How Peter Mandelson became a monster

The former ambassador’s world is disintegrating

Towards the end of A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud insists that, in order to uphold artistic integrity, one must be “absolutely modern”. True creativity, the poet insists, is the result of faithful alignment with the zeitgeist.

Few political figures personified that better than Peter Mandelson. Grandson of Herbert Morrison, Labour’s outstanding machine politician of the last century, he visited Downing Street as a young boy at the invitation of Harold Wilson. Later in 1971 – at the pinnacle of revolutionary chic – he journeyed to Havana as a member of the Communist Youth League. Then, as TV gained supremacy in the cultural sphere, he found work as a producer for London Weekend Television (LWT). Here was a world where Mandelson’s skills and political interests began to converge.

Two years after the 1983 election, Mandelson joined Labour as its new head of communications. By that point any ideological radicalism had evaporated – in its place a desire to experiment at the intersection of politics and media. A man born to the old Labour right, who briefly worshipped at the altar of Che, had found his calling as one of the country’s earliest spin doctors.

In the years that followed, Mandelson was a crucial architect in what became Blairism. This made sense given it was less an ideology than a sunny optimism about globalisation – conjoined to an obsession with media control and outward appearances. In 1996, a year before sweeping to power, Blair told the party faithful at Labour conference that they had to learn to love the now Hartlepool MP.

It was during this particular partnership, with Blair as the nation’s helmsman, that Mandelson most emphatically embodied the spirit of the age. A believer of globalisation during the Great Moderation; a proud European at the pinnacle of Britain’s EU membership; a gay politician as homosexuality was accepted in public life. The arc of the moral universe may have been long but, for much of the 2000s, it bent towards Peter Mandelson. Yes, he had to resign twice from cabinet, but even those embarrassing fiascos somehow captured the essence of politics in the new millennium.

In 2004 Mandelson stood down as an MP to become the European Commissioner for Trade. Six years later, with Labour now in opposition, he started his own lobbying shop: Global Counsel. A man who once identified as a communist, then a social democrat, now helped peddle influence for some of the world’s most powerful companies. Clients soon included the likes of Shell, JP Morgan and TikTok.

And yet it was at this moment, with Mandelson’s personal stature at its zenith, that he started to seem like a figure out of time. After 2008, as the Long Recession unfolded, it became clear a new normal was emerging. Globalisation had faltered, Euroscepticism was on the rise, and hostility to elites had gone from peripheral tendency to a folkish common sense. Here was the new “structure of feeling” that would give rise to a wave of political populism. Mandelson, the inveterate establishment insider, suddenly seemed incongruous.

Take extreme inequality. In 1998, Mandelson memorably remarked that New Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. And yet inequality, especially between England’s regions, created the conditions for not only Brexit but longer-term polarisation too. As much as Mandelson’s fellow travellers on the party right may wish to blame Jeremy Corbyn for the demise of the ‘Red Wall’, the collapse in 2019 was a long time coming.

Relatedly, and in another moment of candour, this time speaking privately to a fellow MP, Mandelson was challenged about the possibility of working class voters deserting Labour. His reply? They had nowhere else to go. Since those words were uttered, Ukip and the Brexit party have finished first in national elections. Reform is likely to follow suit, and overwhelmed both Labour and the Tories in last May’s local elections. Few comments better capture the stupidity of the establishment. Our electoral system, and its tendency to duopoly, created an enormous sense of entitlement. Only now is it truly disintegrating.

And yet, in a moment of ideological uncertainty, populism and conflict, Starmer not only turned to the old hand – but made his apprentice, Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff. That the party’s poll ratings now regularly feature in the low twenties should therefore surprise nobody. It’s like Blair listening exclusively to Harold Wilson staffers in 1998.

The former MP – and now former Ambassador to Washington – is not unique in this regard. In 2008, as the global economy was in freefall, Mandelson was sharing a superyacht with the billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Tony Blair, meanwhile, was reputedly the highest paid speaker in the world – earning as much as $250,000 for a 90 minute speech. Things might have been changing for ordinary Brits – as the country began its first of two lost decades – but for the former prime minister and Lord Mandelson, the amassing of a personal fortune had just begun.

Where Mandelson had Global Counsel, Blair would go on to start the Tony Blair Institute in 2016 – an organisation with extensive ties to Larry Ellison, recently declared the world’s wealthiest individual, briefly overtaking Elon Musk. It’s worth asking how Blair can continue to affect a ‘progressive’ veneer when the TBI is set to accept $375m from a man who once hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. And what does it say about Labour that, at last year’s conference, the TBI’s events were the best attended? Is it possible to both represent the interests of working class Brits and give an American billionaire that kind of influence?

A central idea for Marxists is that conditions determine consciousness. If, like the Blairs, you have a personal property portfolio in the tens of millions, you’ll probably not grasp the disaster that is Britain’s rental market. If, like Lord Mandelson, you own a property worth approximately £10m in Notting Hill, you will struggle to comprehend how owner-occupiers feel about surging numbers of HMOs on their road. If your days are a never-ending sequence of private cars, business class flights and Michelin star restaurants, don’t be surprised if your ability to understand the middle ground becomes unsteady. Presumably that explains why Mandelson, in 2008, told his “best pal” Jeffrey Epstein to “fight for early release” before his sentencing for procuring a child for prostitution. Nobody with the slightest grip on reality would say that.

This, perhaps, is also the principal reason why both Blair and Mandelson got behind the campaign for a second EU referendum. It’s no coincidence that, as issues like falling living standards, migration and underfunded public services were shaping the national debate – something which culminated in the 2017 election – the radical centre attempted to re-assert itself. The only way it could do that, though, was in trying to overturn Brexit, only serving to confirm perceptions about its hostility to democracy. If Nigel Farage as a plausible prime minister starts anywhere, it is with the launch of the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign. That turned him from a single issue politician, however charismatic, to an avatar of wider fury.

Starmerism is even less ideological than Blair’s Labour. And so, in a moment of political crisis, its involuntary reflex has been to become a sort of 1997 reenactment society – only without the growth and charisma. The reintroduction of Mandelson to front line politics was thus part of a wider returning to the fold, a political version of Sylvester Stallone’s Expendables, that included Tim Allan, Liz Lloyd, Clair Reynolds, Jonathan Powell and Jacqui Smith. History will likely recall this administration as centrism’s last stand. It, like Mandelson, is many things. “Absolutely modern” is not one of them.