Peter Mandelson has never had a problem with being straightforward, which, of course, is not quite the same thing as being straight – that is, in the old-fashioned dictionary sense of telling the truth. For years I have retained in my memory, but never written, an exchange with Mandelson related contemporaneously which shocked me at the time, as it does today.
A political fellow traveller, a man named Stephen Wakelam, who had insinuated himself into the entourage of the then-Labour leader Neil Kinnock, encountered Mandelson at a Westminster Christmas party in December 1989, days after the latter’s selection as the prospective Labour candidate, and thus putative MP, for Hartlepool. Wakelam, a playwright and himself a gay man, inquired if Mandelson had been asked at his selection conference about his homosexuality. “They were much too polite, Steve,” said Mandelson. Wakelam asked how Mandelson would have replied if he had been asked the question. “I would have denied it,” he replied.
In my memory, Wakelam reported the conversation with Mandelson saying: “I would have lied.” This amounts to the same thing, but I was gratified that my recollection was essentially accurate when I discovered that Wakelam had also told his story to the journalist Paul Routledge. He reproduces it, with the quotations I have given above, in his sensational 1999 biography Mandy. That was the book containing the revelations that brought about the first of Mandelson’s resignations from office in disgrace, the one caused by the undeclared large financial loan from his friend and fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a four-bedroomed Georgian town house in Notting Hill*, deemed by then a desirable area of West London.
It is all history but it is relevant because, in its way, it tells us all that we needed to know about Peter Mandelson. It was 37 years ago, nearly two generations, the year the Berlin Wall came down, yet this dishonesty remains indelible in my memory. And it wasn’t even the first time that I had been shocked about the way Mandelson did business. I will come to that, but pause to consider the exquisite irony provided by the political backcloth to this summer of 2026: a Labour government with a massive majority in parliament finds itself in chaos and disarray, led (at the time of writing) by a discredited prime minister and facing possible extinction at the next general election, not just as a government but, perhaps, even as a functioning political party. In some playbooks, our democracy itself is trembling today from the onslaught of the hideous mismanagement of British politics by those set in authority over us.
And the cause of this excruciating ignominy? All the tortuous avenues somehow lead to the person of Peter Mandelson. The government’s problems today, for any manner of reasons, can be blamed on Sir Keir Starmer. Yes, I know about the 14 years of Conservative incompetence, the Ukraine war, the Middle East, the Iranian war, the Strait of Hormuz and Brexit. I know there is a madman in the White House. Nevertheless, the shortcomings of the Starmer administration defy rational explanation. How was this lawyer to whom politics was an apparent novelty propelled into premiership? By one Morgan McSweeney. Whose protégé was McSweeney? Why, Peter Mandelson’s.
And that’s the same Peter Mandelson who is the former: director of communications and campaigns for the Labour Party; MP for Hartlepool; minister without portfolio; Northern Ireland secretary; secretary of state for business (twice) and president of the Board of Trade; first secretary of state and lord president of the council; European trade commissioner; member of the House of Lords; and British ambassador to the US (February to September 2025). He has moved on, resigned or been sacked from all of these posts and has now even handed in his membership card of the Labour Party. The party he attempted to fashion in the image he regarded as desirable, all red roses and deep-down shallow. Oh, and also co-founder in 2010 of the lobbying firm Global Counsel, valued at £30million* in 2024, which collapsed in April this year owing £4.6million (including £645,789 tax to HM Revenue and Customs), having lost a series of accounts in the wake of revelations that his former lordship had been besties with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child-sex offender whom he knew was a toxic, hot potato.
As I write, Mandelson remains under investigation by the Metropolitan Police, by whom he was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office; by the European Union anti-fraud office (although fraud has not been specified); and the House of Commons, for goodness knows what. I am told that he is worried about his pensions* – like all of us, really – but at least he is still in occupation of a £7.6million Primrose Hill mansion* in London (bought in 2011, having sold the Trafalgar Square penthouse*). And no, I don’t know what happened to the Notting Hill Georgian number, but Geoffrey Robinson might.
Would you even buy a used car from this man? Or, let us wonder, appoint him to the top job in the British diplomatic service without bothering to find out if there might be any risks involved?
The ructions of the immediate past are best summed up, perhaps, as Sir Keir Starmer expostulating: “I wanted to make Peter Mandelson the United States ambassador – why didn’t anyone stop me?” (I’m sorry about all these italics, but they do make the point.) But if we wind back the clock again, I think I can explain why, if I had been prime minister, I would have had reservations.
There is this business about lying, otherwise termed denying it, for a start. When Mandelson and I first did business in 1989, I had worked at Westminster for 18 years and been a journalist for 25. I had been a women’s page editor, a gossip columnist and a foreign correspondent before writing about politics. I had also been a Labour councillor and chosen not to become an MP, although offered several desirable opportunities, because I loved being a political journalist. It was when I became political editor of The Sunday Telegraph (moving from the same post on the Daily Mirror to get out from under Robert Maxwell’s considerable shadow) that I discovered the extent to which Mandelson attempted to massage the message for the Sunday papers.
We fell out – or, more correctly, we never got on. He was correctly credited with “world-class news management” because that was what he did. He tried to tell us what to write and anyone who didn’t write what he wanted was denied access, cast into outer darkness. He set the course for what would happen subsequently when Tony Blair’s “New” Labour tidal wave swept them all into office in 1997. My issue with Mandelson was that I wasn’t biddable and didn’t buy the “New” Labour nonsense from a man who used the word “socialist” five times at his selection conference without ever apparently bothering to check out its definition.
He certainly seemed to have forgotten about socialism by the time he was first in office, famously boasting in 1998 about the Labour government being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”* (adding quickly, a few moments later, “as long as they pay their taxes”, and later, in 2012, recanting the phrase when he declared he was “much more concerned about inequality”). The reality was that Peter Mandelson was only ever interested in advancing the interests of Peter Mandelson, as he so forcibly demonstrated back in 1989 when, against the wishes of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, for whom he was meant to be trying to win the next election in 1992, he chose to pursue his own ambitions – calling up the memory of “Grandpa” (Herbert Morrison, of course) in his selection speech to enhance his chances and denying whatever might have been necessary to deny in order to do so – by standing in that election himself.
*Advantages of being filthy rich