Labour Never Needed Mandelson

Over in The First Post, Neil Clark writes:

As Andrew Marr once said, for a man supposed to swirl around in the dark, Peter Mandelson is rather touchingly attracted by the spotlight.

This week, the vainest man in British politics has been appearing in television adverts, dressed in a frock coat and sitting in a leather armchair, ready to tell us stories, a la Roald Dahl, from his newly published memoirs.

Mandy is hoping that the adverts, together with this week's Times newspaper serialisation, will get us flocking to the bookshops to buy his account of the inner workings of the last Labour governments. But is anyone - aside from political anoraks and Westminster insiders - really interested?

Mandelson's memoirs, entitled The Third Man, appear to have three main purposes. First, to make even more money for the money-obsessed writer. Second, to put the boot into his arch-enemy, Gordon Brown. And last, but certainly not least, to perpetuate one of the greatest myths of modern British political history: namely that Peter Mandelson matters.

According to the New Labour narrative, Mandelson is a 'brilliant' political tactician who made Labour electable in the 1990s and was responsible, along with Tony Blair and the other 'modernisers', for keeping the Tories out of power for the next decade. Without Mandelson's Machiavellian skills, allied to Tony Blair's charisma, and the ditching of 'Old' Labour policies such as nationalisation, there would have been no Labour victory in 1997 – so the story goes - and the party would have withered away and died.

But this version of history conveniently forgets that Labour was on course for victory anyway in the late 1990s, with or without Mandelson and Blair. The Tories, in power since 1979, and wracked by division and scandal, were clapped-out. The debacle of Black Wednesday, when the pound was forced out of the ERM in September 1992, was the final nail in their coffin.

Had he not died from a heart attack at the age of 55 in the summer of 1994, Labour would have been led into government by John Smith, a thoroughly likeable and decent politician of the old school. Smith, a gregarious and convivial Scot, had, according to Andrew Marr, an "instantaneous dislike" of the waspish metropolitan Mandelson, (who had been elected an MP in 1992), and it's hard to imagine Mandy playing any role - or having any influence - in a Smith-led Labour government.

But after the victory of the Blair-led Labour party in 1997, the myth of the all-powerful, all-conquering Prince of Darkness would only grow, despite the 'brilliant' tactician losing his Cabinet position twice due to scandals. Mandelson was the man who made Labour into winners, the New Labour groupies chimed. Other Labourites learned to put up with the nasty, preening bully with the posh accent, because they were convinced that he helped keep the dreaded Tories out.

The myth of Mandelson was so strong that even Gordon Brown, the Prince of Darkness's main political foe, succumbed to it, bringing him back as Business Secretary in October 2008. Brown clearly felt that it was better to have his bitterest enemy inside the Cabinet, rather than plotting against him from without. But it was to prove a grave mistake.

Mandelson, a shamelessly elitist figure, alienated traditional Labour voters by accusing unions who opposed the privatisation of the Royal Mail of fighting an "ideological" battle . He also sided with oil multinational Total and not the striking British workers at the Lindsey refinery dispute in February 2009.

Finally, when it came to this year's general election, the man with the supposed Midas touch ran what Brown's former spin doctor Charlie Whelan has described as "the worst campaign in Labour's history".

It wasn't the first time that Mandelson had run a losing campaign - he had also managed Labour's 1987 campaign when they gained only 20 seats following on from their heavy defeat in 1983. The galling thing from the viewpoint of today's Labour supporters was that the 2010 election was winnable: there was no great public enthusiasm for David Cameron and the Tories, and a more focused, dynamic Labour campaign might well have kept the party in power.

Labour defenders of Mandelson routinely claim that despite his enormous personal failings, the grandson of Herbert Morrison has always had the best interests of his 'beloved' Labour Party at heart. But publishing his memoirs during a Labour leadership election campaign, and selling the serialisation rights to a media group which supported the Conservatives in the general election, has surely shattered that particular illusion.

The reality is that Mandelson's priority is not to further the cause of the Labour Party, but to further the cause of Peter Mandelson. His memoirs are the work of a self-obsessed narcissist, who believes that he was one of the most important political figures of the era.

