Lord Mandelson’s memoirs left the real questions unanswered, says Trevor Kavanagh. If even he won’t tell the truth about the Blair-Brown years, who will?
Peter Mandelson had a rich seam before him as he sat down to write The Third Man. He was present at the birth of New Labour, helped plot its path to power and then sat on the burning deck when it sank. From start to finish, Mandy was in the thick of it. Little wonder that there should be excitement about his memoirs. But anyone reading the three-part serialisation this week would be left wondering — where is the dynamite? Either the Times had missed the best bits, or Lord Mandelson has sold us all short.
This after all was the book we’d been waiting for, the greatest inside political story of the post-Thatcher years. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown may have been the stars, but it was Mystic Mandy who actually brought the Great Illusion to life. The man who rose from backroom boy to First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council knows precisely where the bodies are buried. He dug the graves. Nobody had a closer ringside seat, a sharper eye, so many scores to settle — or a more detailed diary to rely on.
As Mandelson tells it, this is a drama bursting with jealousy, betrayal, revenge. It is the eye-witness account of two giant egos locked in a bitter political marriage, with Mandelson making it a ménage à trois. But hang on — haven’t we heard all this before?
The raging feuds and personal vendettas between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been documented — and denied — for at least a decade. The best inside account is to be found in Andrew Rawnsley’s book, The End of the Party. It vividly charts the savage wars between Tony and Gordon — what Rawnsley calls the TeeBee-GeeBees. His fly-on-the-wall revelations explore the violent personal clashes that undermined the government at the cost of the governed.
And who was the spy in the camp who provided so much of that waspish gossip? None other than Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the County of Durham — alias The Third Man. Not for the first time, Mandy was happy to drip poison into the ear of anyone prepared to listen. Now he is putting some of that poison under his own name. His lordship’s book was rushed out in just eight weeks. And it shows.
This is not in the league of Labour’s legendary Crossman diaries or even Tony Benn’s dotty jottings. And certainly not as entertaining as Alan Clark’s hilarious account of the Thatcher years. Now, it seems there will be competition. Gordon Brown has been hammering the keyboard with his own version, which explains his mysterious disappearance since election day. And his chancellor, Alistair Darling, is trying to beat him to it. By the time we’ve read them all, we might be able to piece together the real story of Labour’s 13 years in power: the wanton destruction of a nation’s finances, its reputation on the world stage and its once-envied political institutions.
Even the Times seemed a little disappointed by its own exclusive. ‘There is a central question here that neither Lord Mandelson nor any of the leading candidates for the next Labour leadership seem willing to address head-on,’ observed its editorial. ‘From 2002 onwards, the leadership of this country gradually turned public services into universal entitlements. New Labour presided over an increasing public sector wage bill that would eventually have become unsustainable even without the financial crisis.’ My italics.
This, to quote another Graham Greene title, takes us to the heart of the matter …what happened to all our money? When Labour took over, the national debt was around £350 billion. It had almost doubled even before the crash of 2007, when most governments were using the boom years to pay down debt. Low interest rates had led British households, too, to the highest levels of borrowing ever seen in any major economy according to the OECD. Only wild guesses could be made at the cost of unfunded state sector pensions, but it was clear they were out of control.
When I mentioned some of those alarming figures in a rare chat with Tony Blair after the 2005 election, he was completely unfazed. ‘Really?’ he said — and changed the subject. This almost contemptuous indifference lies at the core of what happened in the Labour years. It is important to remember this as the Cameron-Clegg coalition struggles with the consequences. That this is the real story of New Labour — and one that none of its key architects is likely to tell.
Blair was slow to wake up to the threat which debt posed to his legacy because he was, alas, economically illiterate. He walked into government apparently unaware that politics is economics. Nothing else can account for his disastrous decision to hand Gordon Brown absolute control over the nation’s finances, or his failure to act when his chancellor embarked on his reckless gamble. By the time Blair grasped the implications, Brown was running the country with an iron grip on every Whitehall spending department. Tony was simply the gilded figurehead tap-dancing on the world stage.
In the meantime, the state was exploding in size and cost and Gordon was putting Britain on Queer Street. Tony was left fingering the ‘scars on my back’ from his thwarted attempts to reform the public sector. He frequently toyed with the idea of shunting his chancellor off to the Foreign Office. But the truth is that Tony Blair could never have summoned the courage to sack the Iron Chancellor.
