Illtyd harrington: ‘as i please’

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Published: 2 December, 2010
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

Peter and his friends 

IT was, in the last analysis, neither voyeurism nor significant. Mandelson: The Real PM?, screened on BBC4 last week, was a contrived portrait of relentless tedium of a man looking uncertainly for the next step up the ladder.

This cinema verité by Hannah Rothschild looked at Peter Mandelson for five months, culminating in his appointment as commander in chief of Labour’s general election High Command in 2010.

Inevitably it became cinema noir. He sat as alert as a pointer hound as the official car snaked past the symbols of power – the Commons and the Lords.

His job was to order policy output, presentation and above all to liaise with prime minister Gordon Brown. One revealing moment occurred after the three leaders’ television debate. He spoke on his mobile phone reas­suring, suggesting and calming, like a parent on sports day.

Labour ‘s bunker was as uninviting as the foreman’s office on a building site. The main characters were more tailors’ dummies than human. It speeded up a bit when Peter collapsed under the weight of his colossal ego and feline ennui.

It’s a salutary warning to the practitioners of manipulation that Hitler, after 65 years in hell, appears on TV every day. Of course, I’m not drawing parallels but Leni Riefenstahl a Nazi moll did compose and orchestrate the Triumph of the Will – the odious Dr Goebbels said: “Tell a big lie repeatedly and they’ll believe you.” Hitler had his Nuremberg, Kinnock had his Sheffield which Peter organised. It began to look like a blue movie when there were quick shots of a long-haired  and bloated Tony Blair with a moustachioed Peter – Oxford prudes, I understand sniffed and dismissed it as “an unhealthy relationship”.

The Labour Party did not need a Trojan horse. They were inside already. Blair was the messiah. The ambidextrous Peter all four evangelists and Alastair Campbell an unlikely St Paul laying down the authority of the written word.

In 2010 the new model of  Labour had become Brown’s lament. After one of the TV debates the admirable Jon Snow watched in astonishment as Mandelson and Chancellor Osborne engaged in gentle abuse: “ The room was sucked clean of air while at the same time they were acting it out.”

At one point during the 75 minutes Peter looked very much like Narcissus gazing into that treacherous pool, but he did not jump. A hilarious scene of the Labour cabinet holding up pictures of a Rising Sun ended abruptly when a car crashed close by. They scattered. 

Meanwhile, back at the bunker and in the shadow of defeat, the funeral meats were served up, low-fat sandwiches, sugar-free cake and still water. Gone were the days of triumph – not a champagne bottle in sight.

There was one moment which should have been delivered by Bela Lugosi, the best of Draculas. Peter’s dictum: “We are not fighting for place, we are fighting for our faith.” His career in the Boy Scouts and the Young Communist League were not wasted. The Scouts had the King and the League had Stalin to swear to.

At the end I got rather cross. I was tempted to send him a copy of Kipling’s The Man who Would Be King. Michael Caine and Sean Connery starred in the film. Sadly they fell off a swing bridge over a gorge in Afghanistan.

I leave the last word to Lord Byron: “But from the first it was Peter’s drift to be a kind of political eunuch.”