The Genius of Peter Mandelson

As set out by Peter Hitchens:

My relationship with Peter Mandelson - who this week is to all intents and purposes our Prime Minister - began and ended one day in Bournemouth in 1985 when I was introduced to him in his role as the newly appointed publicity director. I chatted briefly to him, asked him for his phone number - and was thoroughly and effectively splatted when in response he told me to: ‘Call the Labour Party Press Office,’ a polite way of telling me to, well, go away. He had quite rightly concluded that I (then a political reporter for a Conservative-supporting daily, who had already established very bad relations indeed with the then leader, Neil Kinnock) was an enemy, and he had no use for me at all. I have to say I thought this was a sensible assessment, though I felt he did not need to be quite so brusque. I didn't have much use for him either, but felt I should go through the motions.

The occasion was the Labour Party conference of that year, when Neil Kinnock made his famous Militant-bashing speech about Liverpool City Council delivering redundancy notices in taxis, to the simpering plaudits of almost all political journalists. They bought the line that Neil Kinnock was the Hammer of the Left. The truth was the real Left, the old pro-Soviet unions, the growing forces of political correctness, the comprehensive school enthusiasts, the anti-British supporters of the EU, were merely rearranging their priorities and seeking a new image. The tiny Trotskyist grouping known publicly as the Militant Tendency (and secretly as the Revolutionary Socialist League) had little influence outside Liverpool. The real Left in the Labour Party was based on the Communist industrial organisation, which controlled or influenced the executives and leaderships of many major unions - which had powerful block votes at Labour conferences and major influence over policy-making. And from the late 1970s there were also organisations, such as the campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, who united and marshalled the Left in Constituency Labour Parties.

These forces together achieved huge rule changes, especially the one forcing many Labour MPs to undergo reselection. They also took away the Labour MPs' power to elect the Party leader. Until then, many Labour MPs had been socially and morally conservative, pro-NATO, anti-Soviet etc. They were also identified as the enemy at Labour conferences, where they were often treated as pariahs and hate-objects. After this revolution, this wing of the Labour Party virtually vanished, some driven out, some defecting to the SDP. They never came back.

New Labour, absurdly viewed by ignoramus political reporters as a 'right-wing' counter-revolution was in fact the coming-to-power of the new, post sixties Left, with its feminist, internationalist PC concerns. It was also the removal from power of the old Working Class movement - both the ancient Stalinist Part and the Methodist, Temperance part. Both of these were puritanical, and not just about people getting filthy rich. New Labour's relaxed middle-class metropolitan attitude towards alcohol, and its bonfire of licensing laws, would have been unthinkable to previous Labour generations, who viewed drink as the enemy of progress.

I mention this because it seems to me that you need to know it to understand Peter Mandelson and what he did to Labour. Mr Mandelson is undoubtedly one of the cleverest and best-educated politicians now active. He is an effective political operator, the cool master of a brief, much-liked by civil servants for his competence and diligence. No surprise there. He came from a political family and was introduced to politics in his childhood. He went to a grammar school (though he campaigned for it to go comprehensive while he was still there) and he fully embraced the possibilities of Oxford. But what are his politics? Nobody ever seems to discuss this. We know all about his mortgages and about his sexual preferences. We know about his friends, his allegedly mistaking mushy peas for guacamole (and if you believe that, you'll believe anything), his rows and reconciliations with Gordon Brown and Anthony Blair.

But nobody ever seems to ask what it is all for. I think we should do Mr Mandelson the favour of acknowledging that he is a major politician who is largely personally responsible for taking this country much further down the road of left-wing radicalism than most people would have believed possible 20 years ago.

So here we are again, examining the political past of a major Labour figure. And what do we find? Well, in my old friend and colleague Donald Macintyre's sympathetic but characteristically rigorous and fair biography, published in 1999, we discover that the young Mandelson, though born into the bosom of conventional Labour, was fully involved in the great wave of late sixties and early seventies Marxist radicalism. Unsurprisingly (especially to anyone who has ever encountered their Olympically boring finger-jabbing comrades) Peter Mandelson was not seduced by the Trotskyist Militant Tendency when he came across them in the Labour Party Young Socialists. I suspect that he would never have been a Trotskyist, rightly concluding that this irresponsible branch of the revolutionary movement simply wasn't serious.

So what did he do?

It is worth reading the whole of Don Macintyre's Chapter Two ('An Incredible Anorak') to find out. It details Mr Mandelson's membership of the Young Communist League, and also describes Mr Mandelson's later attempts to belittle and minimise this connection. This is typical of his generation of Labour politicians, who in my view have never been fully frank about this important section of their political education. It is precisely this lack of frankness which makes me think it is still important.

His biographer (who is certainly not a conservative) is not wholly convinced by Mr Mandelson's airy minimising of his time with the YCL. Quoting the diaries of Mr Mandelson's then friend and comrade Steve Howell, Don Macintyre says:

‘Notwithstanding his later dismissiveness, Mandelson was active for much of the period between February 1971 and September 1972 when he was a YCL member.’

He was not inactive. Nor can he be said to have bumbled into the YCL because there was nothing else available, or he couldn't tell the difference. He had already spent time in the Labour Party YS. We should also recall that he joined the YCL less than three years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which the British Communists had feebly criticised, calling the invasion an 'intervention' and mumbling that they ‘completely underst[ood] the concern of the Soviet Union about the security of the socialist camp’…and continuing to ‘speak as true friends of the Soviet Union.’) This thuggish episode had finished official Communism in the eyes of many leftists of the time. Yet he sold the Communist daily, the Morning Star. He was a steward at the YCL Congress in Scarborough. This is not minor involvement. And while it was a long time ago and he was very young, it cannot be argued that it left no trace on him. At least one former comrade from those days has spoken about the manipulation and Machiavellian aspect of Communist politics, which he would then have encountered. There's also a very interesting account (and for this you'll have to get hold of the Macintyre book) of how Mr Mandelson severed his connections with Communism.

It still amazes me that so little is made (or understood) of the Marxist dalliances of major politicians. If the Cold War were still on, it would cause a huge fuss. And think what would happen if several senior Tories were found to have been dallying with the National Front in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We'd never hear the last of it.