Talking … Peter Mandelson and New Labour w/Helen Thompson

[Music] Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Past Present Future, the history of ideas podcast. Today I'm talking with Helen Thompson about the tortured relationship between Peter Mandelson and the leadership of the Labour Party, but we're not just talking about what's been happening this week, this month, not even what's been going on over the past year. This is a conversation covering more than three decades about the long history of new Labour. Just what kind of a drama has this been? Helen, the idea for this particular pair of conversations came out of a message that you sent me in February when Peter Mandelson's final disgrace took place, the one that led to the resignation of Morgan McSweeney among other things and threatened the position of the Prime Minister, that is an ongoing saga and we will come back to it. And you said this is act five of the new Labour drama and it led me to think what acts one to fool or how one would break it down, but also what kind of a drama it is. If this is a Shakespeare play and in some ways it does have Shakespearean themes, is it a tragedy, is it a comedy? I think my assumption was and we can discuss this as well, that it's a history play in the sense that the history plays are about the battle for the crown on the whole. What it takes to win the crown, what it takes to hold on to the crown heavy is the head that wears the crown and the treacheries that take place along the way, the alliances, but also the portrayals. And new Labour does have some of that feel to it across the arc of its history. So we are going to explore how this would play out if it were. It doesn't have to be a Shakespearean drama, but let's assume this is sort of Shakespearean and some of the elements as we'll see do really sound Shakespearean apart from anything else there are Scottish ghosts in this story. Five acts. So one of the questions is where are we going to draw the lines between the different acts and how they would be set up. I think I'm assuming that Act One would be in this story and this drama, Tony Blair seizing the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994. That's not where new Labour necessarily begins and there is a backstory that we might touch on. It also has to be said that we are going to be not making Peter Mandelson the central actor in this drama. I think one of the reasons it's not a tragedy is that Peter Mandelson is not really a tragic figure in that sense. But Peter Mandelson is an amazingly recurrent figure in all aspects of the new Labour drama and certainly he was there at the beginning. So I guess my opening question would be if this drama begins with Tony Blair seizing the leadership of the Labour Party and thereby displacing Gordon Brown, who had assumed it was not quite his birthright though, not far off, but certainly it was his destiny. And at the heart of that is the fact that Peter Mandelson, who had been a very close friend of Gordon Brown and Gordon Brown had assumed would support him when this moment arose. Peter Mandelson's decision to support Tony Blair and indeed to help engineer Blair's victory was seen by Gordon Brown as a great betrayal. How much of the rest of the story was set by the fact that it seems to begin at least in Gordon Brown's eyes with a great betrayal? Well, I think that that question David a little bit turns on what we think about Gordon Brown and like whether in some sense he is a tragic figure. Because I agree with you that it is a history play not really a tragedy, but if you were going to turn any of these three principal characters in new Labour into a tragic character, I don't say a tragic hero, I think it would have to be Brown. And so in Shakespeare in terms and the question is is he destroyed by circumstance or is he destroyed by his own flaws? I think it's quite hard to avoid the view that he's destroyed by his own flaws. I mean, in preparation for doing this like you I went back and looked at Andrew Rondley's book, The Party is over, which he probably should think in the first edition of it anyway in 2010 before the election, I think that that's right for the first edition. And Brown in this book comes over, it has to be said just appallingly, some of his behavior is quite monstrous, it's quite hard to find other words to describe it in terms of the way in which he behaves towards his colleagues, not just Blair, but to other cabinet ministers towards his advisors towards the officials and secretaries who work in in number 10. And if you take that account at face value and more or less he did spend a lot of time talking to a lot of people through a lot of years to write that book though he clearly is much more sympathetic politically to Blair than to Brown, I think you would have to say that it was always going to go wrong for Gordon Brown regardless of what happened back in 1994 after John Smith died. And then that the tragedy of it in the sense that it is a tragedy is the chasm between Gordon Brown's ambition to be Prime Minister, regardless of Blair's or Mandelson's part in that and the fact that he's entirely unsuitable to be in Prime Minister. And the bit that I think that does give it a certain tragic grander at least in order to his account at the moment when Brown knows that he knows very acutely that he's not fit to be Prime Minister that he doesn't have the right psychological profile for it, he doesn't have the right set of political skills for it and the truth of it is crushing him and that's why he's lashing out. And that sort of version of it seriously then in one sense, I don't think it mattered so much really what happened between Brown and Blair back at the beginning even though it's undoubtedly the case that the very intense anger that Brown directed against Blair from 2001 onwards, the point when he thinks that Blair should stand down is a function of what he thinks of as a broken pact made in a restaurant in North London. So there are two betrayals there in the sense that from 2001 on Brown believed that Blair had promised him that they would effectively take turns or at least Brown would succeed him much sooner than it happened and of course Blair had to be forced out in the end. So there was an understanding that they had come to an understanding that they clearly saw it very differently but then behind that the