Peter Mandelson: What Was It All For?

Some people go into politics because they want to change things and see justice where injustice is. Others go into politics because they are drawn to power and want to feel special, far above the man on the Clapham Omnibus. There is a third type, who starts out as the first kind but ends up as the second.This, I’d guess, is what happened to Peter Mandelson. As a teenager, he was so opposed to America’s role in the Vietnam War that he joined the Young Communist League; he ended up as a super-groupie for the super-rich, caring only for luxury. It’s a strange, sad story.Having met him a few times, I found him a profoundly charmless man — but then, I am female and do not own a yacht, so he probably wasn’t trying. That charm must be in there somewhere, though, as a puzzling number of Labour Party leaders have promoted him to positions of power, starting in 1985 when he was appointed the party’s director of communications; he was the first person in Britain to be called a “spin doctor” but also “the Prince of Darkness.” You might say he was hiding in plain sight from the start.When he was given a safe Labour seat, his lack of connection with his putative constituents was illustrated by one journalist relating a tale — perhaps apocryphal — that on visiting a fish and chip shop, he mistook the Northern working-class side-dish of mushy peas for the rather more metropolitan guacamole. He already had a growing taste for luxury; if only it had stopped with condiments.The first sign that he appeared to be taking Madame Bovary as his role model was when in 1998 as an MP earning £40,000 a year he bought a £475,000 four-story house in a street filled with celebrities at London’s Notting Hill; it transpired he had borrowed £373,000 — a lot in those days — from a rich fellow Labour MP embroiled in financial scandal.Photographs of him smirking in his new abode like the cat who got not just the cream but the cow were published, and he seemed from hereon to get high on the idea of his own store-bought glamour, which must have been heady stuff. This was the year that he famously said of the Labour government “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” A kind of mania to mix with the super-rich may have grabbed him, and from then on it was yachts, yachts, yachts all the way, often owned by dubious Russian oligarchs and other loaded ne’er-do-wells.Predictably, having chosen such playmates, Mr. Mandelson embarked on a giddy whirl of disgrace and rehabilitation which was inexplicable to the outsider and had the most level-headed of us starting to give credence to conspiracy theories about the rich and powerful all having some dirt on each other, and thus being in each other’s pockets.When Mr. Mandelson was made His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States of America — having previously called President Trump “little short of a white nationalist and racist,” “reckless and a danger to the world,” and a “bully” — millions of us gave up trying to be sensible and donned our tin-foil hats with pride.One Trump campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita, publicly referred to Mr. Mandelson as an “absolute moron” — and “Petey’s” relationship with Jeffrey Epstein does indeed indicate this. A 2003 message from Mr. Mandelson in Epstein’s ickily-named “Birthday Book” describes the pedophile as the politician’s “‘best pal” while emails from 2008 encourage the convicted child-molester to “fight for early release” from his 18‑month sentence.Disgraced and rehabilitated so many times, this is the end for Mr. Mandelson. It’s not awfully auspicious for the beleaguered prime minister, either, having chosen the fallen flibbertigibbet for the ambassadorial role in the face of copious warnings. “Mandy” will have all the time in the world to mingle on yachts — but the irony is that none of his rich “friends” will want him now.What was it all for, all that finagling and fixing and flying around in private jets, just to live some life you’d seen in a high-end soap opera? To be forever remembered as the fawning follower of a sex offender, standing there in one’s underpants — caught literally and figuratively with one’s trousers down, immortalized forever in the most humiliating way, perhaps the most comic and tragic figure combined to ever emerge from British politics. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.https://julieburchill.substack.com/p/halfling-a-farewell-to-legs-part-ca8

Peter Mandelson: What Was It All For?

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