Peter Mandelson’s influence over Labour is a 40-year story. It’s not an uninterrupted one – he was marginalised under Ed Miliband and almost banished under Jeremy Corbyn – but it’s certainly one worth telling. (Mandelson started as director of communications to Neil Kinnock in 1985, replacing Labour’s red flag with a red rose.)
By the 2024 general election, Mandelson’s involvement was greater than at any time since he stood inside No 10 on Gordon Brown’s final day as prime minister. As the i reported this week, his unofficial role extended to helping Morgan McSweeney choose potential Labour candidates.
This has encouraged a new and seductive narrative: that the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) is made in Mandelson’s image. Its appeal is obvious: it’s a gift to political opponents and it’s far easier to assume the party’s 404 MPs are ideological clones than it is to get to know them.
So are the government benches stuffed with those intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich? They’re not. New MPs – and the claim is that they are especially Mandelsonian – include the likes of Torsten Bell, Miatta Fahnbulleh, Dan Tomlinson, Jeevun Sandher, Kirsty McNeill and Yuan Yang, champions of post-crash economics, preoccupied with inclusive growth and lower inequality. From a different ideological perspective, Blue Labour MPs such as Jonathan Hinder, Connor Naismith and David Smith, all elected in 2024, have rejected the liberal world-view that Mandelson exemplified. Even those more sympathetic to the New Labour tradition don’t believe it can be used as a template today; they deal in complexity, not orthodoxy. In short, if you try to use The Blair Revolution as a guide to the current PLP you’ll get lost.
And that’s unsurprising. The world has changed since 1997 and Labour has changed with it. One of the painful ironies for Keir Starmer is that, in many ways, he has charted a post-Blairite course on policy: reviving public ownership, expanding workers’ rights and raising taxes – including on the wealthy – and spending far beyond the levels Tony Blair would have considered acceptable. Before the last Budget, senior No 10 and Treasury aides proudly told me that they had moved to the left of New Labour. But who will now hear that message above the Mandelson cataclysm?
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: What Jeffrey Epstein knew about money]
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