Leaving Mandelson’s Shadow

Mark Seddon writes:

I’m pinching myself. It is February 2026, and I am writing for Tribune about Peter Mandelson. Moreover, it’s much the same as I was writing over thirty years ago for Tribune — except that, on this occasion, Mandelson has finally managed to surpass even his own appalling record of venality and avarice. At the time of writing, Mandelson’s latest partner in political crime, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, has fallen on his sword, while erstwhile former friends of Keir Starmer are busy sharpening their knives. Mandelson himself has seen his two homes raided by the police as part of an investigation into misconduct in public office; from everywhere come the noisy sights and sounds of hindsight being played out across the airwaves and across our screens, as former cronies and colleagues scurry to distance themselves from him.

I first came across Mandelson back in 1992, as a volunteer in Gordon Brown’s office during the 1992 general election. A few years earlier, Neil Kinnock had put him in charge of Labour’s communications efforts, and Mandelson caused consternation amongst the trade unions for taking his orders directly from Kinnock, while bypassing the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC). Famously, when the NEC voted to break off all relations with Rupert Murdoch during the bitter Wapping dispute, Mandelson kept up his clandestine briefing meetings with Times journalists. When his own press officer, John Booth, unaware that these meetings were continuing, told another Times journalist that they weren’t, Mandelson sacked him.

Although by 1992 Mandelson was himself a candidate in Hartlepool, the gadfly activities for which he became famed were on full display. He was here, there and everywhere; yellow Post-it notes would be placed on phones and chairs for Brown and further down the corridor for Tony Blair, reading, ‘Peter called — call back!’ On one occasion, he took me to lunch not far from parliament, pinching the odd chip from my plate, angling for information and gossip. The point is that, even then, Mandelson had a reputation for untrustworthiness. Kinnock’s successor, John Smith, for example, would have nothing to do with him.

After Smith died suddenly, Labour’s former long-time chief whip, Nick Brown, told me that while Margaret Beckett and others were in tears, he, Mandelson, was already on the phones, glad-handing MPs on behalf of Blair. He told Gordon Brown that he supported him, and then told Blair the same. Liverpool MP Peter Kilfoyle, who helped organise votes in the PLP for Blair, said, ‘Tony, I’m doing this — but only if you promise that Mandelson will have no role in your campaign.’ Blair promised that this would be the case. After Blair won, and Brown had been betrayed, Mandelson couldn’t help himself. He let it be known through one of his many client journalists that, actually, he had been a key figure in Blair’s campaign all along, operating under the nickname ‘Bobby’.

Fast forward to early January 2001, and I was looking out from the old Tribune offices, in Gray’s Inn Road, as a fine sunset lit up the Gothic backdrop of St Pancras station. The person on the phone was breathlessly telling me about some funny business involving the now minister, Mandelson, the Millennium Dome, for which he was responsible, and something to do with some rich Indian businessmen called the Hindujas and their attempts to gain British passports in return for funding the Millennium Dome. The ‘Hinduja affair’, or ‘cash for passports affair’, was to cost Mandelson his job in government. All that we could do at Tribune was to ask questions, which we did, thus playing a small role in his departure. This was the second major scandal to engulf him and his second resignation, following his failure a few years earlier to reveal that the then paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson, had secretly loaned him £373,000 for home improvements.

John Smith, Ed Miliband, and Jeremy Corbyn distinguished themselves by not falling for Mandelson’s blandishments. They didn’t even need to be warned about him. Not so Blair; not so the betrayed Gordon Brown, who brought him back into the government (either out of fear or out of some misplaced judgement that he could do some good). Not Corbyn, of whom Mandelson famously boasted, ‘I try to undermine Jeremy Corbyn every single day.’ Yet Starmer did, and we now learn that he was apparently advised by everyone around him, including National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, Angela Rayner, and David Lammy, not to make Mandelson ambassador to Washington.

The massive flaws and foibles of Mandelson have been widely known for almost four decades. Throughout that time, he was a key architect of Labour’s shift from being a broadly federal, democratic socialist party rooted in the trade union movement and working class, to becoming, via the New Labour interregnum, a barely recognisable political vehicle presided over by an inflexible, right-wing, top-down leadership, and populated, for the most part, by ambitious political professionals, frequently parachuted into what were once safe Labour seats by Mandelson and others.

Mandelson prospered and returned because he was revered by a whole generation of political professionals, ex-students, and lobbyists and because he personified ‘how politics was done’. Some things remain constant. Back in 1997, Mandelson was helping to weed parliamentary candidates out, but, when a few left-wingers and members of the awkward squad slipped through in seats, he never thought that the party would ever win and resolved to tighten the net further. Fast forward to the last general election, and Mandelson was up to his old tricks, presiding over spreadsheets of candidates with his new pal, Morgan McSweeney. Such was Mandelson’s continued access that he was reportedly also involved, with McSweeney, in helping to reshape Starmer’s cabinet following the resignation of Angela Rayner.

Blair famously once said, ‘I will know that my project is complete when the Labour Party has learned to love Peter Mandelson.’ Blair is currently uncharacteristically quiet about his old chum, but even he will know that he has failed — even if he may neither appreciate nor care that the Labour Party that was supposed to love Mandelson is now at risk of being read the last rites. As for Mandelson, after Gordon Brown amazed everyone by bringing him in from the cold and making him the business secretary, he revealed to Labour Conference delegates that his immediate reaction was, ‘Apprehension. Returning to the goldfish bowl of British politics — and all my fans in the media. It made me pause. I had been in this movie before — and its sequel — and neither time did I like the ending.’