so long as he was at the heart of it. The plot itself didn’t matter. He worked for a deal with Paddy Ashdown’s Liberals when it was obvious to everyone else that the conditions for it, the dubious justification that caused Tony Blair to embark upon it, didn’t exist.
But why? Because he wanted to be part of it. Perhaps his real role in the history of the universe should have been as an adviser to Guy Fawkes. He listened to the advice of Roy Jenkins (to whom he and Tony were becoming “increasingly close,” he boasts, despite the fact that Jenkins was a political dunce) that Tony should keep Prescott on his side. “You need a loyal deputy”, Jenkins said to Blair, “if only to counter the moves of others in the party against you.”
That really is rich: Roy Jenkins, once Harold Wilson’s disloyal deputy, preaching the value of a loyal deputy! The man whose own loyal adviser, John Harris, makes Charlie Whelan look like an amateur. For me, it was almost the most hilarious episode of the book, exceeded only by the mind-blowing vision of the 12-year-old Mandelson, wonderingly being led by the hand through the Cabinet Room by a kindly Marcia Williams (aka Lady Falkender). That was one of Labour’s connoisseur moments. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.
One evening in Corfu, where he had gone to brood on the misfortunes which had elevated him to a life no one had ever dreamed of for a Labour party press officer, one of his new, rich friends, Serena Rothschild, “lingered on the terrace and asked, suddenly: ‘Peter, why do you have so many enemies’?” I don’t know whether his answer satisfied her – the jealousies and back-stabbing of politics and a special hatred for his role in the birth of New Labour – but if it didn’t, she will find it in her autographed copy of The Third Man. As Aneurin Bevan so famously said: “Why look into the crystal when you can read the book?”
