The Meaning of Recognition (23 page)

On Monday, Mandelson seemed to agree. He published an article in this paper crying up New Labour’s new emphasis on ‘articulating core values and beliefs’, but he left the way
open for his readers to infer that the old emphasis on presentation was still in existence, and perhaps counter-productive. Anyone who recalled that Mandelson himself was largely responsible for
the old emphasis might have found this pretty steep, but what mattered was how they might read it at Millbank, where Labour’s campaign was being masterminded by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Gordon Brown.

There were visions of the New Machiavelli driving a wedge between Blair and Brown, as once the old Machiavelli might have warned his Prince against a factotum grown too mighty. At King’s
Cross I caught the train to Hartlepool. Or, rather, I caught the first of three trains to Hartlepool. The first train accumulated only twenty minutes of delay on the way to York, and I’m
bound to say that under New Labour the quality of public address system announcements has improved out of sight, although unfortunately not out of earshot. The best announcement was when the train
was standing just outside Doncaster. ‘We apologize for the slight delay outside Doncaster Station. This is because the driver is on the tracks talking to the signalman about the new speed
restrictions. As soon as . . .’

Ready to vote for Mussolini, I caught the train to Middlesbrough that would qualify me for the train to Hartlepool, but after Middlesbrough my mood changed along with the look of the country. At
the Ann Summers sex shop in Middlesbrough’s glossy main drag the sales assistants had told me that the whole area had come up a long way in the last five years, and now I could see they were
right. Between Billington and Seaton Carew the industries filled the horizon. There were still fields of allotments in among the villages, but the housing looked either refurbished or spanking new,
and Hartlepool sparkled. The new Marina looked like a chunk of San Francisco’s glass and pipe waterfront on a darker sea, or Sydney’s Darling Harbour under a darker sky. The franchises
were stacked sideways one after the other like an updated Monopoly board. Stand-alone edifices had been helicoptered in from global America: Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Warner multiplex.
There were whole streets of discos with percussive names like Passion and Pow!. Hypermarkets hugely occupied the spaces left by the pit-prop yards that died with the pits.

One of the penalties a town pays for modern-day modernization is that it joins a homogenized world, but Hartlepool has kept a lot of its distinguished old buildings and buffed them up: the
refurbs look even snazzier than the new stuff, and the general effect is of a civilized prosperity. Everyone you meet says that five years ago things were far otherwise, and the history books make
that easy to believe. In the Depression, unemployment in the area ran at a steady 40 per cent. In May 1941,
Luftflotte
3
was overhead for three nights at a time, clobbering the
docks. But the really devastating raid was ordered in by Mrs Thatcher, whose government finally laid the old industries waste. It could be said that she made regeneration possible, in the same way
that an Australian bushfire benefits a forest. She certainly handed New Labour the opportunity to prove itself. It undoubtedly has. Where graving docks and the smokestack industries once cranked
out the wherewithal for owners and workers to lead unequal lives, now the new industries are moving in to chase the government aid, benefit from the cheap rents and the freed-up workforce, and gush
the cash-flow for a fair civic order. After more than half a day on the trains I bluffed my way into the students’ café in the College of Further Education and heard a lot about the
upcoming Summerhill complex, a council project to provide a recreational facility that will have everything: rock-climbing, BMX tracks, waterslides, something for everyone. Ann Summers didn’t
get a mention but Peter Mandelson did. It wasn’t a Labour-controlled council any more, but it had been until last year, during the rebuilding period, and Mandelson was still what he had
always been, a terrific constituency MP. When I asked what they thought of his leading the high life in London, they said that’s the way it had to be. ‘He’s here for the
surgeries.’

