Why Labour never really needed Peter Mandelson

As Andrew Marr once said, for a man supposed to swirl around in the dark, Peter Mandelson is rather touchingly attracted by the spotlight.

This week, the vainest man in British politics has been appearing in television adverts, dressed in a frock coat and sitting in a leather armchair, ready to tell us stories, a la Roald Dahl, from his newly published memoirs.

Mandy is hoping that the adverts, together with this week's Times newspaper serialisation, will get us flocking to the bookshops to buy his account of the inner workings of the last Labour governments. But is anyone - aside from political anoraks and Westminster insiders - really interested?

Mandelson's memoirs, entitled The Third Man, appear to have three main purposes. First, to make even more money for the money-obsessed writer. Second, to put the boot into his arch-enemy, Gordon Brown. And last, but certainly not least, to perpetuate one of the greatest myths of modern British political history: namely that Peter Mandelson matters.

According to the New Labour narrative, Mandelson is a 'brilliant' political tactician who made Labour electable in the 1990s and was responsible, along with Tony Blair and the other 'modernisers', for keeping the Tories out of power for the next decade. Without Mandelson's Machiavellian skills, allied to Tony Blair's charisma, and the ditching of 'Old' Labour policies such as nationalisation, there would have been no Labour victory in 1997 – so the story goes - and the party would have withered away and died.

But this version of history conveniently forgets that Labour was on course for victory anyway in the late 1990s, with or without Mandelson and Blair. The Tories, in power since 1979, and wracked by division and scandal, were clapped-out. The debacle of Black Wednesday, when the pound was forced out of the ERM in September 1992, was the final nail in their coffin.

Had he not died from a heart attack at the age of 55 in the summer of 1994, Labour would have been led into government by John Smith, a thoroughly likeable and decent politician of the old school. Smith, a gregarious and convivial Scot, had, according to Andrew Marr, an "instantaneous dislike" of the waspish metropolitan Mandelson, (who had been elected an MP in 1992), and it's hard to imagine Mandy playing any role - or having any influence - in a Smith-led Labour government.

But after the victory of the Blair-led Labour party in 1997, the myth of the all-powerful, all-conquering Prince of Darkness would only grow, despite the 'brilliant' tactician losing his Cabinet position twice due to scandals. Mandelson was the man who made Labour into winners, the New Labour groupies chimed. Other Labourites learned to put up with the nasty, preening bully with the posh accent, because they were convinced that he helped keep the dreaded Tories out.

The myth of Mandelson was so strong that even Gordon Brown, the Prince of Darkness's main political foe, succumbed to it, bringing him back as Business Secretary in October 2008. Brown clearly felt that it was better to have his bitterest enemy inside the Cabinet, rather than plotting against him from without. But it was to prove a grave mistake.

Mandelson, a shamelessly elitist figure, alienated traditional Labour voters by accusing unions who opposed the privatisation of the Royal Mail of fighting an "ideological" battle . He also sided with oil multinational Total and not the striking British workers at the Lindsey refinery dispute in February 2009.

Finally, when it came to this year's general election, the man with the supposed Midas touch ran what Brown's former spin doctor Charlie Whelan has described as "the worst campaign in Labour's history".

It wasn't the first time that Mandelson had run a losing campaign - he had also managed Labour's 1987 campaign when they gained only 20 seats following on from their heavy defeat in 1983. The galling thing from the viewpoint of today's Labour supporters was that the 2010 election was winnable: there was no great public enthusiasm for David Cameron and the Tories, and a more focused, dynamic Labour campaign might well have kept the party in power.
 
Labour defenders of Mandelson routinely claim that despite his enormous personal failings, the grandson of Herbert Morrison has always had the best interests of his 'beloved' Labour Party at heart. But publishing his memoirs during a Labour leadership election campaign, and selling the serialisation rights to a media group which supported the Conservatives in the general election, has surely shattered that particular illusion.

The reality is that Mandelson's priority is not to further the cause of the Labour Party, but to further the cause of Peter Mandelson. His memoirs are the work of a self-obsessed narcissist, who believes that he was one of the most important political figures of the era.

Next time you hear someone talk of the 'brilliance' of Peter Mandelson and how much the Labour Party owes him, remember that if only John Smith had smoked, drunk and eaten a little less, 'The Third Man' would today be 'The man nobody can remember'.
The Labour Party would though, still be here, and the sun would continue to rise in the east. ·