Peter Mandelson added much to British politics when to general astonishment he returned from Brussels in October 2008. No one else was so entertaining, so capable of managing Gordon Brown, or so deadly a foe when crossed: witness the way he almost finished off George Osborne over the curious affair of their holiday on Corfu. As a political conversationalist, Mandelson is in the highest class: no wonder the upper classes invite him to their houses, for he sings for his supper in a most amusing way. This makes his book a disappointment. It is better than most books about New Labour, but it is not a masterpiece. One has the impression that the author does not care very much about writing, or indeed about books. His tone of voice – comic, subtle, affectionate, menacing – is lost behind a screen of bland, serviceable prose. Politics, and his relationships with various people, matter far more to him than establishing himself as a writer. Mandelson is the greatest courtier of the New Labour era, the man with the gift of getting closer to successive leaders than anyone else, but he writes with a courtier’s reticence. And yet there are some very enjoyable things in the book. Mandelson is nicer to women than most of the New Labour henchmen were, and liked Carole Caplin, the health and lifestyle guru who became a friend and confidante of Cherie Blair: “Carole had a champagne-like effervescence about her… For a few days, her descriptions of how industrial quantities of coffee meant certain death frightened us out of risking so much as a single cup.” When some old topless photographs of Caplin surfaced during the Labour conference of 1994, panic ensued and the cry went up, as so often during any Labour crisis of the past 20 years, to send for Mandelson. He arrived in Tony Blair’s suite to find Tony, Cherie, Carole and Alastair Campbell: “When I got there, Alastair was laying into Carole, like a bank security guard who had caught an armed intruder red-handed… I did what I could to calm him down, which was not much. I did say there was no justification for speaking to anyone like that, which sparked an enduring suspicion on Alastair’s part that I was somehow ‘on Carole’s side’.” Mandelson blames Campbell for mishandling the Hinduja passport affair, which precipitated Mandelson’s second departure from office. Soon Campbell is laying into Cherie herself for her links with Peter Foster, a dodgy former boyfriend of Caplin. Mandelson writes: “I had sympathy with Cherie’s plight. I could see that Alastair would have forced her to resign, if only he could have worked out what she would be resigning from.” Blair complains to Mandelson about Campbell’s treatment of Cherie: “He’s saying Cherie’s a liar and that she’s embarrassed him with the media. He’s doing to Cherie exactly what he did to you on the Hinduja stuff. He takes a grain of truth about what you’ve said, he turns it around into something it isn’t, and then he takes a position.” Another way of putting this would be to say that Campbell is a gifted tabloid journalist. Anyhow, he emerges badly from Mandelson’s book, and on page 360 can even be found expressing doubts about the Iraq war, suddenly asking Mandelson: “Do you think we’re right to be doing this?” Gordon Brown emerges worse. Mandelson in the early Nineties ran a sort of informal finishing school for Labour MPs. His two star pupils were Gordon and Tony: “Constantly batting ideas off each other, positioning and planning, they were like a pair of very close, if unidentical, twins. Tony had the sunnier disposition…” Tony came on in leaps and bounds, but “Gordon, meanwhile, was struggling”. So in 1994, when John Smith died, Mandelson decided to back Blair for the leadership, with the result that Brown behaved atrociously towards both Blair and Mandelson until 2008, by which time Brown had deposed Blair but was in such desperate straits that he had to send for Mandelson. The problem with this unedifying story is that most of it has already been told. Mandelson describes his own predicament as that of a mistress who has been spurned: “Tony had decided… I was simply not worth the trouble.” Brown, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer was locked in an unhappy political marriage with Blair, was determined to get rid of Mandelson: “Gordon wants you buried,” as Blair told Mandelson. Mandelson discovered in 2008 that his bond with Brown had never been broken: “I realised that despite all we had gone through, I still cared about him.” At long last they regularised their relationship and formed a political marriage of their own, with Mandelson acquiring the sonorous titles that befitted the second most powerful man in the government. But it was too late for a happy ending. Even with Mandelson’s help, Brown could not win the election, and New Labour was thrown back into the wilderness, where its leaders spent their declining years writing their memoirs. * Andrew Gimson is the author of a biography of Boris Johnson The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour by Peter Mandelson 584pp, HarperPress, £25 Buy now for £23 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph BooksThe Third Man:
Life at the Heart of New Labour
by Peter Mandelson: review
Peter Mandelson describes his predicament as that of a spurned mistress,
says Andrew Gimson,
reviewing Mandelson's indiscreet memoir,
The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Posts