role of Peter Mandelson Brown on the one hand I think recognized that once Blair made his move Brown couldn't compete Blair more or less one that leadership by default because I mean Brown was a huge ambitious man and if he thought he could have taken the crown he would have done and he realized he recognized that he would have done. He realized he recognized that he couldn't and yet he chose Mandelson as the person to blame for that. Mandelson whom he had thought was his friend and this has a lot to do with friendship these people are friends those three men were friends political friends maybe more than personal friends but they were friends and Brown did believe that Mandelson had changed loyalties in a way that was a betrayal. I think that this is one of the many interesting parts of the story there's no doubt I think that Mandelson takes the absolute brunt of Brown's anger and upset about what has happened and then he's not going to be lead of the Labour Party after John Smith dies. In a way I think that that is a very personal telling of the story that does speak to the nature of the friendship between them because there would have been another way of looking at it a bit more rationally I think which would have been that there was very little support within the shadow cabinet at that point for Brown over Blair and we should remember that it's not that Peter Mandelson is in this shadow cabinet because John Smith is really disliked Peter Mandelson he hasn't wanted him there so although that Mandelson had once is seated. He's not a player in that sense he's a behind the scenes player with Brown and Blair so it doesn't really make sense to think that the reason why Brown can't succeed in 94 is because of Mandelson's meddling to put it in those terms because Mandelson the top level is not influential enough to be able to swing that the reason why Brown caught win is because there's insufficient support the top of the Labour Party. So the fact that after Blair becomes leader that Mandelson bears the full brunt of Brown's anger there is a certain in fact the deep I would say irrationality to that which speaks to the central the psychodrama of what then goes on and what consumes new Labour in so many different ways and I don't just mean because of where all leads to in the end today but in terms of relations within that government and the way that government was coming up with that. So to that point as to whether this is a tale of a tragic figure brought down by flaws rather than circumstance two things on the circumstance side of the ledger so I said there are Scottish ghosts. in this story. So one is John Smith. John Smith's death, John Smith was a relatively young man. I think it's almost certainly the case that had he lived, he died in 1994, had he lived, he would have become Prime Minister in 1997. And it wasn't simply that Peter Mandelson was not in the core John Smith team. John Smith profoundly distrusted Peter Mandelson and everything that he stood for, one of the things that John Smith believed, perhaps naively, was that he was not going to go down the route that Mandelson had he thought taken the Labour Party down when Neil Kleineck was leader towards what he saw as a more gimmicky communications oriented politics had Smith lived and become Prime Minister. It's unlikely at least during that period that Mandelson would have found his way back to the heart of things. But also presumably in Brown's mind it is the case that had Smith lived, Gordon Brown who was very close to John Smith and this is part of that Scottish access of Labour politics. Gordon Brown was undone by John Smith's death and then the second thing I completely agree, the accounts of Gordon Brown when he was Prime Minister are eye-popping and he really does not seem like a man who is going to be capable of playing this role. He is far too angry, he's far too distressed but the circumstances were distressing it was a difficult time he made one big mistake and will come onto it which was to do with an election that he seemed to be about to call and didn't call but after that it was a tough time to be Prime Minister. No Prime Minister has ever had a better time to be Prime Minister than Tony Blair in 1997 he inherited a golden kingdom we're going to use these terms. The lay of the land was extraordinarily favourable and I've often wondered had it gone the other way and it's a big if because it's hard to see how it could have gone the other way given as you said actually when push came to shove there wasn't that much support for Gordon Brown which if nothing else suggests that his colleagues were extremely doubtful that he was the right man to be leader and then Prime Minister but still had it gone the other way and Brown had inherited and then inherited the kingdom in 1997 under those conditions if the new labor story had been the other way round first Brown and then Blair comes in at the end rather than first Blair and Brown come to the end might not a Brown premiership have been different might he possibly be the kind of political leader who could have thrived in favourable circumstances those floors seem to have been drawn out of him in part by the circumstances in which he did finally inherit. I think that's a really interesting question I think several things first of all in so many ways the first Blair premiership is Brown's premiership and I think that this is where we get where the story does become complicated because the effective deal that they seem to make is that Brown is going to run the domestic show and that Blair is going to deal with foreign policy there are certain things I think that cut across that and this will really matter in the second term when they're really at war with each other and the first is Europe whether that counts as a domestic question or particularly joining the euro or whether it counts as a foreign policy question and each of them not just actually because they want it to be in the realm where they're in control but they actually substantially disagree about whether it's a foreign policy question or whether it's a domestic economic question and health I think is the other one where Blair wants quite a big say in what Brown thinks is in his domestic sphere and I think and this is sort of reflecting back on the time and what I remember from then I think there was a strong sense I certainly think that