Peter Mandelson has finally satisfied his ambition to be the undisputed, indispensable right-hand man to the prime minister Eight years ago - a very long time indeed in politics - a shroud-whitePeter Mandelson sat in Tony Blair's study begging for his life. "Are you really telling me that you are going to end my political career over this?" he beseeched his friend. "Yes," replied the prime minister bleakly, but firmly. "I'm afraid I am." That summary dismissal, over the Hinduja affair, was the second time he was fired from the cabinet. His first death was triggered by Gordon Brown's assassination squad who took him out with the revelation of the Geoffrey Robinson home loan. Even Jesus Christ only got the one resurrection. No wonder Peter Benjamin Mandelson thought it was the end of his career in the frontline of British politics when he was dispatched from the cabinet for an unprecedented second time in New Year 2001. We have recently read much about the extraordinary resilience of Gordon Brown. As astonishing, if not more so, is the incredible ascent of Peter Mandelson. The survival of the prime minister after leading his party to its worst result in a national election since the First World War is remarkable, but explicable. A coup against him would have created overwhelming pressure for an early general election at which Labourwould have been annihilated. Lingering death is rarely an attractive option - except when the alternative is instant suicide. Turkeys will always vote to postpone Christmas. That is the single most important reason why Mr Brown survives. He limps on a much diminished man compared with the prime minister who was crowned without a contest two years ago. How pitiful, so he would have thought then, for a leader to have to prostrate himself before his MPs and admit that he has weaknesses. Casting himself as a bad husband grovelling to be allowed back into the marital home, Mr Brown was reduced to pleading with his disbelieving colleagues that he could change. He has been forced to retain both a chancellor and a foreign secretary whom his acolytes had stupidly briefed against in advance. When he was strong, Gordon Brown crushed rivals without mercy. Now he is so weakened that he has been obliged to promote Alan Johnson to the Home Office. True, that department has a way of murdering its bosses, a thought which surely occurred to the Brown calculating machine. This doesn't stop it being very uncomfortable for the prime minister that the postman is now officially anointed as the heir-apparent by the media, by the opinion pollsters and by David Miliband, the other possible contender for the title. Yet neither the foreign secretary nor the home secretary has come out of recent events covered in glory. Mr Miliband says he "thought about" resigning. You can't be almost courageous. Both are accused of having less spine than a jellyfish for not acting to put the prime minister out of Labour's misery when they had the chance. I don't see the accusation as entirely fair when they had good reason to fear that a putsch would have led to a massacre. I don't disagree that they have been damaged by the charge of feebleness. One member of the cabinet emerges from the smoking wreckage of electoral disaster and abortive coup as a larger figure. Step forward Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the County of Durham, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Lord President of the Council and Grand Vizier of all he surveys. Through most people's eyes, what he surveys looks indistinguishable from a wasteland. And yet he is clearly having the time of his political life. "What's he up to?" one senior Tory exclaimed to me the other day, simply unable to comprehend why Peter Mandelson saved Gordon Brown, the man with whom he conducted such an epically gory feud for 14 years before he returned to the cabinet last autumn. "They hate each other!" Well, yes they did, but weirdly enough they have always loved each other too. It all goes back to the highly charged days that followed John Smith's death in 1994. Before then, Peter Mandelson was closer to Gordon Brown than he was to Tony Blair. It was the rational choice to back the younger Blair for leader when he was much more popular in the polls, with the media and with senior colleagues. Yet it provoked a wholly irrational response from Gordon Brown. The years of hate were so poisonous precisely because they were preceded by love. Since his return, the two have rediscovered what they admired in each other before the great rupture. Peter tells friends that he has been "reintroduced" to Gordon's "good qualities. Gordon has clung to Peter's presentational flair, tactical nous, coolness in a crisis and loyalty in a crunch. It is highly doubtful that he would have survived the last fortnight without the presence of Baron Mandelson, the self-described "Prince of Stability" who bound in other members of the cabinet and guarded the Blairite flank. The thing that his left-wing critics always got most wrong about Peter Mandelson was to charge him with desiring to destroy the Labour party. He wanted to save it. He is the scion of a Labour dynasty, the grandson of Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee's deputy. He is a Labour tribalist in a way that Tony Blair, the son of a Thatcherite Tory, never was. Another loyalty - to the New Labour project that they founded - is also in play. The more remote Labour's chances of winning the next election, the greater the internal pressure to lurch leftwards. So long as Lord M remains a player, he is in a position to resist that happening - or at least delay the shift until after they have lost power. He lives, eats and breathes for the great game of British politics. Like any true professional, his relish for it is just as great, perhaps more so, when the game seems so bleak for his side. I am not surprised to learn that he sent Gordon Brown off to bed and sat in the Downing Street war room into the early hours of the morning making phone calls to ensure that his premiership was secure. During the years in Brussels, he craved a return to the frontline of British politics, a hunger which was more sharp because he never expected it to be satisfied. For sure, he enjoyed considerable prestige and power as a European commissioner. Yet he told one friend that he woke up every morning aching with "an almost physical pain" because of his exile across the Channel. Now he is once again at the heart of power. More, he is the heart of power. When the pummelled prime minister faced Labour MPs, Peter Mandelson sat directly behind him, ostentatiously passing notes of advice to Mr Brown about how he should respond to the hostiles. Geraldine Smith, the MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale and a Brown loyalist, got up to say that she had seen Lord M on the television batting for the prime minister and the government. Much to her amazement: "I found myself falling in love with Peter Mandelson." From his perch, he peered over his glasses, puckered his lips and blew her a little kiss. There is another paradox to savour. Tony Blair once declared that his project would be complete when the Labour party had "learnt to love Peter Mandelson". They are not all there yet. But many Labour MPs are feeling surprised by their feelings of warmth towards him. There is an admiration that he is their only leading figure who talks with clarity about the deep hole they are in and speaks with conviction about how they might try to drag themselves out of it. When all around have been losing their heads, he has kept his - and saved the prime minister's neck as well. Why he did that continues to baffle many at Westminster. In private conversation with Gordon Brown, he has often teased the other man about what the Brown gang did to him in the past. It must have crossed his complex mind that he was presented with a golden opportunity to exact retribution by terminating Gordon's premiership as payback for the way in which Gordon first ruined him. Yet sometimes in politics there are tastes even more delicious than revenge. It was more satisfying to make a dependant of his close friend turned bitter foe turned friend again. As a fellow Labour politician who has known him for more than 25 years says: "Peter is the ultimate courtier." It takes little imagination to see him in a cardinal's robe gliding the corridors of power in Machiavelli's Florence. It was never realistic for him to aim for the very top, so he has always pursued his ambitions through making himself important to whomsoever was Labour's leader. He was consigliere to Neil Kinnock when that Labour leader rebuilt the party only to despair that he couldn't get it into power. He was then Svengali to Tony Blair only for his dreams to turn to dust when two short periods as a cabinet minister were both truncated by scandal. It is as the effective number two to Gordon Brown - who would have thought it? - that he has climbed to where he always wanted to be. There he sits, at last the leader's undisputed, indispensable right hand. I expect it tastes sweet. And sour too. He once hoped to occupy this role for Tony Blair when New Labour was at the peak of its powers and had many years in office to look forward to. All those titles and all that influence have finally come to him under Gordon Brown just as darkness falls on their project. That is the tragedy for Peter Mandelson of his late triumph.The triumph and tragedy of the Overlord of New Labour
Sunday 14 June 2009
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