Once upon a time, the idea of Lord Mandelson rescuing the maiden Britannia made for a grim tale. But, despite his new leading role, there will still be no happy ending
It is the perfect political fairy story. Just as the big bad King Brown is leading his party to electoral annihilation, here is Prince Peter the Charming, conveyed in the magical Constitutional Reform Bill coach, to take over the Labour leadership, cast his spell over the British people and ensure that the Labour government rules for ever and ever.
However, it does not really take Business Secretary Lord Mandelson’s denial for it to be clear that a fairy tale is all it is. First, there is the little matter of getting the Bill through Parliament. The next session must end by May for the general election to take place. This is a large, complex piece of legislation with many controversial clauses other than the one allowing peers to resign. It can expect a long-lasting going-over, in the Lords especially. One amendment, certain to be pressed hard, will be to guard against peers suddenly switching to the Commons to start or resume political careers there.
The chances of the Bill getting through in time for Mandelson to renounce his peerage, find a safe Labour seat, force the prime minister from office, emerge triumphant in the subsequent leadership contest and win the election are somewhat less than a snowball’s in hell. If they were not, Gordon Brown would not have been so rash as to let the peers’ resignation clause figure in the proposed Bill in the first place.
Nevertheless, like all the best fairy tales, Peter and the Premiership has useful lessons for the young. One is that in politics, it generally pays never to say never. After all, not two years back, Mandelson was a European commissioner, isolated from and apparently done with British politics, with a prime minister, his sworn enemy, not then contemplating for a single second having him back.
Secondly, quality matters. The complexities of Lord Mandelson’s character have been exhaustively analysed with all sorts of contradictory characteristics vigorously affirmed to be his. Some of the Peters I read about I recognise and some I don’t. But amateur psychoanalysis adds little to what it is about Mandelson that makes him stand out.
There are plenty of competent ministers who are poor politicians. There are plenty of competent politicians who are poor ministers. What is unusual about Mandelson is that he is good at both.
As a politician he has always been an outstanding talent, seeing at first glance what many others can’t see after weeks of contemplation. He has got better. He seems to have grasped why people once distrusted and disliked him, and we now get more charm and less bluster. He has eliminated the errors that at least once and arguably twice forced him out of the Cabinet.
But he is also an outstanding minister. He is unusually consistent – for example as a free trader at a time when the free trade consensus has come under some pressure from the recession. He is strong on principle – for example about the need to modernise the Post Office – without being inflexible when that principle has to bend to political reality: backbench revolt.
His civil servants adore him for his speed of mastery of a brief. He is – unusually for ministers today – respectful of Parliament, sitting for hours on the Lords’ front bench when many another would have left some poor underling to listen through the debates.
There are still things we don’t know about him and his standing. We don’t know yet if today’s Labour Party, purged of Old Labour as it has been over the Blair-Brown years, loves him or not. Still less do we know if the public loves him or loathes him (or both). We know he was good at ensuring that a Labour Party too far to the Left moved to the Right in the 1990s but we don’t know how he would adapt to a party which felt it had moved too far to the Right and wanted to move Left.
Above all, we do not know if he has what it takes to be a good – perhaps even a great – prime minister. And short of a fairy tale for once coming true, we never will.
David Lipsey is a Labour peer