I had a sense by 1999 is that really that Brown was running the show and that Blair was the figurehead and the thing that changed that was Kosovo because of a war in 1999 and I remember my sort of maybe pretty naive take at the time was but I remember having it was that probably we sat around and discussed it was that Kosovo and Blair's enthusiastic embrace of that war against Serbia was in significant part because it gave Blair something to do it was way outside Gordon Brown's well and the Blair was Keena being foreign policy Prime Minister and this gave him the stage in which he needed to project Prime Ministerial Authority I think that then it goes into the fact that in the early part of the new Labour project and this was true I think in opposition as well as in that first term that being as Brown saw it macro economically credible demonstrating that Labour was pro business and it was pro markets and the financial markets particularly the foreign exchange markets could trust new Labour that's what distinguished them from old Labour that was fairly fundamental and the person who was doing the running on all that who was constructing new Labour's macro economic policy was Gordon Brown and his advisors particularly a young Ed Balls and that was symbolised if you like in the decision which I don't think Blair really had anything to do with of giving operational independence to the bank of England very quickly after the election had been one not something that had been in the manifesto and so I think that there was then this tension in which Brown kind of thought he was running the show that he was in some sense Prime Minister and that the next step was to take over the form of it as well as the substance of it and yet there was some very real sense in which he wasn't because he although the domestic remit was wide you know went way beyond the treasury there was still a whole world stage if you like European stage in which it it really was the Blair show now then the question to get back to your question David that arises from that is well would Brown have done much better at that aspect of it and the communications aspect of it if he could have allied it with his we're so good macroeconomically which was the narrative that he put on what he saw as new Labour's macroeconomic success and I'm not so sure I can see the case for it certainly it's nowhere near as difficult as dealing with the set of issues at stake by 2008 when the crash has happened and Russia's in raising Georgia and generally things are becoming a lot more geopolitical but that whole set of issues about how do you deal with a hundred different things a day that or however many different things are promised as opposed to deal with at the same time which Brown seems at least in Vaughn's least account really bad at when he does become Prime Minister that would still have been there in the first term so just one more aspect to that counterfactual which is it is also the case that given how it did play out Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer did want to constrain the power of the Prime Minister as much as he could and so the macroeconomic policy that he adopted was partly it was convenient as well as possibly being the thing that he believed was right for the new Labour project had he been Prime Minister I don't know I'm sure he probably would have given operational independence to the Bank of England but he might have had more pause if he thought he was going to be the one who was not just in the treasury but actually running the government and I agree though would you have done a better job presentation than Blair almost certainly not would the complex range of things because he would have been a Prime Minister who would have tried to manage across the whole piece in the way that Blair didn't I mean Blair was able to be good presentation because he did leave a lot of economic questions to the treasury you can be quite sure Gordon Brown I don't know do we know who he would have made Chancellor can we guess who he would have made Chancellor I don't know it wouldn't have been Alice the Darling back then but I assume it would have been a very different Prime Minister Chancellor relationship in that the Chancellor would have been subservient to the Prime Minister in that government Blair would presumably either have been Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary which are very different kinds of roles and actually the people who hold those roles rarely go on to be Prime Minister occasionally they do Theresa May made that leap so Blair would have posed a much less of a threat to Brown than Brown did to Blair and I'm just wondering whether if Brown had thought I am going to be Prime Minister he would have been a little bit less fierce about the macroeconomic credibility question because he was in part constraining the Prime Minister by adopting that set of policies I see what you're getting at the only thing I would say is I do think that in terms of there being substance to new labor this issue of being macroeconomically safe and credible to use the language of the time was very very important and in that sense I think that Brown could reasonably claim that in policy terms he did more to define what new labor was the Blair did and I think that that gets to an interesting question like bringing Mandelson back into it is well what was Blair's particular contribution to this new labor project because I think you could argue that the macroeconomic part of it which I think is central policy wise was Brown you could argue that the strategy and tactics of electoral politics and framing was Mandelson and then that Blair was the frontman the thing that Blair brought to the show was a certain kind of fluency in communication and communicating in ways that wasn't off-putting to the group of voters who still had some nervousness about voting for Labour, particularly those ones who actually were direct switches from conservatives to Labour between the 92 and the 97 election. And put in those terms what makes it so fascinating as a drama is, therefore that was the strongest possible combination. Actually, they were all in the right roles. That was what Blair was best at, tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, education, education, education. It's not a substantive contribution to the new Labour project, but these are