By PETER OBORNE Opulence: Mandelson was quite at home shooting with Gaddafi's son at the Rothschild estate The sumptuous home of financier Jacob Rothschild, Waddesdon Manor, has long been famed as one of Britain's most magnificent country houses. But for all its splendour and beauty, the estate has this week been associated with an extraordinary weekend shooting party which symbolises the decadence, corruption and moral collapse of modern British socialism. No novelist would have dared to invent such an occasion. The host was a leading member of the world's richest and most famous banking dynasty. The guests included the son of a bloodthirsty and oil-rich Arab dictator, and the discredited wife of a former British prime minister. And totally at home in all this gilded opulence was the remarkable figure of Lord Mandelson, former Young Communist, far Left activist, major player in three successive Labour election victories and right-hand man to Gordon Brown. One might have expected such a figure to have been repelled by so much opulence and wealth. Instead, Mandelson clearly revels in it. The drab lives of the hard-working men and women who placed their faith in Labour at three consecutive general elections hold no appeal to him. Mandelson now only seems truly at home in grand country houses or on the yachts of billionaires such as his Russian oligarch friend Oleg Deripaska, whose guest he was during the summer of 2008. The truth is that his attendance at a shooting party with Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi's son is a perfect parable of the decadent Left's embrace of everything it claims to despise. Nor is Mandelson an exception. Practically every member of Tony Blair's Cabinet which took office in 1997 has since sold out to wealth and power. Blair himself is a perfect example. Since leaving office, he has become a popular member of the international plutocracy; a consultant to an investment bank who has earned an estimated £15 million since leaving Downing Street. While at No 10, Blair was shamefully attracted to extremely rich men. On one occasion, government policy was even changed after the tycoon Bernie Ecclestone donated £1 million to the Labour Party. Peerages were for sale under his government, while his wife Cherie blatantly profiteered from her status of First Lady by accepting free gifts and discounts from retailers. Numerous ministers from the Blair years have exploited their Whitehall experience to go on to earn fat fees in the private sector. Indeed, some of those who boasted loudest about their working class credentials, such as John Prescott, have been among the greediest. Nor should it be forgotten that MPs' culture of cheating over their expenses took root during the New Labour years (although, of course, many Tories were just as bad). Former Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was accused of betraying Labour Party values But the moral squalidness of today's Labour Party is light years away from the laudatory ideals of its founders. How many modern New Labour MPs are able to recall the early socialist politician who proclaimed that Labour 'is a moral crusade or it is nothing'. This philosophy was deeply important to the early band of Labour MPs that assembled under their legendary leader, Keir Hardie, and who were genuinely close to the working people from whom they came. They turned down all inducements and bribes. Many died in poverty and obscurity. But almost as soon as Labour gained real power, its Westminster representatives turned their backs on working people. The first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was the prototype for Blair and Mandelson. Like Mandelson, MacDonald was accused of betraying the Labour Party's values. He loved dining with duchesses - having a special fondness for international capitalists - and fell in love with a grand dame named Lady Londonderry (the wife of one of his ministers). In his wake, subsequent Labour leaders - with the exceptions of the post-war prime minister Clem Attlee and Michael Foot - have succumbed to the temptation of wealth. Most egregiously, Harold Wilson had an unfortunate weakness for corrupt businessmen. Typically, in his resignation Honours List of 1976, he handed titles to a host of dodgy tycoons, such as James Goldsmith, Joseph Kagan, the raincoat manufacturer later jailed for fraud, and Eric Miller, a property developer who later shot himself over the public exposure of his questionable business dealings. The Kinnock family have done very well for themselves thanks to a series of jobs taken with the European Union. But none has betrayed the ideals of socialism with more gusto and less shame than Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and the wide circle which surround them today. The great socialist writer George Orwell foresaw all of this in his wonderful fable Animal Farm. With compelling insight, he described how the pigs led a great revolution on behalf of the hard-working farm animals against the exploitation and greed of their human masters. Orwell told how the pigs were then intoxicated by power and corrupted by high living. In the end, they betrayed their fellow animals - and came to exactly resemble the brutal and arrogant human beings they had replaced. Orwell intended his story as a metaphor for the horrible fate of Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 when the Communist leaders soon became an elite demanding lives of luxury. But it applies pretty well to all socialist movements. They start off by claiming to represent the many - but soon turn on their supporters with contempt, and form a tiny and privileged elite. So the story of Peter Mandelson at a shoot with Gaddafi's son on the estate of a stately home built in the style of a 19th century French chateau is drearily familiar. The Business Secretary has completely sold out to the capitalist and aristocratic class he once vowed to destroy. For him, Labour politics has turned into a vehicle for social climbing and personal enrichment. This scornful betrayal of the honest and incorruptible values which the Labour Party used to represent risks destroying an organisation which still includes people (like Jon Cruddas and Chris Mullin) who believe in its original vision as the principled party of working people. After the general election, these people will seek to take the party back to its austere and decent origins. And if Labour loses that election, Mandelson's activities are likely to score very high on the list of betrayals to be avenged as the Labour Party embarks on a brutal civil war. Intriguingly, Mandy's Waddesdon Manor weekend recalls another great political scandal at another Buckinghamshire stately home. Forty years ago, Cliveden Manor played a central role in the Profumo Affair, when Tory defence minister John Profumo was forced to resign after lying over his dalliance with a call-girl there. The affair came to symbolise the corruption, arrogance and high-living of Harold Macmillan's Conservative Party, and had a key part in the defeat of the Conservatives in the 1964 general election. There will be no Cabinet resignations after the Waddesdon shooting weekend, and Peter Mandelson has not done anything illegal. But the message it sends is loud and clear. The Labour Party has lost its moral centre. Its leaders have nauseatingly sold out to the aristocratic lifestyle and world of high finance that they claimed to abhor. Having abandoned the high ideals that took them into politics, they will undoubtedly be abandoned by the voters they once pledged to represent. Mandelson shows Labour is a party rotten with decadence
27th November 2009
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