Video: watch Philip Webster on Peter Mandelson at www.thetimes.co.uk
Lord Mandelson reads the last rites over new Labour today, declaring that the project that he helped to fashion “died on May 6, 2010”.
Writing in The Times, the architect of the party’s recovery from electoral oblivion and its 13-year reign reveals that he is about to deliver the project’s full obituary. “It will no doubt ruffle some feathers,” he says of his memoir to be published this summer.
The peer, twice forced to resign but who staged an astonishing political comeback two years ago, offers an early taste of an account that he says will be a “mixture of history, autobiography and emotion”.
He says that he regrets persuading Gordon Brown to stand aside in favour of Tony Blair in 1994. “If we had resolved the matter there and then, we would have avoided so much of the soap opera that followed.”
As well as booking a centre-stage spot in the party’s recent history, the former Business Secretary seeks to frame the current leadership contest. Declaring his “phase” of new Labour dead, he says that the party must nevertheless remain aspirational and keep its reforming instincts if it is ever again to be a “serious party of government”.
He writes: “It is about Labour not being a party of class or sectional interest, but about being a broad-based party of conscience and reform.” He also warns the candidates for Labour’s leadership not to duck “very difficult policy issues” raised by the need to reduce Britain’s record deficit. Both interventions will be seen as supporting David Miliband, although Lord Mandelson has not yet formally endorsed the former Foreign Secretary.
It is, however, the publication of his account of a career that defined new Labour — as image-maker, campaigner, fixer and de facto deputy prime minister — that will be most eagerly awaited. “It tells it as I saw it, working off the detailed notes, papers and diaries which I kept throughout my career,” he writes.
The book, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour, will be published by HarperPress — almost certainly before Mr Blair’s own account, which is due for release in September.
Lord Mandelson will be unsparing in his account of a chequered career in which he made many enemies, saying that he began the memoir at a time when he did not expect to return to government: “It will no doubt ruffle some feathers but if it didn’t it wouldn’t tell the story of what new Labour achieved in government, where and why it didn’t achieve everything we hoped for, and what it can accomplish in the future.”
Having become Labour’s director of communications in 1985 he cultivated Mr Blair and Mr Brown after they were first elected two years later. It was his promotion of the former to lead Labour in 1994 that created a 14-year feud with Mr Brown. The circumstances of his resignations — once in 1998 after details of secret home loan from an ally of Mr Brown were revealed, the second in 2001 over his approval for a UK passport for the businessman Srichand Hinduja — further complicated a fraught relationship.
However, the surprise Cabinet recall of Lord Mandelson in 2008 by Mr Brown, by then Prime Minister, was a political masterstroke, effectively insulating the former Chancellor from attacks by other allies of Mr Blair.
With all the leadership candidates insisting that it is time for the party to move on from its recent past, Lord Mandelson begins a new phase in his political career as one of its elder statesmen. “I am not arguing for the new Labour of Blair, Brown and Mandelson to be preserved in aspic: that would be the opposite of the revisionist instincts that lay at the root of our project. This phase of new Labour is now over and died on May 6, 2010,” he writes. “But the cast of mind new Labour represents — aspirational, reforming, in touch and that faces up to the choices power demands — must not die with it if our party is to be a serious party of government again.”
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