the lines that people remember. Mandelson was very good at the strategy and indeed the tactics and indeed the methods of electoral politics. And Brown was in the right role as the person giving strategic vision to the overall macroeconomic project. And yet them all being in the right roles was toxic, completely toxic. That's what it needs Shakespeare to, so in Act 1, which presumably in this play would have, as it's central scene, a reconstruction of an event of which we do not have a record, the dinner at Grenita, different accounts of what might have been said, what the promise was, what promise was made, what promise was kept, what promise was broken. Presumably, the two parties having a very different memory of what was actually said. But it puts everyone in their right role and out of that, you get 30 years of poison right the way through to today. You and I are speaking as Keir Starmer is on his feet and the House of Commons defending the vetting process or the failures of the vetting process or justifying his ignorance of the failures of the vetting process in relation to Mandelson's appointment. And Gordon Brown is still there in the background wanting Mandelson jailed. The poison that was ejected in Grenita runs through British politics like a river for a generation. As we know, I can't remember now at some point early in the year, wasn't it that was reported that that Brown was handing documents over to the police in relation to Mandelson. And well, in Act 1 in our story, the first time that Mandelson is sacked from Blair's cabinet in 1998 is over this loan that he's taken from Jeffrey Robinson. And again, I'm just relying on the Rawnsley account here, but in Rawnsley's account, it's Brown's people who have leaked the information about that and the Mandelson holds responsible for his sacking. Because although I think it's reasonable to say that the deep animus that Brown ends up showing towards Blair only really manifests at least at its almost nist psychotic level after the 2001 election, there's plenty of it towards other ministers, including Mandelson, particularly Mandelson in the first term, and this is the first evidence of it. I mean, there is that little moment as well, because obviously we kept him outside far, but there's Alice the Campbell as well. It would seem the source, but who knows, but probably the source for the often seen, let's put it that way, is a source for the comment that the briefing to Rawnsley when he was back in 1998 that Brown had psychological flaws. I mean, so you can see very early on. So that's a year in, you have seemingly, I want to say seemingly, because it says never been absolutely clear who did this, but the prime ministers communication director briefing against Brown, and that you have Brown's people essentially maneuvering in ways that lose Mandelson his job. So I think I had imagined that if Act One was Blair becoming leader, it's quite hard to know how you put these things in acts because there's so much time to be covered here. And if this is going to work as a play, we've got to pick out particular scenes, but I feel like Act Two in this drama are the various betrayals of Peter Mandelson at least in his own mind, because as you say, in 1998, he had to resign, and it's almost certainly the case that Brown or Brown's people, not just Ed Bulls, but others, Charlie Wheeling, Damian Bride, I think, was already knocking around then. In Shakespeare in terms, genuine henchmen were instrumental in letting the press know the details they needed to know to bring Mandelson down the first time. But Mandelson then had to resign again, having been brought back by Blair into his cabinet, second time around a secretary of state for Northern Ireland, which in itself is quite a sort of Shakespearean idea. Mandelson at various points in the second crisis that brought him down was in Stormont, having meetings with the head of the royal Ulster Constabulary, and then on the phone back to London trying to defend himself. The first case it was a home loan scandal, and the second case it was a passports for access or cash scandal involving the Millennium Don. I mean, everything about new labour was encapsulated in this. But second time around, he blamed not Brown, but Alistair Campbell and ultimately Blair himself. He thought Blair let him down second time around and chickened out. So in the second resignation, it turned in a way that these things with hindsight it all seemed so small with the distance of time. But it turned, I think on a phone call, whether Mandelson had or hadn't made a phone call to the foreign office, essentially pushing the case of the Hindugers who were the people who'd given money to the Millennium Don project, and then they either had or hadn't been rewarded with fast access to British citizenship. That was the question on which it turned. And at the heart of that was the question whether Mandelson, who was heavily involved in the Millennium Don project, the new Labour Vanity project, essentially, whether he had been personally instrumental in that or whether he was his officials, he had simply the stuff with Stalmer today touches on this a bit, whether he had simply been doing things that the system had a mind of its own and a life of its own and he had maybe acquiesced in or signed off on things of which he was not fully aware. And it turned on the question of a phone call. And he thought both Campbell and Blair rushed to judgment. They condemned him. They were frightened of the press. They more or less chickened out in the face of what they thought the Daily Mail White do rather than backing their friend. Second time around, second resignation for Peter Mandelson. The betrayal that he felt was not Brown's revenge. It was Blair not backing him. So I kind of feel that is act too. I mean, I think there's got to be more in act too and we need to take this story further to the beginning of Blair's own undoing. But in a way, when you read the accounts of this and it is so personal, so much of this, so much of it is about that feeling of friends letting down friends. Mandelson felt betrayed by Blair in the end. And yet it didn't break their political relationship. Within a few months of resigning second time round, he was back being run up by Blair, advising Blair. He wasn't back in the cabinet. He was behind the scenes. Blair had to conceal the extent to