Jock Mulligan on Mandelson.
The long and the winding road of Peter Mandelson’s political career has reached a bitter and a shameful end. At fughing last.
For a man who twice walked away from the high table with the whiff of the backstairs deal hanging about him, these new tales from the Epstein papers have proven to be the third knock on the door that even his most fawning friends (and he has a few of those in politics, the media and amongst the rich) cannot ignore. The Prince of Darkness finally has fallen into a hole too deep for his silver shovel and it says a great deal about the folk who kept him in the parlour long after the smell of his shite had set in.
They used to whisper that the man was unsackable and that he was a political feline with more lives than a Westminster alley scavenger, but this week as he hands back his party card and lets go of his peerage it seems the luck has finally dried up like a puddle of rancid piss in a summer heatwave. The tragedy is not just the fall of the man himself but the staggering lack of sense shown by the Labour leadership who insisted on resurrecting him for one last dance as if the working man has the memory of a geriatric goldfish. His career was a masterclass in proximity to power and the very wealthy and he was a man who felt more at home in the drawing rooms of billionaires and on the yachts of Russian oligarchs than he ever did in the damp offices of the folk in Hartlepool. He was the architect of a party that stopped being about the shop floor and started being about the boardroom and his fall is the fall of that entire hollow Blairite project.
If you look at the ledger of his life you see a man with one hand on the red box and the other deep in a millionaire’s pocket and it is a list that would make Saint Bridget reach for the bottle.
There was the secret loan of three hundred and seventy three thousand pounds from Geoffrey Robinson in ninety eight that saw him leave the cabinet with his tail between his legs for the first time.
There was the business with the Hinduja brothers and the passports in two thousand and one where the whiff of a favour for a moneyed friend was enough to send him packing again.
There were the years spent holidaying with the corporate titans on their floating palaces while the movement he supposedly served was being hollowed out and sold to the highest bidder.
Most damningly there is the final reckoning found in those three million pages of American documents where bank statements show seventy five thousand dollars paid into linked accounts and emails suggesting that as Business Secretary in two thousand and nine he was leaking market secrets to Jeffrey Epstein. While the people were losing their homes in the great crash he was colloguing with a monster and suggesting that bank bosses should “mildly threaten” the Chancellor Gordon Brown over their bonuses.
In two thousand and nine when the world was falling apart and the folk in the street were watching their life savings vanish like smoke in a gale for while the public was being told to tighten their belts and prepare for the long winter of austerity, the Prince of Darkness was busy colloguing with Epstein and whispering the secrets of the state into his ear. The papers show that while the Treasury was scrambling to save the banks with the people’s money Mandelson was leaking the inside track on the rescue packages to a man who had no business knowing the time of day let alone the movements of the market and it was a betrayal of the highest order for it gave the boardroom titans a head start to protect their own purses while the rest of the country was being led to the slaughter.
And then you have the sheer brass neck of the man suggesting that the bank bosses should mildly threaten the Chancellor over their bonuses as if the folk who had just broken the world deserved a pat on the back and a golden handshake and he was acting as a go-between for the very people who were stripping the assets of the nation using a convicted monster as his postman. It shows you exactly where the heart of the New Labour project was beating and it wasn’t in the chests of the workers for it was in the hushed rooms where the billionaires and the politicians trade the futures of the poor for a bit of sport and a seventy five thousand dollar kickback and it is a story of a man who saw the greatest crisis of our time not as a tragedy to be mended but as a chance to do a bit of business with the shadows.
The unions have had their fill of the polite silence for they are calling now for a full reckoning of every contract and every handshake that passed through the department during those dark years. They want to know which other cronies were snout-deep in the trough while the yards were closing and the families were being told there was no money left in the kitty for a man who sells state secrets to a monster is a man who wouldn’t think twice about throwing a bone to a wealthy pal at the expense of the worker – and the unions are demanding that the light is shone into every dusty corner of the New Labour estate until the last of the board-room bandits is sent packing.
And what of the hacks in the newsrooms who spent their days polishing his boots and telling us he was the cleverest man in the room? He always had a circle of scribblers- like Robert Harris and the rest of the London set who were only too happy to dine at his table and laugh at his jokes. AND DEFEND HIM. You have to ask why these men of the pen were so eager to defend the indefensible and whether it was the fine wine or just the desperate need to feel they were part of an inner circle. They can only have turned a blind eye to the shit because Mandelson was the gatekeeper to the world they craved, where power is a private club and the truth is something to be traded for a better seat at the feast.
We must give a nod of the cap to Private Eye who never stopped pointing at the red flags while the rest of the press were acting as his footmen. They have asked the hard question of whether Keir Starmer’s close connection to the man explains why the call for him to resign from the Lords came so late and why he was allowed to slip away quietly by resigning his membership rather than suffering the indignity of being expelled.
The Eye points out the fact that Mandelson was a key man in the organisation called “Labour Together” which helped engineer the rise of Starmer and that group was run by Morgan McSweeney who they call a Mandelson protégé. This explains the shambles of the last year where McSweeney and Starmer ignored every warning and appointed Mandelson as the UK Ambassador to the United States. It was a move that put the nostalgia for “New Labour” above any kind of common decency and it shows a leadership that ran a leftish sounding campaign only to take a sharp rightward turn once they had the keys to the house.
The Prince of Darkness is now a man without a party and soon he will be a man without a title, but the folk in the street are asking why it took a mountain of mostly redacted paper from the FBI to tell the elites what every worker had seen for decades. In politics you are the company you keep and for Starmer and McSweeney the Mandelson ghost will be rattling its chains in the hallway long after the man himself has left the building. They traded the soul of the movement for a seat at the billionaires’ table and now they are left with the bill and a very bitter taste in the mouth.
