This Charming Man

Last week, a long time ago in politics, the Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge tweeted that "Peter Mandelson is obviously a very charming man". This struck me as odd because Mandelson has always seemed to me to be a particularly charmless individual - vain, cruel and pompous - and I can't imagine I am the only one who thinks this way. The emphasis of "obviously" was perhaps an attempt by Ridge to excuse her own gullibility, but it also serves to remind us that she is talking of his reputation within a rarefied social network. To be fair to her, the remainder of her anecdote belied her first sentence, noting that in her personal experience he was initially dismissive because she, as a trainee reporter many years ago, had neither status nor power. She then correctly notes that his "charm" was simply the currency of a "closed group of elites" expressed through gossip and condescension: "There are too many people in Westminster who look over the shoulder of the person they're talking to see if there's someone more important in the room". In other words, "charming" does not have its ordinary meaning here. It is simply a performance intended to confirm your membership of the "inner circle".

The key to Mandelson's character, I suspect, is that he is a snob: a middle class North London boy who grew up among Labour aristocracy in Hampstead Garden City and who has always sought elevation to the real thing, hence his acquisition of a posh accent and the accoutrements of country living - the purple Aga, the scruffy dog, the Beryl Cook print - straight out of a Jilly Cooper novel. For many journalists, his charm was little more than a readiness to make bitchy remarks about other politicians and a willingness to leak confidential information. Those political commentators expressing shock that he might have revealed commercially sensitive information to Jeffrey Epstein are obviously disingenuous, but no more so than those of a certain age who insisted that Mandelson's influence in the Labour Party during the 1990s was the product of his skills rather than David Sainsbury's money. And those skills were largely journalistic fantasy. The fact that he repeatedly got caught out and had to resign should have been a clue that he was neither as cunning nor calculating as the press routinely claimed. The moment the media failed to indulge him, he came across as an idiot or an importunate nuisance.

The responses to the revelations about Mandelson's abuse of position and his dishonesty over his relationship with Epstein can be broadly divided into two camps: those who see the affair as the tale of a reprehensible, possibly criminal, individual who tainted others by association; and those who see the peer and former minister as a symptom of a corrupt system. The politico-media class has tended towards the first interpretation while the general public has tended towards the second. This isn't surprising. The first response to political scandal by those in the vicinity is to establish its limits, how far the poison has spread, hence the focus on who knew what and when. The assumption is that the body is sound and we simply need to cut out the rotten parts and let the healing begin. The popular view is that the system itself, the entire politico-media nexus, is rotten and incurable. This is obviously dangerous. So dangerous that any number of individuals will be sacrified to preserve the system. Indeed, the renewed speculation over the position of the Prime Minister is proof of that. 

The recent emphasis on Keir Starmer's "decency" might appear odd even if you only had a passing acquaintance with his track record of duplicity and spite, not to mention his readiness to sack others to save his own skin. The explanation is that centrist political commentators know he has to go because, to borrow a phrase of Clement Attlee, he's just "not up to it", but they want him to go with his dignity intact. Not because they care about him as an individual. It's no secret that his unwillingness to cultivate personal relations with the press claque, which has created a full-time job for Tom Baldwin, has not endeared him, but they understand the need to protect the system. In their eyes Starmer's job was to restore the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn. Though he purged the Labour left and won a massive majority, he has failed in this goal. The UK has looked shrunken and slightly pathetic on the world stage as Starmer has tried to appease Trump, while Starmer and McSweeney's authority is in freefall among ministers and the wider PLP.

Since 2008, "populism" - the centrist shorthand for any threat to the system - has either been diverted if it appears from the right, usually towards anti-immigration and transphobic sentiment, or bluntly extirpated if it appears from the left, usually through claims of antisemitism or the treasonous support of our nation's enemies. The obvious risk is that the further fallout from the Mandelson affair might lead to more embarrassing revelations about the latter manoeuvre, specifically in relation to the Labour Party between 2016 and 2024. The upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election already looks like a straight fight between the Greens and Reform, which means a competition between two anti-system critiques: one focused on the distance between Manchester and Westminster (which has been widened by Starmer's blocking of Andy Burnham as a possible candidate); the other on the proximity of Rochdale and Oldham and their history of grooming gangs (if Matt Goodwin refers to Mandelson, it will probably be in the context of sexual exploitation).

Mandelson is the British political system incarnate. I don't say that to rehearse the usual guff about how well-connected he is, or to praise his acute understanding of party dynamics and personalities. My point is that he is typical: bitchy, anti-intellectual, venal. He is giddily impressed by wealth and status, which is why he was such an easy mark for an arch-manipulator like Epstein. What should surprise us about the cash gifts he received is how modest they were in the world he inhabited: small change for billionaires. Just as the average member of the PLP appears biddable through a couple of concert tickets and a new suit, so Mandelson appeared happy to bend over backwards simply for the passing attention of the rich, an attention that he used as currency in his dealings with the British media where gossipy name-dropping provided the seasoning for his otherwise stodgy vanity.

His 1998 comment, which will surely be his epitaph, that New Labour was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they paid their taxes" was interpreted in the shadow of the "greed is good" 1980s. But Mandelson wasn't merely flipping the traditional ethic that saw greed as a deadly sin. He was advertising that the British political system was happy with dirty money and indeed keen to cultivate it, whether from Russian oligarchs or Silicon Valley techbros. The consequence is not just a House of Lords bursting at the seams with criminals and pimps of one sort or another but a House of Commons in which many MPs spend more time lobbying for business interests and foreign powers than they do for their own constituents. Mandelson was not a corrupt exception to the honourable rule. Expelling him from the Lords will do little when the problem is the Lords. Expelling him from the Labour Party will do little when the problem is the Labour Party.