which he was dependent on Mandelson. But it was a betrayal, but not a betrayal that broke a political relationship. No, I think the thing that Mandelson on that, I think there's some kind of official investigation and he is actually exonerated. And he charges that Blair jumped to judgment way too soon. And again, in runesley's account, Mandelson is still bringing this subject up years later. I think though it's clear that the reason why Mandelson ends up back in the kitchen cabinet, if you like to use that term, is because things by this point, by 2002, early 2003, become pretty appalling between Brown and Blair. Well, we should make clear, actually, just one thing, just going back a little bit into the into the first act is there's a lot of discussion between Blair and his closest advisors in the run up to the 2001 election about whether they should sack Brown, sort of dress it up by making him throw in secretary and have a different chancellor and Blair backs off that because he scared really about what the consequences for the government will be of splitting it. So you've got both Brown and Blair after the 2001 election, going off in what are radically different directions in terms of policy, I think, as well, on and the euro, whether to join the euro or not, becomes the big policy divide between them. But their relationship is also sufficiently broken down on both sides and that each of them is looking to do without the other. And it's in that space that Blair brings Mandelson back in for help as much as anything as where I read it for dealing with Brown. And then you've got two different things going on. You've got the euro question where Mandelson is absolutely on Blair's side substantively. And regards Brown and the Treasury as just putting economic obstacles or macroeconomic obstacles, his five tests as they were called in the way for the sake of it. Just to be clear, Mandelson and Blair by this point wanted to join the euro and Blair started to believe it was part of his historical destiny to be the British prime minister who took Britain into the euro. And Brown's position on the euro shifts over time, but Brown by this point and whether this is principle or whether it is because Blair wants to do it, he's going to stop them. Absolutely. And it also goes on for a long time because he keeps saying that these tests have good, you know, it takes a long time to put the Treasury to do this technical work. And Blair's not got the slightest bit interested, obviously, in the technical detail of it or really any of the economic detail of it. He just thinks of it as a geopolitical question essentially Britain in Europe. That's what matters, leading Europe in his mind. But the thing that's going on at the same time, which is I think really the end of act two is Iraq and the build up to Blair's decision to take Britain into the Iraq war with the United States without there being a second authorizing resolution at the United Nations. And what's interesting in the trio story here is that I think in lots of ways that Brown and Mandelson's position are closer to each other than there are to Blair's. The one person who is as infatically in favor of Iraq around Blair as him is Jonathan Powell is chief of staff. Now, care, Starmer's chief foreign policy advisor. Exactly. A Mandelson is I mean in the end both Brown and Mandelson go along with it and accept it. But I think that both of them for somewhat different reasons are skeptical and there is a sense that hanging over all this this moment about Iraq that the consequences of it going wrong for Blair are the Gordon Brown will become prime minister. And I think there's everybody in the cabinet understands as a crucial cabinet meeting where they did Brown were to say I'm opposed to the war. And at this point or around this point, anyway, I can't get quite the timeline right then two people are resigning from the cabinet. Robin Coutcoot has been deposed by Blair as foreign second tone is now leader of the House and Claire Short, but Brown won't do it. And you could read that as caution in terms of like what will he inherit if he takes over in that kind of crisis. You could read it I think as when it really comes to it, Brown is too much been a lanticist to break with the Americans over it. But interestingly, I think on Mandelson side, it's well if this goes wrong and we don't back the layer, the consequence of it is going to be Brown being prime minister. And Mandelson, I think at that point, would want anything other than Brown being prime minister. So even then when when Brown and Mandelson are kind of a sort of agreeing, I think, being skeptical about Blair's foreign policy decision making, it's still that this clash that is deciding at least which way Mandelson's going. It almost does need Shakespeare to do justice to this because for both Brown and Mandelson in this, there is something profoundly compromised and compromising about the positions that they adopt. For Brown is this true, you could say the upside for him in backing this war that he doesn't really believe in and that he suspects has not been properly thought through by the Americans as it might hasten the end of Tony Blair. But of course, he'd also hasten the end of New Labor in the sense that it enormously tarnishes the New Labor project and Gordon Brown is never going to be able to distance himself from that tarnishing of it. At the same time for Mandelson, my memory of this including reading Mandelson's own memoir is that he was, I mean, maybe with hindsight, but he suggests that he was like Brown skeptical of the war. At the same time, he was probably prime among the people at this point who was trying to push Blair into if not sacking Brown because that was too incendiary. And if Brown wouldn't accept being foreign secretary, the plan for a while was to break up the treasury sort of thing that prime ministers always think you're doing to try and take on the power of the treasury, break it up into two departments and give Brown one of them but give someone else the other how they were divided. I can't remember. At one point Mandelson believed that he'd got Blair's agreement that he would break up the treasury in two and then Blair took him down. But my memory of that memoir is not quite explicitly but between the lines. Mandelson's position before the Iraq war was to try and remind Tony Blair that