Over the course of a dry-ish January, I spent a few free evenings with Peter Mandelson. He was good company. A little arid when it came to the nitty gritty of policy; a little behind the times, perhaps, but lucid and forthright. I was reading The Blair Revolution, a book he co-wrote with Roger Liddle, which was published in 1996, on the eve of their boss’s first landslide victory. I wondered what I could learn about their project on its 30th anniversary. This was before Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party and the Lords in disgrace in early February, after more details emerged of his relations with Jeffrey Epstein.
What struck me was the book’s radicalism. It set out an unsentimentally revisionist form of social democracy. This third way meant sweeping reform to education, “work first” changes to welfare, and an embrace of global economic change in starkly 1990s terms (the authors are obsessed with the four Asian tigers). To Gordon Brown’s fury, the book even revealed New Labour’s bold plans for Bank of England independence. There is an almost-religious optimism about a world governed by a liberal rules-based order, a meritocratic country free of prejudice and predation, sitting at the heart of Europe, with an economy that would give people security and therefore freedom.
This wasn’t Mandelson as Blair’s stenographer, but as a Labour thinker in his own right. Even his self-designation as the “Third Man” in New Labour was modest. It was Mandelson who, as Neil Kinnock’s director of communications in the 1980s, catapulted the young backbenchers, Blair and Brown, into the Labour spotlight.
Mandelson once wrote that his political mission was to ensure “the daughter of a Hartlepool shop assistant has as much chance of becoming a High Court judge as the daughter of a Harley Street doctor”. Now, as one former cabinet minister who served with him told me, the common belief is that “the only thing that ever motivated Peter Mandelson was Peter Mandelson”.
What led to this transformation? I called some of the old Blairites to get their reactions. One of Mandelson’s oldest friends in Labour said they were “shocked and upset”. Most spoke with weary resignation about a man who struggled to follow a righteous path. One suggested that Mandelson’s dealings with Epstein were the inevitable endpoint of a career built on trading information for favourable coverage, which ultimately descended to something darker. “If Alistair [Darling] was still with us, goodness me, he would be absolutely incandescent,” said a former cabinet colleague of Darling and Mandelson.
Mandelson inhabited a world that was the opposite of the one set out in The Blair Revolution, with its progressive and equitable future for minorities and women (note the Hartlepool success story was a daughter, rather than a son). Instead, he is alleged to have sent market-sensitive emails from No 10 to an American financier and convicted sex trafficker. This was a world of raw power: the strong dominating the weak, hidden dealings, and a place without rules for those who could afford it.
Mandelson stands as a rebuke to the very political project he should have been remembered for. But it’s not just him. Who can help but wince at Tony Blair’s post-premiership career: obscenely wealthy, consultant to dictators, viceroy to Emperor Trump? Then there are the failures of the revolution, too familiar to need listing. Only last week, my news feed was swamped by the scandal of student loan interest rates – an aftershock of the top-up fees introduced by these once high-minded revolutionaries, which the current Labour leadership refuses to address. The optimism of The Blair Revolution, once again, feels an awfully long time ago.
The Blairite legacy is not some esoteric historical interest. It is a live debate within the Labour Party, as it tries to get out of its rut. The new generation of Blairites is furious that it has been tarnished with the perceived failures of this government, which is too often casually described as “Blairite”, despite being more properly understood as of the old Labour right. The misinterpretation comes from the fact that a lot of ex-Blair staffers were hired at the start of this government, and Keir Starmer was thrust into the leadership by a temporary alliance of the Blairites and the old right formed in opposition to Jeremy Corbyn.
The new generation of Blairites is frustrated by a range of measures the government has introduced: taxes on business, education reforms they see as retrograde, and what they regard as the government’s feeble first response to rising racial hatred. In the shadow of the disgrace of their old leaders, this group is rallying to reinvent itself. Wes Streeting, once close to Mandelson, no longer calls himself a Blairite, but a “progressive” or a member of the “new right”.
Something new is bound to emerge from the death of New Labour, which is exciting for anyone interested in politics. There will be arguments. Does the new right, finally freed from the faded heroes of May Day 1997, have its own structural analysis of Britain’s malaise? Or is it content to tinker with taxes and red tape in a desperate quest for economic growth, as their soft-left rivals will argue?
Thirty years on from its zenith, “Blairism” in its old form is destined for the very “sealed tomb” of politics to which a young Mandelson once pledged to consign his hard-left foes.
[Further reading: The Epstein files expose the rot of Mandelson’s Britain]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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Subscribe here to commentI left Labour in 1977 because of the entryism of the disbanded CPGB. I joined the SDP in 1981 and was amazed to find burgeoning of social democracy during the years up to 1988 when they were persecuted to join the Liberal Party as part of the LibDems. Blair and Brown emerged in 1994 when John Smith died and the fight was on the become Labour leader. All the propaganda about Blair was of his private education and soft opinions on everything. I was amazed when he was elected leader on the first ballot. I soon found out why when he started to dominate the Commons on PMQ. Most of the programme was copied almost word for word from the SDP Manifesto of the 1983 General Election. Mandelson was noted after Kinnock had appointed him shortly after the 1983 election when he took over from Michael Foot. Sudden ly there was a rapid response unit with every government policy responded to, every budget proposal rebutted. To no avail of course. Thatcher, after 1983 was unassailable and the unions that survived saw half their members disappear. The Blair Revolution was a damp squib that failed to reform the voting system and facilitated the eventual collapse of the financial system in 2007/8. A revolution changes things permanently and Blair was not a revolutionary.