They’ll Send Him Away

Peter Mandelson is absolutely guaranteed to lose any seat that Labour finds for him to contest once he has surreally resigned his life peerage. Not in the North East, not in South Wales, not anywhere is there a constituency that would vote for him, any more than for Tony Blair, who also used to think (and probably still does) that everybody loved him.

As for Mandy’s contesting North-West Durham, I have been trying to think of who would sign his nomination papers. No one who wanted to hold or to win back a council seat. And thus no one in a position to deliver any votes at all for a candidate not just certain to lose, but with no local base of his own from which to lose with any sort of dignity. Fourth candidates have kept their deposits here on the last three occasions. But he would not.

There could still be the all-women shortlist without which in Hilary Armstrong’s constituency there can never be another in the entire country. As a supporter of abortion on demand up to and including partial birth, as an upper-middle-class person (even if not a full-blown toff like David Cameron’s cousin), and as a sectarian Leftist from the Seventies, Peter Mandelson is a woman within the understanding of Harriet Harman, whose job it is to decide these things. Mere chromosomes are neither here nor there.

This would be a singularly nasty contest, especially in the Consett area, where leaflets, without the schoolboy error of naming an author or a publisher, would set out Mandy’s lifestyle and background in Polish (the language of EU citizens free to vote, or not, for any local council candidate who had nominated or campaigned for Mandelson). Just as well that it is not going to happen.