Peter Mandelson - The Third Man - Life at the Heart of New Labour

From childhood, it was certainly mine. Even before Harold Wilson left for Downing Street, I remember rushing home from school to listen to the results of the final ballot from which he emerged as Labour leader after Hugh Gaitskell’s death, then racing into the kitchen to tell my mother the good news. She never became carried away by such things. At election time, I would set out on canvassing missions around the Suburb – beginning, I am told, by tricycle at the tender age of six. Once, I even embarrassingly knocked on the door of Manny Shinwell, Defence Minister alongside my grandfather in the post-war government, to remind him to vote.

What I most absorbed from both of my parents was their love for each other, and for Miles and me. Both my mother and father had been married before. They met after the war at the London advertising agency Dorlands, where my mother, who had worked with the Quaker refugee service in the war years, had a job as a secretary, while my father was on one of the ad account teams. It appears to have been love at first sight, but it was complicated by the fact that my father was still married. My mother had divorced her first husband, the son of the Agriculture Minister alongside Herbert Morrison in the cabinet. My grandfather had been unhappy enough about that first marriage, feeling that my mother, then only nineteen, was far too young. She and my father kept their liaison pretty much secret until he was divorced from his first wife.

Even then, however, the idea of my mother having married as a teenager, divorced soon afterwards, and then married another divorcee did not exactly please her father, to put it mildly. I don’t know whether he had moral objections, but what is clear is that he did not relish the possibility of any gossip or criticism that might encroach on what mattered most to him: his political career. As a young boy, I would come to feel pride, respect and sometimes awe at my grandfather’s political status and accomplishments. Those feelings never entirely left me as I made my own way into national politics, but as I approached my teens, I also became aware of the effects of his all-consuming political ambition on those around him, above all on my mother. He visited us when he was able to drive himself across London from his home in Eltham, but his second wife did not make it easy, as she wanted to cut him off from his family and past friends. When he died in March 1965, a few months after I turned eleven, the first we knew of it was from a newsflash that interrupted the Saturday-evening film on ITV. My mother tried not to show her hurt, but I am sure she felt it as acutely as I did. She arranged for me to be excused from school to attend my grandfather’s funeral: my abiding memory of the occasion is of George Brown, then Labour’s voluble deputy leader, telling me off for my politically inappropriate dress sense – I was wearing a blue tie.

The authority in our family came from my mother. She was by far the quieter of my parents, but she was a source of unquestioned support for all of us. She had an elegance, almost a regality about her: my childhood friends and I called her ‘Duchess’. That is how I remember her to this day. But she had steel. Never raising her voice, she instilled in Miles and me a sense of good manners, of propriety, right and wrong. Her silent opprobrium when we strayed beyond the boundaries was far more effective than any scolding or punishment would have been.

My father was in many ways her opposite. Though his real name was George, he was universally known as Tony, ever since he had served as an officer in the Royal Dragoons during the war. He dressed impeccably, and had the bearing of a City gent rather than an advertising salesman. He had a wonderful, waspish sense of humour and fun, and revelled in being with people, until he shut the front door behind him each evening and propped himself up on his bed, smoking his pipe, surrounded by his books and newspapers. In his later years he became a Suburb personality as chairman of the residents’ association. He sallied forth almost daily, walking stick in hand, sometimes with his wartime binoculars around his neck, to ensure that Dame Henrietta’s sylvan planning restrictions were surviving the era of two-Volvo families and paved-over front gardens.

As a child, I remember feeling slightly embarrassed at times by the showman in my father. As an adult, however, I would come to recognise that much of my own political passion and public personality came from him. My brother Miles, who is four years older than me, and was always more tranquil and reflective, saw this earlier and more keenly than I did. Having gone on to qualify as a clinical psychologist, he contributed his insights into how each of our family jigsaw pieces fitted together for a biography the journalist Donald Macintyre wrote about me in the 1990s. They were striking and, I am sure, accurate. Miles was always much more like my mother, he observed, while I am more like my father. But growing up, the attachments we formed with our parents were a mirror image of this. I was much closer to my mother, rather doting on her, and Miles to my father.

Perhaps because my father and I were alike in so many ways, there was a certain friction between us. Especially where politics was concerned – and more than ever when my first-hand experience of Labour in the 1980s convinced me that the party had to take on the hard left if it was to survive. Even before then, it was clear that his view of Labour and mine were likely to diverge. I remember the two of us visiting a Suburb neighbour named Hans Janitschek on a bright Sunday morning in 1972. Janitschek was an Austrian writer who was then Secretary General of the Socialist International. A modern European Social Democrat, I remember him saying that he feared Labour was risking a ‘dangerous’ swerve to the left. Harold Wilson had lost the 1970 general election, and Tony Benn and his allies had led a successful campaign to get Labour’s National Executive Committee to adopt a leftist policy programme. Harold evidently concluded that since the party wasn’t going to re-enter government anytime soon, there was no particular urgency about taking them on. Janitschek was convinced – rightly, of course – that this inaction would come back to haunt Labour, and that sooner or later a battle over policy and ideology would have to be fought. I listened intently as my father not only defended Harold’s apparent insouciance, but said that he felt the socialist ideologues should be given latitude and tolerance. For him, that was part of what being Labour was all about.

I loved both of my parents dearly. Even now, two decades after my father’s death and four years after my mother’s, there is barely a day when I don’t think of them. My mother’s memory, especially, still lives with me. But my father’s too. Events in my life, in politics, the places I go, often rekindle recollections of them. In the waning days of Gordon Brown’s government, I was in Regent’s Park for an early-morning stroll when I saw a man with a cane trying to make his way up one of the paths. My mind instantly flashed back to the array of walking sticks my father kept in the front hall, and the old army greatcoat he used to throw over his shoulders as he ventured out in his role as one-man Suburb conservation force. I smiled at the image. He was so full of life and energy and élan, so passionate about what he believed in. He was such a presence. And, as Miles still reminds me, so much like the person and politician I became.

In many ways, we led a charmed childhood. My Euro-enthusiasm as a politician grew from roots planted then. From the time I was a small child, my parents took us on summer holidays in Europe. Every August we would go somewhere new: Ibiza, Brittany, Italy and Elba. We would stay either on campsites or in an inexpensive pension or hotel. I remember one year we camped in the grounds of a monastery in Tuscany. A group of monks stood watching the silhouette of my mother inside her tent as she combed her waist-length hair. For a few years we shared our holidays with an American family we had met, from San Francisco. They had three boys, and together the two families travelled round in a – very crowded – VW camper van.