Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man

Peter Mandelson‘s memoir, The Third Man, was timed for maximum impact, being released just after the British election this year. Mandelson’s musings were condemned as unhelpful by the full gamut of UK Labour figures (including Tony Blair, who was perhaps peeved that Mandelson pre-empted his own book). The last thing the Labour party needed, it was said, was yet another raking over of the ashes of the New Labour soap opera – the schisms, tensions and clashes between Blair and Gordon Brown which began in 1994 with the Granita Pact, and whose afterlife was one of the many factors cruelling Brown’s Premiership.

In particular, no one wanted reminding that there had been such things as Blair-ites and Brown-ites, and that some of the history was deeply personal and unpleasant. Not when all four of the leading candidates for the Labour leadership, the Miliband brothers, Ed Balls, and Andy Burnham, had form in the sometimes very petty games of court politics, New Labour style. The contenders wanted to get on with the programme of reconnecting Labour to its voters, and of articulating a new or revived rationale for progressive politics, and not to address the unpleasant details of how the party had found itself in such an impasse.

As it turned out, Mandelson’s tome hit the bookshelves with more of a thud than an explosion. In another sign of the times of the publishing/media complex, the juicy bits had all been serialised prior to its release. The pre-eminent practitioner of the “dark arts” of politics had perhaps been revealed as a hollow shell. The threat of truth-telling proved more frightening than the tale told (which Mandelson is very concerned to warrant as nothing but the truth).

So, why would anyone want to read The Third Man?

Surveying the reviews, it might be because it’s a “good book”, which, actually, it is.

Or perhaps because of Mandelson’s curiously intriguing narrative voice, which triangulates oddly between Blairite condemnation of Brown and the paradoxical endorsement of Brown’s moment in the sun by both Blair and Mandelson. That’s both a political point and one that captures the strange slitheriness of the Baron’s authorial voice – reading Mandelson, one could imagine oneself reading Umberto Eco.

That paradox is revelatory, surely, of both Mandelson’s self-description as ‘The Third Man’ and of the Janus faced New Labour project, whose internal self-contradiction is both encapsulated by the rivalry at the centre of power and never resolved because its dimensions are much bigger than the personalities who seem to represent the two polarities of social justice and neo-liberal adaptation.

One reviewer, astutely, noticed that The Third Man is:

about four different books rolled into one. As noted in this blog earlier this week, it is a not very dramatic instant book about the last days of Labour in power. It is also a breathless account of the: “Tony complained to Peter that Gordon was out of control after he had shouted at Alastair for leaking that Charlie had briefed against him” sort of nonsense that consumed so much energy among people who were meant to be running the country.

But it is also a pretty devastating portrait of Mr Blair, a man Lord Mandelson admits took up a startling amount of space in his life (he ponders poignantly, at one point, how every single entry in his diary involves something to do with Mr Blair).

The book seeks to propose a justification of the New Labour project, which Mandelson rightly regards himself as central to, and a defence of its continuity with the “big beasts” of the future spin doctor’s youth – his grandfather Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee and other luminaries of “Old Labour”.

That’s where the contradictions are most obvious.

It’s not just that Mandelson is “a plotter, but a rather useless one”, or that his memoirs are strangely impersonal (Andrew Rawnsley observes that his dog, Bobby, is mentioned somewhat more often than his partner). Mandelson is in fact quite eloquent about his upbringing, and quite personal about his frustrations at forever being cast as a backroom operator. The substantial political career he says he wanted – one to rival his grandfather’s – always slips just out of his reach, as he’s pulled back into the co-dependent world of Blair’s sofa government and also pays the price for his public image as arch-manipulator.

In his defence of New Labour, Mandelson refers to a pamphlet the Labour MP, Giles Radice, authored in 1992, arguing that the party had to reflect the desires of voters in the marginal seats of London and England’s South. The same argument is being re-run at the moment between the two Milibands – with Ed, rightly, pointing to the fact that the very large number of voters Labour lost between 1997 and 2010 defected mainly to parties other than the Tories, or disappeared from the political process altogether, abstaining from voting. The psephological choice Labour faces is not one between its “heartland” and “middle England” – there are, in fact, more than enough votes to construct a majority through overturning that particular dichotomy.

That’s where New Labour always presented a somewhat schizoid face to the world – one of the oppositions ‘The Third Way’ couldn’t overcome was the one at its heart, for all the attempts to conjure up a fantasmatic representation of the median voter. So we had ‘Red Gordon’ being trundled out on occasion, and Mandelson expressing shock to find himself associated with a government which increased the top rate of income tax and surprise to find himself being begged by business for more state interventionism.

Seamus Milne:

In the end, it was only Blair’s departure and the economic maelstrom of 2008 that allowed Brown and Mandelson to bury their vendetta. In a redemptive twist, Mandelson saved Brown’s skin as they both backed a shift towards the kind of social democratic interventionism that would have been anathema in the high New Labour years – even if it was too little, too late to save a deeply damaged prime minister and government.

The risk now is that Mandelson’s memoirs will be used to claim New Labour only failed because of dysfunctional leaders. In reality, the ground was laid by the fateful choices of the mid-1990s, when both Blair and Brown embraced neoliberal economics, and 2001-02, when Blair hitched Britain to George Bush’s war chariot. The result was the desertion of four million voters in eight years and a hollowed-out party in the grip of a presidential clique: perfect conditions, in other words, for the fevered personality conflict Mandelson chronicles.