Next morning I turned up at his house in Sutton Avenue, where the prices run to about 50 or 60 thou. In London, as Mandelson learned too well, it costs ten times as much to live this neatly. The
air of snug safety is somewhat offset by his police escort, but that’s got nothing to do with Hartlepool, or even with the prospect of an incoming egg of the calibre that took out John
Prescott. Northern Ireland will follow Mandelson for a long time. The only car he’s allowed to ride in weighs three and a half tons more than it looks. Paranoia would be understandable, but
he answered his own door and emanated a convincing air of cool. Fine drawn in slacks and loose woolly, he moved to match his easy murmur. On his own immediate confession, or insistence, it’s
only the press that makes him jumpy. Everything else – including, by implication, a rocket grenade with an Irish accent through his front window – is part of the game, but the press is
something wicked. He recited from bitter memory a list of commentators who were on his case. Ten years ago, he said, it had been different, but by now the press had injected ‘quantities of
cynicism into the political bloodstream’.

Part of the press myself, if only on a part-time basis, I stuck up for our side by pointing out that using the press had been the basis of the presentational politics which he himself had done a
lot to invent, and that the policy had reached its questionable apotheosis with Blair’s Pied Piper routine at St Olave’s. It was at this early point that he called me a wizened old
media hack. We were in his kitchen, the coffee was still brewing, and already he had me reeling at how unguarded he could be. In conversation, the man determined not to bore himself is the one
least likely to bore anybody else. Mandelson treats any topic to his own high standards of exposition and will continue talking unless interrupted. On the other hand, he listens carefully to the
interruption and takes off again from what you said, instead of merely continuing with what he was saying before. When pressed in rapid exchange, he can cover any given topic in three or four
nuanced sentences, any one of which could be used to murder him without even being misquoted.

He talks as if sound-bite land didn’t exist, as if a wizened old media hack would never jot down a phrase and use it to frame him. If flattery were his intention, it would be an immensely
flattering technique. But I think it’s just him. He simply wasn’t born for the game whose harsh rules he has done so much to make binding. On only two topics did he press the on-message
replay button: Blair and Millbank. To take them in reverse, Millbank was wonderful, doing a great job, practically infallible. Blair had ‘intelligence, integrity, selflessness’ and many
other qualities in common with Solomon, Einstein and Albert Schweitzer. But even here – in fact especially here – the beamed dogma suddenly expanded into genuine eloquence. Spotting
that the tendency of my own argument was to suggest that Blair had been managed into existence by his back-up team, Mandelson took several minutes to explain that the opposite was true. New
Labour’s new direction, new deal and new society: it was all Blair’s idea. Blair was a unique combination of vision and practicality. The job of his managers had been to hold the wall
while he got on with it. I interrupted the flow to contend that they had also managed the media in order to project him. ‘Protect him?’ Mandelson asked, misinterpreting my mumble.
‘No,’ I said, ‘project.’ Mandelson said that for better or worse, ‘we live in a personality-driven media age’.

Clearly, in his own case, he thinks it is for the worse. One day it might be known as the Mandelson Paradox: he accepted and mastered, on behalf of his party and the two men who led it to
transformation – Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair – a set of atmospheric conditions in which he himself could hardly breathe. To pursue the cause in which he believes, he rated reality above
his own tastes. There is a sacrificial element, which in his more vulnerable moments he might be tempted to admire in a mirror: that face out of a Renaissance painting could easily take on the
pained resignation of St Sebastian shot full of arrows. Those of us whose bloodstreams have been tainted by cynicism might say he asked for it. There is certainly at least one man-trap question
that not even he will find it easy to talk his way out of, even if his memoirs run to the full two volumes. If Blair is so great, and you did nothing wrong, why did he accept your resignation?
Surely the truth is that he was done in by the silent borrowing, and not the supposed leg-up for the Hinduja Brothers. When it came to the crunch, Mandelson was in the position of the small boy who
gets away with burning down the school and then gets busted for riding his bicycle on the footpath. But here again, I think, the weakness comes from the strength. For a man like him, elegant
conviviality and conversational brilliance amount to a talent which is death to hide. He could no more be expected to lead the simple life of Arthur Scargill than Metternich could have been
expected to live like a peasant. The civilized dinner table was not his aspiration: he felt it to be his natural entitlement. But in the modern, media-sensitive politics of the Mandelson age, what
seems natural to you is the very thing you have to examine in advance for its possible effects. It seemed natural to John Prescott that an egg-thrower should be thumped in the face.