the real enemy is not Saddam Hussein. It's Gordon Brown. This is what you should be focusing your prime minister on. You've been distracted reading Blair's memoir to go back to your point about Kosovo. It was clear that on 9/11 part of the sense of release that he felt he says it was a sense of release because he finally the world made sense to him again. He understood which side everyone needed to be on. But it was completely clear. It was also released because he thought now this government is going to go into places where Brown can't stop me. You know this has changed the terms between me and my chancellor. And that was even if he wouldn't admit it to himself a big part of his sense of psychological release which he describes watching the planes hit the twin towers. He almost describes it as a moment of horror/ephoria because as he says now the dots started to join up but actually what he saw was a vision of his prime minister ship in which he would be free. Brown wouldn't be able to stop him. I don't know if this is Shakespeare. I don't know what it is but the psychology of those three in that moment in each case the vision is so tainted already by the stain of what's happened to their personal relationships. It isn't. I think the other thing then is that into this obviously through Iraq comes this unquestionable tragedy for an individual. It was not any of them. It's David Kelly. The weapons inspector who others to Campbell is effectively outtored as somebody who leaked information about the intelligence reports that Blair and Campbell were using to justify the war. Leaked them to the BBC and then David Kelly took his own life. And this is obviously a terrible tragedy for him. And it produces probably the the low point perhaps even for anything of anything that was going to happen in the Blair premiership in terms of the effect that that and his own popularity. Blair's on popularity. I mean that then has because he goes into this again in Warnesley's account within six months after this happening. He's still in this terrible place psychologically which is not clearly wants to carry on as Prime Minister and Brown by this point thinks it's absolutely his opportunity. You know he's practically working out who's going to be in his his cabinet and there's a point then as I recall when John Prescott steps in and they have another dinner except this time there are three people. The deputy prime minister John Prescott is there between them as as well and Brown thinks he's got another commitment from Blair which is to leave in the summer of 2004. And I think there's the possibility then that Blair could have quit but then the people who again Mandelson Sherry Blair, Jonathan Powell the people who constant Brown are all running around him saying no no no you just got to hang in there. The bad times will pass you'll feel like doing it again and he does stop feeling better about being Prime Minister and there we have you know Brown got a whole new round of fury perhaps in some sense more legitimately than the first time. And in this play the death of David Kelly produced one of those moments one of those lines that is still remembered in Blair's premiership he was on a plane I think flying back from Tokyo when the news of David Kelly's death broke and a journalist said to him Prime Minister have you got blood on your hands? You know not have you got blood on your hands in Iraq which is another question but have you got blood on your hands and by all accounts Blair went white and he looked like he'd seen a ghost and that would be in this place somewhere too for sure but I'm guessing if that's act two act three begins with Gordon Brown finally after ten years seizing the crown in through 2006 through to 2007 it was a long drawn out coup if a coup it was I think it was a coup it was a coup but it was a coup or it was a coup delayed in the sense there was a coup in 2006 but Blair Odie left in the summer of 2007 it also would have to include those moments along the way where Brown made sure that he wouldn't be challenged for the leadership because presumably by this point scarred first time around but also he was self-aware enough to know he had made many many many enemies over the preceding ten years and he couldn't be sure if David Miliband for instance challenged him for the leadership what might happen he probably could be reasonably secure he would win it but whether he would win it with his legitimacy questioned and he did some fairly dark arts things in order to ensure that he inherited the crown without a challenge which is what happened and entered Downing Street in the summer of 2007 briefly for about a week or so seemingly master of all he surveyed I remember Brown's first week I remember the press coverage he got the sense of relief that Blair was finally gone people were sick of Blair by that point sick of the sanctum and he sick of the sick of the sick of the site of him I think ten years is a long time to be Prime Minister Brown was meant to be the grown up this is all very reminiscent of the first week of Kirstalmer's Prime Minister ship Brown created what was called the government of all the talents he brought in people who weren't politicians he brought in business people I think Alan Sugar was one of the mistakes I'm mistaken for American listeners that's the person who hosts our version of the apprentice but he will never be Prime Minister and it lasted such a short period of time that I think is is the start of act three but at the heart of act three is to me the most fascinating part of this whole story which is the rapprochement between Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson Peter Mandelson comes back and Brown brings him back into government a man with whom his relationships were absolutely toxic poisonous is the word for them these two had been at each other's throats And in 2008, once Brown's prime minister was in trouble, he brought Peter Mandelson back. To me, the revelation in the Andrew Rawensley book was that he says, I don't know if this is true, but I didn't, there's no reason to make it up because it's not a particularly interesting detail for anyone other, maybe the new of me. He says that Brown still full of mistrust of Mandelson suspicion. But Peter Mandelson came to Cambridge in February 2008. Peter Mandelson was the EU trade commissioner at this point. He'd left