For the past four weeks, Peter Mandelson has been retreading old footsteps. Canvassing for the Labour Party around Hartlepool, the north-east coastal town he represented as an MP from 1992-2004, he encountered many former voters.
“I was struck going back on to all the old council estates where I used to draw so much support [by] what owner-occupation and new private house-building has done; there’s a smartness and tidiness to those houses and their gardens,” he told me from the cottage he rents on a farm in Wiltshire.
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