This was the key to what Mandelson now describes as Blair’s ‘weak and indecisive’ character. Britain today is paying a painful price for that weakness — and will be for a long time to come. His failure to act left a man in charge of the economy who, if Mandelson is to be believed, is not just ‘psychologically flawed’ but ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ — and, tragically for Britain, had economic policies to match.
Lord Mandelson’s choice of ‘insurrection’ to describe the onslaught by Treasury thugs against the Prime Minister is completely apt. Brown was a political terrorist who ruled by fear. A word of criticism was, to him, tantamount to unforgivable treachery. Mandelson was first to pay the price when Brownites leaked his dodgy mortgage, but the Labour morgue is filled with Gordon’s victims. Senior ministers walked in perpetual dread of ‘the Brown Spot’. Even admirers were not spared. Douglas Alexander, having worshipped at his master’s feet, was cast adrift for taking one false step.
Now the self-appointed Prince of Darkness is getting his own back. But his memoirs only raise bigger questions about the Blair–Brown years. It is clear, now, that senior party figures were well aware of Brown’s flaws. They knew he was a disaster as Prime Minister from the moment they let him barge into the job. For all his promises of ‘change’, he had no plans at all for government nor any clue how to win a fourth term. Indeed they knew beyond doubt that he was leading them inexorably to defeat.
So why didn’t the Labour party take the course pursued with devastating efficiency last month by the Australian Labor party and put their leader out of his misery? Why did it not save the country from Brown? Mandelson’s memoirs make clear that the country was the last thing on ministers’ minds. Their mission was all about self-preservation, keeping Labour in power, stopping the Tories at any cost — even the cost of economic stability. Mandelson even quotes Blair to this effect. ‘It’s not about loyalty to one man. It’s about loyalty to the party. It’s about saving the party.’ No mention of the national interest here.
David Miliband, described correctly by Blair as ‘not perfect’, denies it was lack of courage that stopped him challenging Brown two years ago. He tells Mandelson he held back because a change of leadership would have forced Labour into an early election. Consider the rationale. Having chucked out one Prime Minister, the last thing Labour’s high command wanted was for voters to have a say on his unelected successor.
Democracy and New Labour are frequently strangers — witness Mr Brown welshing on his promised EU referendum. Today, with a real leadership campaign to fight, Mr Miliband confesses: ‘We talked about “we” but it meant us, not them.” He was not alone. Time after time, Mandy makes clear he and the rest of the anti-Brown faction were interested solely in their political futures, not the fate of Britain. This government was cursed with the certainty of entitlement.
It was Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, Herbert Morrison, who bragged: ‘We are the masters now.’ That was Old Labour, but not much has changed. His grandson’s party still believes voters are the ‘little people’. And this conceit suffused the party’s thinking. Brown truly believed he knew better how to spend people’s hard-earned money than they did. Indeed, he tested that pernicious theory to destruction.
The vices of some New Labour colleagues were perhaps more venal. Blair was a brilliant tactician with the greatest political asset of all — a beguilingly honest smile. But it’s hard to believe he saw politics as a vehicle for public service. He loved the glory and the prestige and the power. As we have seen, he was determined to continue reaping the fruits of high office long after he left it.
This is why we cannot expect many honest histories of the New Labour years, and why so many of the memoirs lining bookshelves will be as uninformative as Mandelson’s. In the end, New Labour will be remembered as much for its hypocrisy and greed as for its monumental incompetence in government. When we think of the Blair-Brown years, we will think of John Prescott who made a hash of his vainglorious empire of transport, environment and the regions, only to reward himself by grabbing the ermine he professed to despise.
It will be remembered for the speed with which Tony Blair amassed a remarkable fortune as a civilian, a process condemned just last week by Lord MacDonald, the former director of public prosecutions, as ‘undignified’. But in the decades to come, I suspect we may be reminded most of all by the incorrigible Mandy as we learn more about his life and times at the centre of so many storms, past, present and future.
Lord Mandelson is like a moth to the flame. He has, to quote David Blunkett, ‘a habitual desire to intrigue and take part in the “insider” plotting which can so often damage the best of projects’. He is obsessively secretive, especially about his relations with the fabulously rich. But too often for his own comfort, he gets found out. When asked what he has to say about a so-called Labour luminary flirting with the dubious likes of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, he snaps: ‘Good for me.’ Oh, Mandy! That’s the perfect New Labour epitaph.
Trevor Kavanagh is a columnist on the Sun and was its political editor between 1983 and 2006.