British politics in that sense. He was no longer an MP. He came to Cambridge in February 2008 to give a lecture hosted by our department, you're in my department, the politics department in Cambridge. You and I were both at this lecture and then at the dinner afterwards with Peter Mandelson. And apparently this lecture so impressed Brown with its analysis of the challenges of globalization that he asked his people to arrange a lunch with Mandelson, which happened soon afterwards. For 20 minutes, they clouded each other still full of mutual suspicion and poison. And then the ice was broken by talking about this lecture and before long Brown had decided he needed Mandelson back. If I was writing this play, that would be in there somewhere. But you sent me the text of the lecture. And wow, that was the lecture that overcame Shakespearean levels of mistrust and feelings of betrayal. I must admit, I didn't read every word of it before I sent it to you, David. But the thing that is most striking about it now is that it just belongs to another world. And it is really Mandelson defending globalization against the challenges and really being very confident, I think, that he as trade commission, which is the position he was serving in the commission, could deliver a new world trade agreement because they hadn't been a successful one since the year ago around that had established a world trade organisation. And Mandelson was trying to push on the EU side, the Doha round, I think it was called through it. The challenge that was coming to it, there were several ones, but there's developing country protections. But there was also sort of a more protectionist spirit in the US Congress, at least, by that point. And so for Brown to be sort of impressed by it, it would be like Brown wanting to embrace the global to defend it at a point when, I mean, it's nothing like the threats that were going to overwhelm it, which is why it seems now to be, the lecture now seems to belong to another world. It's quite hard to imagine, I was thinking about this, it's quite hard to imagine that that's the lecture that Tony Blair would have given. And it should be said as well, the lecture was actually, wasn't it, was the Alkin lecture, which is a lecture that Leon Britain had set up. Alkin being an orthombian monk who had been an ambassador, I think, to or been at Charlemagne's court. And so it was also an occasion, and you can see this in the lecture, of embracing the European courts in the face of globalization. And that's interesting, again, from Brown's point of view in sort of responding to that, because Brown was very keen on his Euro-Skeptic credentials in many ways at that point. And it wasn't just a question of the victory he'd won over Blair and keeping Britain out of the Euro, but as Prime Minister, you did as much as possible to make it clear how much he disliked, how much he signed the Lisbon Treaty, I think as I recall, the refuse to go to the ceremony, the main ceremony for signing it and did it himself independently. So I think you might read it as much as anything, is that saying something about the depths to which Brown's premiership had sunk so quickly by that point. And interestingly, one of the, well, there's the election that never happened, obviously, we can come to that. But the issue I think that's causing him so much grief by the summer of 2008 is this issue of having got rid of the 10-penced income tax rate. So something on his own territory, you know, he's got Alissa Darling as Chancellor, but he's clearly driving the decision still. He's not really taking any notice of Darling, they are not having furious rarers, but he's made a mistake, a political electoral mistake that really does harm Labour because it means that poor people pay more taxes on the area where he claimed he knew absolutely best. This was supposed to be vintage Brown and this was where he made his terrible mistake. When I reread the lecture, the thing I was struck by is that Madison's case for Europe is also a case against the United States. And he says, we've got to make a bet here in the era we're living in. It's an era in which globalization is inevitable, but it's going to come under strain in various ways. And it's February 2008, so it's not clear that Obama's going to be president. This is George W. Bush's presidency still. Northern rock has happened, but layman brothers hasn't happened yet. As you say, the United States is showing signs of moving towards both protectionism and the beginnings of a kind of populism, but we haven't yet got to the Tea Party movement. But Madison, more or less says in that lecture, you've got to put a bet here. You've got to put your bet on Europe because Europe combines real social security, the protection of a established welfare system, a complete belief in rules of law and an international order. America looks vulnerable. America does not have welfare, protection of the kind that Europe can offer. America seems to be drifting towards protectionism. America looks like it might be, as it always has, a bit iffy about the rules of the international order. So if you're going to put your money on something, you're going to put your money on the European Union. That was bad prophecy. I mean, with hindsight at least, but maybe even at the time, that was a misreading of the inherent strengths of the United States in the disorder that was to come. What's interesting is, I remember actually having a disagreement with him at the dinner. I should say, he'd never met him before that evening, but there weren't that many people at the dinner as I recall. And there was a certain point in the evening when it went to collective conversation. And he was being very upbeat about securing this trade agreement. And essentially that Europe, as I recall, at least that Europe could lead on this. And I asked him something about the Bush administration not having fast-track or authority, which meant that the Senate would be a constraint. And eating thing of that was relevant really at all. But the answer came, that he gave me, is from a conviction that Europe could lead. And that is, I think, both turned out not just to be wrong. But what is just not there in that lecture is, in this sense, the European America are just going to economically diverge. In the 2010s, as the global comes under this intense pressure, becomes so geopolitically