Next time you hear someone talk of the 'brilliance' of Peter Mandelson and how much the Labour Party owes him, remember that if only John Smith had smoked, drunk and eaten a little less, 'The Third Man' would today be 'The man nobody can remember'.

The Labour Party would though, still be here, and the sun would continue to rise in the east.

Labour never needed Tony Blair, either. He was only ever the central character in an Ealing comedy. Our hero is wandering aimlessly on the fringes of London society when he unexpectedly falls for the left-wing girl at work. In order to impress her, he involves himself in the Labour Party. Then, over 20 years, a series of accidents makes him Prime Minister. However, his political interests do not develop in any way at all, not even during the further 10 years of his Premiership. Ian Carmicheal in the lead role, essentially the same character as his Stanley Windrush in I’m All Right, Jack. James Robertson Justice as Derry Irvine. Hilarious yet poignant stuff from the golden age of British cinema.

After the death of John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992. There were swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after John Smith’s death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett. But do not try and tell that to these people, who include David Cameron and those around him. Instead of the verifiable facts above, they would have us believe that the 1997 “victory” was all the work of their own archetype of those who did best, ostensibly, out of both the 1960s and the 1980s.

They are also insistent that General Elections are won and lost in the South East. The South East is the least conservative part of the country. It is therefore the part with the highest level of support for the post-Thatcher Conservative Party. If General Elections really were won and lost there, then there would have been a Conservative Government with a large majority in 2005. In the days when that party used to win Elections outright rather than having to be propped up by someone else, then it did so by winning considerable numbers of seats in Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands. Those are all much more conservative places than the South East.

By losing first many and then most of those seats, the Conservative Party first nearly and then actually lost power in 1992 and 1997 respectively. In 1992, only the most obsessive political anorak had ever even heard of Tony Blair. And that was still the case on Golden Wednesday, when the Conservative defeat, and thus the Labour “victory” by default, became a done deal. Furthermore, the Conservatives’ failure to regain power first at all and then on its own has consisted precisely in its failure to regain those Scottish, Welsh, Northern and Midland seats. By contrast, the Labour gains in the South East in 1997 were just a bonus, and the loss of most of them in 2005 made no real difference. Indeed, only in 2005 did Blair finally influence a General Election result at all. Specifically, he lost Labour 100 seats that any other Labour Leader would have saved. Thus he moved from being a mere irrelevance to being a positive liability.

However, the Conservatives, deprived of any significant parliamentary link with the areas that really matter electorally, entirely failed to register this. Instead, they installed as Leader a Blair clone, because he played well in the South East, and in polls with the 34 to 38 per cent of determined non-voters dishonestly factored out. What do those 34 to 38 per cent, and the thoroughly disgruntled Conservative and Labour core voters who remain (for now), actually believe? They believe in national self-government, the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts. In local variation, historical consciousness, and family life. In agriculture, manufacturing, and small business. In close-knit communities, law and order, and civil liberties. In academic standards, all forms of art, and mass political participation within a constitutional framework. In short, they are conservative.

Therefore, they cannot be in favour of “free” market capitalism, which corrodes to nought all these good things and more. Rather, they see the need for the universal Welfare State (including farm subsidies), and for the strong statutory and other, including trade union, protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.

Since they rightly oppose the unregulated movement of labour, they rightly also oppose the unregulated movement of goods, services and capital; and vice versa. Since they rightly oppose the decadent social libertinism deriving from the 1960s, they rightly also oppose its logically inevitable, and not unwitting, development into the decadent economic libertinism deriving from the 1980s; and vice versa. And since they rightly oppose the erosion of self-government and cultural distinctiveness by the European Union, they rightly also oppose that erosion by American hegemony and global capital, closely connected as all these three are; and vice versa.

These are the only means of defending the conservative values against capitalism. After all, what other means are there? Correspondingly, those values provide the only grounds for needing or wanting those means. After all, what other grounds are there? A new political movement in that vein could take at least a third of the vote. But first, we all need to do what most of us have already done: get over Tony Blair.