Twice ejected from Cabinet, but now once again one of the most powerful men in the UK, a mellowed Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool talks to MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
HOLDING AN orange in his hand, Peter Mandelson, who has just completed an interview for BBC News, rises from the table and microphone, and gripes to his staff about the way the broadcaster is reporting a story about cuts in universities’ income.
It is the gripe of a different Mandelson to one of years past. From the mid-1980s, as head of Labour's communications, Mandelson would have barked, bullied, threatened and cajoled. Today, on the mezzanine floor of a University of Nottingham lecture hall, he is more relaxed: "I don't know whythey report it like that. The universities are just getting their retaliation in first," he grumbles, but mildly so.
But he has not gone soft on the press. Once a television journalist himself, he has a low opinion of the trade, clearly believing it to be lazy, blinkered, biased and often vicious.
Still, it is there, just like bad weather, influenza and family death. It must be tolerated; overcome and bypassed wherever possible; chided repeatedly for its mistakes and never permitted to get above its station. But he does not tear himself up about it anymore.
Today, Mandelson has more titles than a Grand Duke in Ruritania: First Secretary of State, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council, and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills.
More importantly, he has been taken to the bosom of Labour, a party he helped to bring back to winning ways through the New Labour project formed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but that never loved him.
Much of the old animosity disappeared last September when he stood to speak to its conference in Brighton before delegates who were depressed and without hope of a fourth electoral victory. By the time he finished the audience was on its feet, cheering him to the rafters, and, seemingly, surprised with itself for its changed feelings towards a man many had for long hated.
Twice removed from cabinet, Mandelson is now, seemingly, immune to attack. Having gone to Brussels as European Commissioner in 2004, he returned to British politics in 2008 when prime minister Gordon Brown decided on something that had seemed unthinkable, and invited back a man he had blamed for helping to keep him out of No 10 for so long.
Speaking in Brighton last September, Mandelson said he had been “shocked” to be invited back – as well as apprehensive: “I made enemies, sometimes needlessly. I was sometimes too careless with the feelings and views of others.”
Last week, sitting on a London-bound train from Coventry, Mandelson thought back to Brighton, but it is clear that for this man, steeped in Labour since birth, to be loved by the party means a great deal.
Asked how he felt about the reception, he replies: “You were surprised? You are not as surprised about it as I was. Ah, surprised, relieved. It was quite a humbling experience, when you have had . . . ” The words trail off.
The Brighton speech, personal as it was, was a gamble; its reaction uncertain: “Some people said to me, including one friend who works in No 10, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t make a speech like this, it’s too personal, it’s too, sort of, high risk.”
But why did they react so warmly? He pauses, looks out of the train window: “Why, why, why. You have to remember that the party was in a pretty beleaguered place in 2008 when I came back.
“I think people felt pleased, or relieved, or surprised that, you know, I came back from what I was doing in the Commission. They felt that I had, sort of, given up something to come back, which I had. They were pleased that I had done so, but I think that they also wanted unity. They wanted to put the strife, the Blair-Brown-Mandelson strife behind them. In a sense, my coming back sealed that, and I think that people were relieved.
“I suppose the other reason is that they came to conference pretty low. It got off to a desultory start, and I sort of cheered them up.”
His exit for the second time from the cabinet in January 2001, when he was secretary of state for Northern Ireland, still hurts, though he is certain that he was a man wronged, and let down by long-time colleagues.
He had been accused of using his position to get a passport for an Indian businessman, Srichand Hinduja, when the Indian was under investigation by the New Delhi government over an arms scandal.
Mandelson insisted from the beginning that he had done nothing wrong, and was subsequently cleared, and he now describes the affair as “a wholly manufactured construction”.
“Alistair Campbell later acknowledged I would never have had to resign the second time if I hadn’t gone the first time. That was his sort-of defence of his role in the whole thing, that, you know, I had made myself weaker, or more fragile. What they didn’t realise was that people were just trying it on the second time, and if those around me had been more robust then the attempt could have been seen off. In fact, they weren’t more robust; they just collapsed in the face of it.”
DESPITE HIS LOSSof office, he insists he was never bitter: "Well, what can I say. In reality, though it was hard for me to swallow what had happened, I didn't let it interfere with my relationship with Blair," he says, adding that he "clicked back" into helping the PM when [Blair] was "quite vulnerable" after Campbell left. Everyone involved now regrets their role: "Well, everyone, including the people themselves . . . thought that. Tony said afterwards that . . . I'll wait until I say what he said then. He regretted it."
Privately, some of those who clashed with him say they have softened only because the Mandelson of old has disappeared, to be replaced by the calm, almost regal creation on view in Nottingham and Coventry last week.
Mandelson sees it differently: “You have to understand what happened between Tony and Gordon in 1994. I mean, the party, Labour MPs, the media, were divided into Blairites and Brownites. And the Brownites to a man and woman were schooled, you know, to attack me, to undermine me.
“When you are put in that position, it does affect, it affects your feelings and your behaviour, and I think it was the lifting of that jihad against me that allowed me to become more like myself,” he says.
The use of the word “jihad” illustrates the scale of past hatreds, and it is clear that there are those – such as schools secretary Ed Balls, a long-time ally of Gordon Brown – who are still not fans of Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool.
In December and January, the accepted Westminster wisdom was that Mandelson had gone into a sulk over a Brown/Balls strategy to target the party’s core vote by spreading a message of class-war, higher taxes on the rich, etc.
