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

When I was ten, we settled into a pattern of going to Spain’s Costa Brava every summer. It was nowhere near as built-up then as it is now. We stayed a few miles down the coast from Rosas, at a place called Almadraba which consisted of a few dozen very basic chalets tucked away from the beach. Over dinner, my mother and father would give Miles and me a half-glass of wine, and very occasionally a tiny portion of Cointreau with ice as a nightcap. If I remember rightly, I drank more than Miles. Perhaps in part because of this distinctly Continental introduction to alcohol, I now drink only in moderation: wine and whisky.

Another effect of our Spanish summers proved slightly more painful. With light-coloured skin like my mother, and the more cavalier attitude towards such things that I got from my father, I would invariably neglect the sun lotion and quickly burn to a bright red. I still do when I’m not careful. Nor was my immersion in the sporting life of the Costa Brava especially successful. For two years running I tried – and failed – to learn how to water-ski, as everyone on the beach watched my repeated humiliation. I finally abandoned my efforts.

While the summers on the Costa Brava were idyllic for me as a child, politically, of course, Spain was no idyll. Franco was in power, and I am not sure how my parents reconciled our holidays there with their solid Labour sympathy for the republican side in the civil war. I do remember that we mollified my grandfather by bringing him a box of his favourite cigars after each holiday. He would drive over for Saturday lunch to collect them on our return.

The Suburb may have been created as a socially mixed urban utopia, but by the time I was born half a century later, it was decidedly middle-class. The more thrusting families aspired to send their children to the nearby four-hundred-year-old Highgate School, or to University College School in Hampstead. Although my parents might have been able to afford the fees, it would not have occurred to them to enrol us anywhere but at a state school. Anyway, they preferred to spend their money on our budget summer holidays in Europe. After Miles and I left Garden Suburb Primary, a short walk away on the other side of Big Wood, we moved on to Hendon County Grammar School. Under its dauntingly traditionalist head teacher, E.W. Maynard Potts, it was intellectually rigorous, and very strict. I did well academically. I enjoyed learning from, and on occasion jousting with, most of my teachers, especially about politics. I remember bringing a geography lesson to a standstill as our teacher, Mr Chapman, and I argued about the implications of the collapse of Barbara Castle’s trade-union reform White Paper, In Place of Strife . He said the retreat was a political disaster. I knew he was right, of course, but loyally defended the government’s corner.

I made some extraordinarily close friendships at school, above all with Keren Abse and a Hendon boy named Stephen Howell, who shared my teenage enthusiasm for all things political, and who remains close to me today. The two of them used to kid me about being something of a Labour anorak. Not only was I by now thoroughly conversant with the policy debates in the party, but particularly on long car journeys, I played what we called the ‘constituency game’. Boringly, and at length, I would try to name the sitting Labour MP for every constituency they could think of. Nevertheless, we became an inseparable trio. When we were sixteen, Steve’s grandmother and aunt, both Hendon Labour activists, suggested that we rekindle the dormant local branch of the Young Socialists. I became chairman, Steve the secretary, and Keren the slightly less politically obsessive glue that held our founding cell together. By the time of our inaugural meeting in March 1970, we had cajoled two dozen others to enlist in the cause. My mother no doubt shuddered at the thought that I might end up joining the breed she so disliked, and become a politician. If so, she didn’t show it. She provided a warm welcome to my comrades in arms, complete with egg-and-tomato sandwiches and hot chocolate, for our after-school meetings. She typed out our slightly overblown screeds for the monthly YS newsletter, and remained unruffled when the three of us were summarily thrown out of Hendon Town Hall during the 1970 election campaign for heckling the Conservative candidate. After the election, which ended in a Tory victory and brought Edward Heath into Downing Street, she even joined us on a demonstration against the new government’s Industrial Relations Bill. Mr Potts was less sanguine, threatening to expel me for my unruly activism. He was deterred only by the intervention of a strong-willed, and thoroughly Labour, school governor.

My politics began spilling into my school life, to Mr Potts’s alarm. In common with other grammars, Hendon County had found itself caught up in the Labour government’s campaign to end the 11-Plus examination and move to comprehensive secondary schooling. Mr Potts was dead against this, and was horrified when Steve, Keren and I joined with our YS comrades in campaigning for an end to selection and a merger with a nearby secondary modern. He denounced us to a school assembly as ‘industrial militants trying to tear apart the fabric of our school community’ – before taking early retirement, possibly to escape the spectre of the advancing Communist hordes.

When Steve and I became prefects in the lower sixth, we found ourselves at odds with the new head teacher. This time it was over our support for a move to open up the prefects’ room to all sixth-formers, liberalise the school-uniform rules and abolish the prefects system in favour of an elected school council. For me, like my parents, the joy of politics has always been in battles of principle. In this case, it meant the dilemma of abandoning the prospect of my becoming Head Boy, with all its attendant privileges. I did end up as the first head of an elected school council instead. I confess that this brought out a less attractive aspect of my future political personality, a quality Tony Blair would call my ‘imperiousness’. I was quite the disciplinarian, sometimes unbearably bossy towards pupils in the lower forms. Still, my wider political focus remained on the world of Labour politics. In one of my more portentous YS editorials, I even sounded a clarion defence of Clause IV – the socialist economic creed that I would back Tony in ditching a quarter of a century later. I did say, however, that such high-sounding words were pointless unless our brave band of student socialists was organising and acting in the real world. We all actively supported the campaign against apartheid and subscribed to Amnesty International, and in two summer holidays I volunteered in the offices of the National Council for Civil Liberties, the forerunner of Liberty, dealing with cases usually arising from allegations of rough justice at the hands of the police.

Midway through the sixth form, Keren, Steve and I opted for a distinctly unreal world: the Young Communist League. Keren went first. The Young Communists appealed to her rebelliousness, with the added attraction, she said, that the boys were cuter. Steve and I agreed to join her at what turned out to be their annual meeting, in a rambling house in West Hampstead. As we started going to occasional branch meetings, we wound down our YS branch early in 1971. Our main formal YCL activity was to try, with indifferent success, to flog the Morning Star on Friday evenings outside Kilburn tube station. Steve and I did become stewards at the YCL national congress, at which Keren was a delegate, and was denounced as a bourgeois turncoat for speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The biggest impact the YCL made on my life was when news got round that a local youth club was losing its premises in a church, and was eyeing a disused four-storey Victorian pub, the Winchester Arms in Swiss Cottage, as a replacement. The pub had been purchased by Camden Council years before, and left empty. I volunteered to join the members of the youth club in occupying this wonderful building and setting to work on converting it, while I negotiated with the council for a short-term lease. The project consumed the attention of my whole family. The youth leader, Graham Good, and his partner Brenda, took up residence in my parents’ home, and my father became the project’s legal trustee. The refitted building survives as a popular youth club, under voluntary rather than Communist management, to this day.