Peter and me
Every encounter I ever had with our former man in Washington, DC
After Wes Streeting kicked off what is sure to become a trend by publishing all his WhatsApp messages with Peter Mandelson, I’ve been examining my own (very limited) contact with our former ambassador.
Let’s be honest about this: there is absolutely no point in people like me, or anyone who supported Tony Blair’s New Labour project, now claiming that we never liked or knew Peter, that we always knew he was a wrong ’un and we’re happy to be shot of him (although that last bit is certainly true). The fact is that Mandelson was a key part of the team that created New Labour and injected it with an intellectual basis that allowed it to capture the centre ground of politics for more than a decade (the other key members being Blair himself, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell and Philip Gould).
I liked Mandelson and admired his skills. I was sad when he left the cabinet the first time, mainly because I recognised that Tony still valued him. I also regretted his second resignation, as Northern Ireland Secretary, and was glad that a subsequent official inquiry cleared him of all wrongdoing.
I was even (briefly) pleased when I heard that Gordon had brought him into his government as Business Secretary in 2008. The “briefly” is explained further down.
He was already something of a mythical figure in the Labour Party when I first met him. He had attracted much criticism from the traditional Left of the party after he was appointed by Neil Kinnock as the party’s Director of Communications in 1985 and set about rebranding the party, replacing the familiar flag logo with a red rose. In those days, the favourite criticism of the Left was the word “glossy”: if a party leaflet was well-designed, colourful, clear to read (in other words, short) and easy to understand, it was dismissed as “glossy” by those who would prefer a single-colour Risographed epistle featuring a sermon on socialist values in 10-point text.
Mandelson, with his obsession with winning votes and persuading people to vote Labour, rather than lecturing them about how wrong they were to vote Tory, became the epitome of all that was bad about Kinnock’s leadership.
Which is probably what made me like him. Judge someone by his enemies, and all that.
I met him for the first time, very briefly, a week after I had been appointed as press officer for Labour in Scotland in September 1990, and was invited to visit the press office at Labour’s London HQ in Walworth Road. I shook hands with him but was told that he was already working his notice, having resigned as Director of Communications and having decided to pursue a more profitable career before trying for a parliamentary seat of his own.