Such a strategy would be an admission of defeat, because it could never produce a Labour majority, but it could limit the losses and hold out hope of getting the Conservatives out after one term, rather than a generation.
Mandelson, many sources affirm, fought against this, and a number of sources have privately said they were told this by Mandelson himself. He, on the other hand, simply denies it ever happened.
“Nobody ever asked me what my views were. They just took them for granted, it fitted into their stories, all based on other people’s perceptions. Nobody asked me what my views were,” he says, as the train rolls into Rugby station. “I don’t know a single living soul in the ranks of the Labour Party, certainly not in its leadership and government who imagines that you can win an election on the basis of our core vote. It is arithmetically not possible,” he says – entirely correct but not an answer to the question that was asked.
A second go at the question – emphasising that the strategy, if it existed, accepted defeat, but sought to minimise it – does little better: “Well, that is very complicated. I don’t know anyone who wants that. You mean they want to lose narrowly?” Again, of course, not the question put, nor the point made; but the implication that the questioner is terribly earnest, but just a little dim or naive, is left hanging in the air. So, too, is a hint of amusement.
A probe about his appetite for politics if Labour loses meets a similar obstacle: “Appetite for opposition? I have a greater appetite for office,” he says archly.
Naturally, the scale of the appetite is not in question if power remains, as if such could ever be in doubt, but what if it is not? “If that is what the electorate decides, then I won’t have any option will I?”
“Well, you don’t have to stay around,” he is told. “I don’t have to stay around. I seeeeee.”
Does he have the same hunger to do again what he did 15 years ago? This time, he pauses. The tone turns serious: “All my life I wanted to see my party in office, because I believe in it, what it stands for and what it can do. A lot of my life, though, has seen the Labour Party vote-losing, being defeated in elections and languishing in opposition. I have never liked seeing that. I have always worked for the opposite and I am sure that I will continue doing so if that is the result.”
On the Conservatives, Mandelson clearly believes David Cameron and George Osborne have not paid their dues; that they have not travelled the painful road he, Blair and Brown passed to reform Labour.
“I think they are being rumbled. When we were creating New Labour in the 1990s we decided to make real changes, to face down opposition and not to take those on the Left with us who disagreed with the changes.
“Cameron, by contrast, has chosen not to face down the Right who oppose his policies but to take them with him and that has meant a blunting of change, diluting the reform and policies which he advertised at the beginning.”
The observation that Cameron and Osborne are the guts of 10 points ahead, depending on which poll is viewed, prompts another pleasantly-fired salvo: “Yes, but you asked me a specific question. Now you are just making debating points.”
Cameron, he says, had spoken days previously to a major business gathering in London: “Three people have said to me since, that they came out thinking that there is less to this guy than meets the eye, that he doesn’t have substance. The people kicked out the Tories in 1997 because they decided they didn’t like the party, and, therefore, if its instincts haven’t changed and its policies haven’t changed they are the same old Tories that the public booted out last time.”
By now, the train has pulled into Euston, and Mandelson and his staff, including Limerick-born press adviser, Peter Power, head back to the office for a final round of meetings.
Some final questions remain, though, and they are dealt with in a Saturday morning call when Mandelson, relaxed after an early run, is already in an executive lounge in Heathrow on his way to a five-day visit to the Gulf.
One of them is about his relations with Mo Mowlam, prompted by the recent Channel 4 film on her life starring Julie Walters, which made him look a pantomime villain. The programme’s basic premise is rejected outright.
“I didn’t actually have difficulties with Mo. I was a friend of Mo’s in the 1980s. She helped me get my seat. We used to holiday together. I was a friend of hers during the 1990s and helped her considerably, which she acknowledged.
“And I really did help her, and she was grateful for that. I am afraid [his portrayal] was a piece of story telling,” he says, pausing, “I didn’t actually see it. It was on a Sunday evening. I didn’t see it. I clean forgot. [But] I know enough about it to know it wasn’t true.
WHEN THE TIMEcame for Mo to leave Northern Ireland before the summer of 1999, she really didn't want to leave. Really. She was absolutely insistent on staying, and she used every argument and every leverage, including seeking to embarrass me and drag me into it and the result was that [Blair] left her there, but only did so until October when she simply had to leave for reasons that you may or may not understand, I don't know."
And she did not have to go just because of her awful relations with Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, but Sinn Féin, too: “It wasn’t just with Unionists. The Unionists just wouldn’t have anything to do with her, but it wasn’t that.
“Sinn Féin had given up on her as well. Sinn Féin did not find her . . . ” the words trail off, “She just didn’t have, as it were, the usefulness, that she had previously,” says Mandelson. Even if it is not the commonly-held opinion, the facts support much of his argument. Mowlam was sidelined by the Northern players, some of them more willingly than others, long before she was replaced by Blair.
So how does Mandelson, who says he is bored with the press’s interest in him and his life, analyse Mandelson in 2010?
“What am I? I know my own mind. I have strong political views and convictions.
“I’m fairly uncompromising, I am fairly outspoken. That doesn’t always win you friends in politics. In that sense, I am rather tough. I am not a fence-sitter, but I am also somebody who is loyal, somebody who has a sense of humour, somebody who likes others to succeed. I don’t feel the need to bring about, or gauge my own success at other’s expense, as some politicians do,” he says.
With that, an airline official can be heard on the telephone, telling him that he must leave to catch his flight. “Listen, I have got to go here, it seems,” says Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool. And he is off.