contested, that the United States economy is going to do a lot better than either the European Union economy collectively, almost of the individual European economies. I know there's some exceptions, like Poland, but generally the West European countries have not, did not have a good 2010s. And I think that what's interesting about that, in terms of the bigger picture story, is that this notion that was so crucial to at least Brown's conception of new labour, that they understood the economic world, or at least that he understood the economic world. He and his advisors, that their analysis was good, and that there was analysis was what made them competent. And that's what distinguished them from the conservatives. I think you can see that the analysis around 2008, and what it meant was really poor. And I'm just using that as a symptomatic of it, not because it's the most revealing example of it, just because it's one what we saw. And actually, the new labour just wasn't going to be equipped, even leaving the personalities and the implosion out of it, it would not going to be equipped for the economic and geopolitical world, as it was in the 2010s. And in that sense, it's a certain kind of fitness, if in a way, to labour's absence from power during the decade to come. And it was going to take the conservatives' implosion to nothing that actually Kistama would do to reinvent new labour, which in one sense was what he was trying to do. But there's nothing there, in terms of the re-invention. It's just the fact that the economic and political forces that are going to accumulate through the 2010s in the first years of this decade are just going to destroy British governments. But dinner, the Alkouin did, there was also the dinner I remember. I only had one conversation with Peter Manatham, which is after the dinner was over, we were standing outside, I was waiting. To go home, he was waiting for his driver to come and pick him up. He was very polite. He said to me, "What are you working on?" I said, "I'm writing a book about political hypocrisy." He punched me in the chest and said, "I am not a hypocrite." And I said the book's not about you, Peter. The other memorable thing I can remember from the many years of attending these Alkouin lectures is the one in 2014 where we hosted Enrico Letter, who had been Italian Prime Minister. And in his lecture in 2014, he talked towards the end about something that he feared might happen and that people should take more seriously than they were and he called it Brexit. And the lecture finished and I had to ask the person sitting next to me, "What's Brexit?" Never heard the word before. [BLANK_AUDIO] 2014. There's one more thing we need to say about Act 3 in Shakespearean terms, which is that we haven't yet reached the apogee of Peter Mandelson's power in British politics because that came after an attempted coup against Gordon Brown in 2009 when one of his ministers James Pernel resigned had another David Miller ban resigned at the same time. It would almost certainly have brought down Gordon Brown when James Pernel was asked why he hadn't coordinated with David Miller Bound. He said, "Well, that would have made it a plot," which in itself was an interesting answer. Brown in desperation that night got Mandelson to ring around and rally support. Took a bit of time to come, ministers had to be dragged kicking and screaming in front of the cameras to defend their beloved leader, but they did in the end and Brown survived. And Mandelson's reward was to be made effectively Deputy Prime Minister and to be given a whole host of titles which seem to have come from a Shakespearean history play. Wasn't he made Lord High Protector? Lord President of the Council for a Secretary of State. So not quite Lord High Protector, that's my memory. He's definitely got some Thomas Cromwell element to it, I think. So that in this story, it's almost like that is the point, I think in this history play where we are halfway through, but these two men who load each other, load each other, have not just reconciled, but there's a mutual dependency, which is almost like a blood tie at this point. Mandelson is keeping Brown in office, and Brown knows it and Mandelson knows it, and then only now with hindsight, what's also haunting about that is we've seen the emails that Peter Mandelson was writing to Jeffrey Epstein at the same time. That was part one of a two-part conversation we've reached somewhere in the middle of Act 3. The second part covering Acts 4 and 5, taking the story right up to the present day, is going to be out tomorrow on PPF Plus. Here's a short extract. At one point, they're all obsessed with how does Labour win an election again, but winning elections from Mandelson is his life's work. It really is his life's work. Yeah, and I think that he sees the person who's got the best chance of, or seems anyway, to have the best chance of doing that, who is non-Corbanistam, is Kirstaaba. In this play, a character who would enter late on is Morgan McSweeney, and Morgan McSweeney is central to Act 5. There is a view that Morgan McSweeney is a Peter Mandelson creation and Kirstaama is a Morgan McSweeney creation. It's too simplistic to put it in those terms, but is it wrong? I think that they're both Peter Mandelson creations. Wow. So McSweeney's role has been overstated and Mandelson's understated in the Starmer project. You are probably sick of me saying this if you've heard our recent episodes with some highlights from PPF, but if you would like to get that and all of our bonus episodes, plus add free listening, sign up now. Click on the link in the show description or go to our website ppfideers.com. A quick reminder about an event that is coming up quite soon. It's the third screening in our season at the Regent Street Cinema in London. It's on Wednesday. May the 6th, there are just a few tickets left. I'm going to be talking to the writer, journalist and now host, or BBC Radio 4's in our time, Misha Glenny, about Carol Reed's masterpiece, the third man. To get your tickets, click on the link in the show description or go to our website ppfideers.com. Next time in our regular slot, it is the episode we recorded in the second of our screenings at the Regent Street Cinema. I'm going to be talking to BeeBan Kidron about the South Park movie. Do join us for that. This has been Past Present Future.