Neil Kinnock famously quipped that ‘those who call Peter Mandelson an ‘evil genius’ are only half-right’. When I put this to the now ennobled Lord Mandelson, he cracks up into laughter – an uncharacteristic release of energy. The truth, I suggest, is that the two aren’t quite mutually exclusive, even mutually reinforcing. This time he reveals a wry smile and a knowing glance to his aide; he seems relaxed, jovial but overall – in control.
Since Labour failed to get a majority at the last election, the peer has maintained a ferocious schedule, globe-trotting, meeting foreign leaders – especially in the EU, on which he delivered the annual ‘Hands Lecture’ last Friday.
Mandelson is an ardent pro-European, unlike his grandfather Herbert Morrison who, as Acting Prime Minister, was faced with the decision of whether to join the European Coal and Steel Community (a precursor to the EU). When a civil servant pressed him for an answer, Morrison had no doubt. ‘The Durham miners won’t wear it’ he said, thereby sealing Britain’s fate on the periphery of the integrationist project for a generation. In his speech at the Exam Schools, Mandelson expressed concern that the ‘looser arrangement’ the UK is developing with the Franco-German core may lead ultimately to a similar exclusion that left Britain behind in the 50s and 60s. As the Eurozone’s ‘inexorable logic’, to coin George Osborne’s grim phrase, forces it to become fiscally and politically unified, Britain will ultimately have to make a choice – fully in, or fully out
Not surprisingly considering his voluminous charm and intellect, Mandelson was an Oxford PPE-ist. I ask him about those days; his answer was fascinating. As Mandelson recounts: ‘I came from a family background that was about serious politics. I was almost literally born into the Labour Party’. Indeed the Hampstead garden suburb in which he was raised nurtured those seeds of moderate liberalism that would come to full fruition under Blair’s premiership. Born in 1953 to a relatively prosperous family Mandelson was pedigree Labour – the grandson of Herbert Morrison and contemporary to the Wilson’s who lived nearby. I put it to him that given his pedigree it seems strange that the Union and even the Labour Club never fell under his spell. ‘A number of greasy poles inhibited [Oxford] politics’ replied the most infamous political operator of the past generation, ‘the struggles of the Union society, and their termly elections, didn’t fire me with great interest or enthusiasm’. Given that he proved so apt at climbing it, his statement that ‘the greasy pole didn’t attract me’, left me incredulous. Yet upon examination perhaps I shouldn’t have been so bemused. Mandelson was intensely political – it’s just he was more focused on doing something than on being someone.
His gap-year in Tanzania, then an incubator for an eclectic mix of leftism and nationalism had the effect of, if not radicalising him, then imbuing a sense of social purpose that was fundamentally socialist in its world view. A 1972 letter he wrote to his friend, Stephen Howell, captured his political maturity: ‘Sometimes, I reason that Tanzanian socialism is tremendous, and the only hope for development, but that socialism in England would be wholly impractical…England no more has a socialist future than it will fly in the air’. Mandelson was left-wing, but not self-indulgently so like his contemporary Christopher Hitchens – the Balliol Bolshevik who planned communist insurrections before Sunday formal. Upon returned from Africa and settling into our city of dreaming spires, he was reticent: ‘Oxford to me was a little but alien, a little bit difficult, and I could not shake off my interest in Africa’.
An introvert, however, he was not, joining the United Nations Youth and Students Association and set up an alternative Oxford Labour Students Association, seeking to disassociate himself from the ‘self-serving careerists and preening would-be Cabinet ministers’ – the would-be Labour politicians, who inhibited the Labour club. After failing his politics prelim – surely a refutation of any causal link between success in academic and practical politics – young Peter invested more of his time in academics, deepening his understanding of the world as the post-war consensus crumbled around him.
As we met, a legacy from that era, Ken Livingstone, was witnessing the end of his dramatic career as hopes of a third mayoral term disintegrated. Vindicating the incumbent’s strategy to focus on personality, not policy, Bullingdon Boris had won over the electorate in a city where Labour were polling 19 points higher than the Conservatives. Mandelson was candid: ‘if the Labour party chooses to run a candidate who is not just pre-New Labour, but pre-Kinnock as well, you can hardly be surprised when the voters turn around and say ‘actually we’d prefer a rather more contemporary candidate thank you’’. The spirit and tone was light-hearted, yet I couldn’t help thinking that the joviality was somewhat forced, contrived to mask a contempt towards Ken that has roots in his independent bid for the mayorality in 2000, for which he was expelled from the Labour Party.
Ken isn’t the only politician with whom Mandelson had turbulent relations. Indeed no one inspires loyalties or hatreds as much as he does. The price of success is that he accrued enemies in the parliamentary party; so many, in fact, that all of the Labour leadership candidates sought to disown him. Certainly his stock is less than it was. I challenge him on Enoch Powell’s famous observation that ‘all political lives…end in failure’. Without hesitation, ‘I’m the exception to that’ he asserts. ‘My career ended in failure half-way through it’ – alluding to the scandals that forced his ejection from the Cabinet, twice – ‘but I was given a third chance’.
Mandelson’s reputation as a Machiavellian man of mystery always proved useful, allowing him to manipulate the surprisingly small cabal of political correspondents who worked in awe of him. I wanted to uncover his human side; the one that walks his pet dog, Bobby, or lived secretly as a gay man, only to be out-ed on national television. It’s clear that he doesn’t revel in his ego, but largely the impressions of his personality evade me. He exudes statesmanship. In an inversion of Norman Lamont’s famous putdown to Major, Lord Mandelson gives the impression of being in power but not in office. Moulded by his experience at the heart of the Labour Party, teasing, disciplining, coercing it into a party of government, that is now his nature. Would he join a Miliband government? I didn’t bother asking; that’s been an unlikely prospect ever since Ed pronounced his crowning achievement – New Labour – dead. Still, with Mandy, you never know.
