Peter Mandelson could not solve Labour’s woes

The latest release of the Mandelson files tots up to more than 1,000 pages, an unappealingly lengthy text with the most boring title imaginable: “Update on the Government Response to the Humble Address Motion”. But if a publisher was looking for a more marketable title, they might channel Dale Carnegie and plump for “How to Win Gongs and Irritate People”.

Here is the irrepressible Peter Mandelson in unvarnished form, repeatedly badgering some of the biggest names in politics and government for favours, information and jobs. For the more humble reader of this document – which could be a postmodern novel about the administration of a nuclear power via WhatsApp – the first thought might be: why didn’t they all just tell him to bugger off? Well, Ed Miliband nearly did, and you can sense that in his tense and not entirely believable “out of office” replies to Mandelson’s relentless messages.

But most people accommodated him. The spectacle of serving ministers, one of them now a fairly senior cabinet minister, spending their time trying to facilitate Mandelson’s dream of becoming Chancellor of the University of Oxford – something that is entirely outside the purview of government or Labour Party business – is remarkable.

Mandelson exerted such influence for two reasons. One is because he knew how government worked, better than most of these tyro-politicians in a party that had been out of power for 14 years; the other is he made it his business to know everybody who mattered, including many in the media. An example of both qualities in action is his dash to obtain, from a friend in the cabinet, the personal phone number of the civil servant Chris Wormald, so he could message his congratulations on Wormald’s appointment as cabinet secretary. Mandelson knew where power was in Westminster and made it his business to befriend those who possessed it.

It is worth acknowledging here that the world described above is not alien to us in the media. Political journalists make it their business to work out where power lies in Westminster and to get to know those who possess it – to get their phone numbers and meet them for coffee, or lunch, or a pint after work. The more we learn, the more we understand what is really going on in government. Relationships are built over WhatsApp, where questions are asked and confidences shared. It is uncomfortable, but there is a reason arch political operators like Mandelson – or Boris Johnson, George Osborne or Ed Balls – have also found that they are comfortable operating both in politics and the media.

Mandelson’s pursuit in getting close to the centre of power seemingly knew no bounds. (It even took him into Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit.) Consider the sheer brass neck of his assuming responsibility for the appointment of the PM’s principal economic adviser. His advice on this, as in quite a few of the published exchanges, was politely entertained and then ignored (in the now-infamous words of Keir Starmer, “To us, he’s just Peter.”)

Again, while it is denied that Mandelson had anything to do with the September reshuffle, despite offering suggestions and being present in No 10 on the day it occurred, senior figures did their best to puff him up. It was suggested to Mandelson by a senior Downing Street figure that he might “have some fun” by coming in through the black door, past the waiting cameras, to get the media excited about a shock reshuffle appointment.

Through more dogged persistence Mandelson managed to get himself appointed to the most senior diplomatic post in the foreign service: ambassador to the US. It raises the question that comes up again and again in this seemingly endless affair: why? What made him so special?

We can now say that Mandelson was a morbid symptom. In most of Mandelson’s exchanges with ministers, they are venting to him about a lack of growth strategy (Wes Streeting), “messy” policy execution (Torsten Bell) and “doom-loop” politics (Hamish Falconer). Distressed at their government’s lack of direction, frustrated with their apparently uninterested leader, they turned to someone who was politically active during a time when Labour was successful, in the hope that he could tell them how to do it better.

But Mandelson couldn’t give them the answers they wanted. If there was one quote more telling than any other in these files, it was his desperate admission: “I am going mad with the things Morgan [McSweeney] is sending me. I am trying to be constructive but I just don’t know what to say any more.”

It all feels a little like the story of Faust. The bad doctor wanted desperately to discover what force held the world together at its core. But of course, when Faust finally reached the innermost room of the innermost room, he found that it was empty. This Labour government walked into that room in 2024 and found Mandelson standing there with a list of sinecures he quite liked the look of.

The tragedy is that Mandelson inadvertently told them all along that he wasn’t the solution to their problems. It’s the policy that’s wrong, he insisted in a number of the disclosed messages, not the comms or even the personnel. That was the same message recently delivered to the Labour Party by Tony Blair in his essay-length intervention. Luckily the party will finally have that battle of ideas if and when a leadership contest breaks out. Or so it says. It just took this humiliation and two years of dithering to get there. 

[Further reading: Six things we learned from the Mandelson files]