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

Although all three of us sensed by early in 1988 that Labour was not going to win the next election without something dramatic happening, I think that the realisation affected Gordon and me a bit differently than it did Tony. While he was frustrated, and sometimes angry, about the party’s failure to put itself back in the running for government, for us, there was a deeper, more personal, almost existential, feeling of despair.

There was another bond with Gordon as well. I was spending almost all my waking hours trying to find ways of getting Labour’s message into the newspapers or onto the radio or television, and through them to voters. That was not just my job, it was a fixation. For Gordon, it was nearer an obsession. It needed not be about some grand policy announcement – it rarely was. It was not done in any expectation of our winning the major arguments, much less an election, against Mrs Thatcher. But Gordon plotted a ceaseless campaign of guerrilla strikes against the Tories. He was constantly reading ministerial statements, dissecting policy proposals, culling potentially damaging leaks of internal documents. Then, sometimes acting by himself, sometimes through Tony, and increasingly often in league with me, he would zero in on just the right newspaper or broadcaster, just the right news cycle, to strike the blow. For Gordon, this was deadly serious. He viewed the Tories not only as political opponents, but as a battlefield enemy. We might not be able to kill them, but he hoped, wound by wound, to bring them to their knees. His eye for tactical opportunities was extraordinary, and he showed a master craftsman’s delight and eagerness in trying to initiate Tony and me into the secrets of the trade.

For the first time I heard him expound on his core principle of political battle, and it would resurface many times, in many contexts, later on. Essentially, his argument was that our own policies weren’t necessarily key to scoring a communications or campaigning success – which was fortunate, because our own policies were hardly putting us in a strong position. The key, Gordon said, was to identify, magnify and exploit ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. I became an eager co-conspirator. Given the challenge of finding a way to market the pabulum of the policy review, I began to see Gordon’s endless schemes to annoy the Tories as invaluable in my efforts to keep Labour in the public eye. His relentless urge to attack also gave me a sense that Labour had not given up the fight.

I saw Tony, too, as a huge asset, especially in conveying a sense of newness in Labour on television. Even before I arrived at Walworth Road, I remember having been bowled over by an appearance he made on the BBC’s Question Time . He was accusing the Conservatives of undermining civil liberties, but it wasn’t the substance of his message that most struck me, timely and apt though it was. I was impressed by his freshness, his fluency, his ability to talk politics in words that connected in a way so many of our frontbenchers seemed to find it difficult to do. I was keen to find ways of turning this to Labour’s wider benefit, by steering high-profile TV invitations his way.

My increasing promotion of Tony’s and Gordon’s media profiles did not escape the notice of some of their more senior colleagues. The first time I put Tony on breakfast TV, to rebut Tory economic policy before the 1987 election, I felt almost as if I’d taken my life in my hands. He was at that time a junior spokesman in Roy’s Shadow Treasury team. That afternoon, a redoubtable and undeniably more senior member, the Thurrock MP Oonagh McDonald, pinned me up against a wall behind the Speaker’s chair in the Commons. When Roy wasn’t available for an interview, she thundered, she was next in line. Did I understand? What on earth had I been playing at by putting Tony up instead? I assured her that there would be plenty of future opportunities for everyone, but I couldn’t help adding, ‘Tony was very good, wasn’t he?’ It was not what Oonagh wanted to hear.

Gordon’s first real chance to shine came a year and a half after the 1987 defeat, and it happened by accident. Both he and Tony had risen up the ranks since the election. Still too junior to be perceived as a threat to those at the top, and too bright and effective to be ignored, they were voted into the shadow cabinet. Tony was Shadow Energy Secretary, while Gordon was Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, under John Smith. By the time we arrived in Brighton for the party conference at the end of September 1988, I was not alone in having marked them out as faces for the future. For Gordon, the time frame was about to shorten dramatically. Two days after conference, John suffered a serious heart attack which meant that he would need several months’ rest before returning to work. On paper, Bryan Gould should have been in line to fill in for him. With his responsibility for Trade and Industry, he held the second-top economic brief in the shadow cabinet. But Gordon made it instantly clear that he was able, and ready, to fill the breech. Since no one with influence went to bat for Bryan, the arrangement was nodded through. I am sure that they, like me, felt that while Gordon lacked John’s political weight and dispatch-box experience, he had the intellect and policy grasp to be capable of holding the fort. Within weeks, however, he faced a first major test: replying for Labour to the government’s autumn financial statement.

It had all the marks of a distinctly unequal fight. In the Conservative corner, Nigel Lawson had been Chancellor since 1983. He was two decades older than Gordon, and had been in the Commons a decade longer. He had steadily lowered income tax, and since 1986 had built an economic recovery into an income and consumer boom. There were signs of trouble, however. Inflation was rising, and interest rates, which stood at 14 per cent, even more worryingly. Though this was Gordon’s first big set-piece parliamentary encounter, he at least had a strong argument to make, ‘dividing lines’ to exploit, a target to attack. That he would make his points effectively was something I never doubted: he, and Tony and I, had worked on rehearsing and refining them.

When he rose to face Lawson, he did much more than that. He spoke with confidence, vigour and verve. Lawson’s great economic expansion, he said, was mere sleight of hand, based on irresponsible levels of borrowing. ‘It is a boom based on credit,’ he said. Warning of trouble ahead, he ridiculed the Conservatives’ efforts to insist that all would be well despite their failure to live up even to their own economic forecasts. Then came the killer line, as Lawson sat grimacing, like an elephant improbably brought down by a mosquito: ‘The proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor!’ When he had finished, to shouts of support from the Labour benches, I went up to the press gallery to gauge the reaction. I didn’t need to tell them Gordon had done well; they had seen it for themselves. But I felt we had witnessed something of real significance to Labour in this David and Goliath drama. ‘Today,’ I told them, ‘a star was born.’ The reason the Guardian ’s Ian Aitken and others echoed the phrase the following morning was because all of us recognised that it rang true.

Part of what drew me to Gordon and Tony, and drew us together, was simply the way they did politics. So much of the Labour Party seemed weighted down by torpor and an acceptance of defeat. Morale reached a new low the week after Gordon’s Commons breakthrough, with a particularly painful by-election defeat in the ostensibly safe seat of Glasgow Govan. We lost it, with a swing of 33 per cent, to the Scottish Nationalists. Neil was feeling so despondent that for a brief period he even began speaking of stepping aside the following summer. I was feeling equally down. A fortnight later, I boarded a train north with Tony to join him at a meeting with his constituents. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Watching him use his mixture of intellect, humour and charm to communicate – with voters was like getting a blood transfusion.