What Mandelson lost will be seen only in the long run. What Blair lost in the short run was dramatically on view that same afternoon, when Mandelson visited High Tunstall School. It’s an
ordinary school that anyone local can send their children to, but even by the exalted standards of St Olave’s it looks like Arcadia. The children had organized themselves into a miniature
House of Commons, complete with canopy for the Speaker, played by National Best Speaker Stuart Bevell (13) who can do a stunning impersonation of Betty Boothroyd. The Prime Minister had a
bother-boy haircut but turned in a notably more fleet-footed Question Time performance than his model, and the Leader of the Opposition, son of a doctor from the subcontinent, had Hague’s
every needling technique well covered. What was astonishing, however, was the high standard of argument. Mandelson listened in unfeigned delight, and when he rose to commend them he paid the
participants the compliment of being delightful on his own account. ‘Do you feel you were unpleasant and aggressive enough?’

But the tease play was only the start. He gave them a run-down on what the House of Commons is like to be in, and how the close confinement encourages verbal aggression. ‘It’s not
that they’re nasty people. But you forget yourself, and before you know where you are you’re shouting with the rest of them.’ He gave the kids everything he had, and didn’t
patronize them for a second. The son of a prominent local Tory was given exceptional respect for his views. If Millbank had filmed the whole event, they could have had a PPB for the future: Labour
education policies for the primary schools have worked, they could say, and the secondary schools are next. But whether Mandelson could have done all that with the camera on him is another
question. Essentially it was a private performance.

Onward to a regeneration committee meeting at the Council chambers, where a
Newsnight
team was on hand. Immediately Mandelson tightened up. By arrangement,
Newsnight
filmed him
only in the corridors and for the first few minutes of the meeting. When they backed out of the door he was himself again. Once again he was impressive, and this time for doing more listening than
talking. As chairman of the cross-party committtee he got the best out of everybody. For a gifted talker there is always a temptation to crush the less eloquent by summarizing their long arguments
with a single phrase, but Mandelson did not succumb. What he said was either usefully supplementary or else neatly summarized the points of contention. Though he would probably rather die than say
so, a Labour-dominated meeting would have been less interesting. He told me afterwards what a joy it was to be able to draw on the experience of the Lib Dem old hand: ‘good, solid, civic
stock’.

For Mandelson, ‘civic’ is a big word. His fondness for the idea is one of the things that make him remarkable, because those who help to paint and frame the big picture are often
impatient with local detail. In the eye of history, Mandelson will be seen to have helped alter the course of British politics from one millennium to the next, but the view of his influence will be
impoverished if it does not include his respect for what should not alter: the unglamorous but necessary work in the constituency, the long meetings where everyone gets a say, the depressing moment
when you recommend a skateboard ramp for the local layabout youths and find out the hard way that the vicar doesn’t know what a skateboard is. I saw it happen, and wondered if it ever
happened to Machiavelli. But Mandelson managed the moment well, as he can manage everything except the fundamental contradiction of his life. He is a master artist of politics, but politics is not
an art. Machiavelli, who thought it was, found out it wasn’t when the very people he had sought to advise put him to the rack. That evening Mandelson went out canvassing. I thought he was
quite good at that too, but I suppose they all are, or they would never get elected. I left him there, and thus missed the episode when he was monstered by Jeremy Vine in the
Newsnight
minivan.

2. Incredible Shrinking Tories

In any democracy, there is never a more fascinating election than when only one party can win no matter how repellent its campaign. The fascination comes from the unblinkable
fact that the future of the opposition is on the line. In 1983 I followed Michael Foot’s campaign on its way to catastrophe. Clinging with the rest of the Keystone Kops to the running-board
of his Model T as it swerved zanily between the trolley cars, I had only one thing on my mind: this is an accident that had to happen. Out of the wreckage, they might build something. Today the
same goes double for the Tories. At least the crash of Foot’s doomed vehicle left his party divided merely in two, even as the Kops took parabolic flight in all directions to wind up
demolishing pie-stalls or disappearing into the windows of shops selling lingerie. But after this election the Tories might be left with hardly any party at all.