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.
I think for the general public Mandelson understandably seems to be a man without qualities, so his prominence must therefore be a matter of underhand manipulation or corruption, and what aggravates this is that his corruption appears to be entirely personal with no other purpose.
ReplyDeleteOther corrupt and malevolent figures like Trump, Johnson and Farage make little effort to hide these flaws, which actually works in their favour because people can identify with their open prejudices, there is less appearance of secrecy and conspiracy, and many people also feel that they can benefit themselves from a society that is more openly 'easygoing' on issues of moral rectitude.
On a personal level, Mandelson's downfall(s) have probably being due to an inability to fully recognise his limitations. If it wasn't for his own cupidity and snobbery, as you put it, he could probably have remained in the shadows and maintained his influence without his weaknesses being exposed.
re "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." – I do wonder was Starmer ever aware of this assignment? like I presumed he was briefed but when he dumped Gray for McSweeney I was like huh what are you doing here.
ReplyDeleteI think the size of the Commons majority is to blame, both in the belief of the Labour Together guys that McSweeney had earnt it and in Starmer's assumption that it didn't really matter who ran the Number 10 operation because he faced no internal threats and no strong opposition across the floor.
Delete"In their [the press claque's] eyes, Starmer's job was to restore the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn."
ReplyDeleteI am never very sure what DT means when he says this. However I did see this couple of bleats from Will Davies, which might be what you are getting at.
"Labour elites' idea that the Tories created something undefined called 'psychodrama', which could simply be switched off as a matter of preference, was always going to suffer a rude awakening. .... If what is meant by 'psychodrama' is political disagreement, or contradictions between ideological fantasy and reality, then we're in for quite a lot more psychodrama in the years ahead."
Corbyn was an insult because he said things that are taboo. "Having the adults back in charge" was supposed to mean bringing in people who were quietly competent, though they seem to be quietly incompetent. If they were "forensic" they would be bringing forward plenty of wicked problems that would frighten the press claque.
The insult was not Corbyn breaking taboos but the Labour membership electing him party leader, much as Brexit was the result of a referendum that span out of control. In other words, it was the irruption of democracy that offended the establishment.
DeleteThe party system had been designed to limit popular democracy, and referenda avoided for much the same reason. Miscalculations by Labour (moving to OMOV to marginalise the unions) and the Tories (Cameron being over-confident) led to the two "mistakes".
The response was the ideological construction of the "populist" threat (i.e. we must constrain democracy to save democracy), and a coup by the apparat within the labour Party to ensure that a leftwing leader could never again be elected.
Starmer's brief was firstly to secure the Labour Party for the establishment and then in govt to move foreign & trade policy back into the domain of technocratic expertise (this is ultimately more important than formal reaccession to the EU).
The hypocrisy and repression over Gaza, like the kowtowing to Trump, might appear ugly, but both are about making clear to the electorate that "high" politics is none of their business.
Referenda are avoided due to the fact that simple 'yes or no' questions are very rare in politics, and the difficulty was always going to be not 'if' but 'how' we left the EU. That in itself was going to involve a lot of extra questions, and it would be somewhat impractical to defer them all to a plebiscite. Also, it is debatable whether many people want to be given the responsibility of making these decisions themselves, having elected their representatives in the first place, as Brenda from Bristol and the success of the 'Brexit means Brexit' idiocy of 2019 tend to show.
DeleteMy point is not to do with how useful or practical the mechanism of a referendum is but why they have historically been avoided in the UK to a greater extent than in other countries.
DeletePart of this is down to the insistence on the sovereignty of Parliament, which was an important means of absorbing the Labour Party into the state after 1918, but part is also a prejudice that arose in the early 20th century as plebiscites were used to decide national borders after Versailles in 1919. A significant exception was Northern Ireland, where the border was drawn to maximise Unionist support. The further use of plebiscites in the 1930s in Europe led to a settled aversion to them in the UK, with Attlee famously dismissing them as "a device of dictators and demagogues".
The relevance of this to my point is that, practical or not, referenda are exercises in direct democracy and that is considered threatening. You can see this mindset in how the institutionalised members of the PLP ignored the number of votes cast for them in 2024 (lower in absolute terms than in 2019) and emphasised the number of seats won. This isn't simply opportunistic delight in FPTP but an insistence that what matters in our parliamentray system is the MPs themselves, not the voters they ostensibly represent.
Not convinced that it demonstrates uniquely anti-democratic attitudes in UK politics.
DeleteWithin the UK over the past 30 years there has been a profligacy of sub-national referenda, from issues such as Scottish Independence, through various stages of devolved powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, down to whether certain councils want directly-elected mayors. Indeed, the existence of directly-elected mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners could be said to be a form of direct democracy.
But in practice, the public seem very unenthusiastic about a lot of these votes, suspecting that they are either a fait accompli to ratify something that has already been decided, a shuffling of chairs, or a deliberate attempt by elected politicians to avoid responsibility for decisions. I reckon these suspicions are shared in many other countries with a longer history of referendum use.
You can divide referenda in the UK over the last 30 years into three groups: traditional national plebiscites for independence; votes to establish devolved assemblies; the creation of directly-elected mayors and PCCs; and one-off consitutional referenda.
DeleteThe first has been granted with great reluctance, happening only once: Scotland in 2014. The implosion of the current government, and the damage it is doing to the cause of unionism, means that this will almost certainly become a live issue again in Scotland (and possibly Wales and Northern Ireland), but there will continue to be reluctance in London to grant further votes.
The second was always intended to stymie the push for independence. Regional assemblies in England never got off the ground in part because electors saw them as fragmenting local government. A key aim for them was to put a dampener on left-populist city councils, so they are best seen as being in the tradition of Thatcher's war against the metro councils.
The third was always couched as the election of a "CEO" who could "get a grip" - i.e. act over the heads of local councils. There were some pragmatic grounds for the latter - e.g. controlling unified transport authorities - but the underlying belief was that a wider electorate (i.e. not biased towards inner city populations) would lead to the election of business-friendly moderates.
The fourth has always been risky, but for that reason also carefully stage-managed, e.g. the EEC referendum in 1975 and the Alternative Vote referendum in 2011. The exception to this rule was the epic miscalculation of the 2016 EU referendum. It is this category of referenda - involving the consitutional arrangements of the UK as a whole - that the state has historically sought to avoid, and which usually only comes about because the government is too weak (1975), or is divided against itself (2016), or because its viability depends on acceding to it (2011, and arguably 1975).
I pretty much agree with all of that. My point was that referenda are used as a multi-purpose political tool, and like parliamentary sovereignty or cabinet government should be analysed as such and not as an overarching political principle that diverges considerably in practice.
Delete"It was the irruption of democracy that offended the establishment." OK, but the UK is nominally a democracy so the establishment cannot say that and its outriders in the media don't say openly that this is the issue. It is difficult to discern what they want through the haze of smoke and mirrors.
ReplyDeleteThe press claque attempt to portray politicians as earnestly analysing the fundamentals of key issues then the next moment as analysing those issues through the lens of winning over key groups of swing voters. The press claque seem not to know what to make of the present government, which has put a lot of effort into winning over bigots who they consider to be swing voters and thus lost a lot of other voters who are probably better informed.